Compare moats
Up to three covered companies, band by band. Every call is a curated editorial judgment, never a disclosed figure — and every band carries its cited basis.
| NetApp | Astera Labs | Cadence Design Systems | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moat 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. | narrow The FY2025 10-K names Broadcom, Credo, Marvell, Microchip, Montage, Parade and Rambus as principal competitors who compete 'with respect to some, but not all' of the solutions — a defensible platform position inside a crowded, larger-capitalized field. | wide The FY2025 10-K competition section names only a short list of full-flow rivals — Synopsys, Ansys (acquired by Synopsys) and Siemens EDA — for a toolset it describes as essential to meeting foundry manufacturing sign-off requirements. |
| Moat 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. | switching costs The COSMOS software suite is 'embedded in our connectivity products and integrated into our customers' systems,' and the Interop Lab validates compatibility 'early in their product development process and prior to large-scale deployments' — design-in before deployment is the lock. | switching costs The 10-K states Cadence works with foundry partners to develop process design kits 'to ensure our core EDA products and solutions meet manufacturing sign-off requirements', and licenses software on two-to-three-year time-based terms — so the tools are embedded in a customer's qualified design flow, not bought per project. |
| 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". | co leader Named by rivals as well as naming them: Credo's own 10-K lists Astera as its most direct PCIe-retimer competitor, and this filing names seven competitors against parts of the platform — a co-leadership contest, not a settled hierarchy. | co leader The 10-K calls Virtuoso 'the industry standard for custom and analog IC design' while naming Synopsys, Ansys and Siemens EDA as key competitors across the same markets. |
| 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. | moderate The filing's competitive factors lead with platform completeness, software and interoperability — ease of integration, not price, is stated first, which is where pricing power lives when it exists. | strong Product and maintenance was 91% of fiscal 2025 revenue under time-based licences 'generally two to three years', with $7.8 billion of contracted but unsatisfied performance obligations at December 31, 2025; SEC-reported operating income in the same filing was 28.2% of revenue. |
| Summary | 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. | Astera sells the connective tissue of AI servers — PCIe/CXL retimers, smart cable modules and the software that manages them — to 'major hyperscalers, leading AI accelerator vendors (including GPU vendors), and system OEMs.' The filing's platform claim ('a differentiated and holistic Intelligent Connectivity Platform purpose-built for cloud and AI infrastructure') mirrors, almost phrase for phrase, the complete-suite claim its named rival Credo makes — two companies each claiming the whole against a field that competes on the pieces. | Cadence sells the design and sign-off flow that chips must pass to be manufacturable: the 10-K describes foundry-co-developed PDKs, integrated DRC/LVS/STA sign-off, and multi-year time-based licences that leave $7.8 billion of contracted but unsatisfied performance obligations at December 31, 2025. |
| Chain position | 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". | Layer-4 connectivity silicon inside AI servers, between accelerators, storage and NICs. | Upstream design layer: every chip in the graph is designed and signed off through an EDA flow before a foundry will build it. |
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| Long-horizon vote | +0.13 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.13 at weight 0.20 · swarm bullish Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.35 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. |