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 | SAP | Arista Networks | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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. | wide The 20-F describes a migration market made of SAP's own customers: RISE with SAP 'is targeted at our installed base customers and helps them on their journey from legacy ERP systems to SAP Business Suite' — an installed base so entrenched that moving WITHIN the vendor is a multi-year journey, with the Q2 2026 statement showing €22.9 billion of contractually committed cloud backlog, up 27%. | narrow The FY2025 10-K claims 'Market research confirms that we continue to be a leader in high-speed Ethernet switching', but grounds its differentiation in 'open and standards-based technology that avoids what is often expensive vendor lock-in' and warns that white-box entrants and alternative technologies 'may create downward pricing pressure'. |
| 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 ERP is the system of record for a company's core processes; the 20-F's own strategy language — SAP Business Suite as 'the destination for all our customers,' with AI-enabled migration tools easing the journey off SAP's own legacy systems — is a switching-cost moat described from the inside. | intangibles ip The durable asset the 10-K names is software, not hardware: a single state-oriented operating system (EOS) with a centralised system database, one data lake (NetDL) and one management plane (CloudVision) across the whole portfolio, with Arista, EOS and CloudVision listed as core trademarks — while the switching silicon comes from Broadcom, its 'predominant merchant silicon vendor'. |
| 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". | clear leader Grounded in scale and position rather than an asserted share: the 20-F describes a market segment consisting of SAP's own legacy estates (RISE), and the Q2 statement shows Cloud ERP Suite revenue of €5.5 billion in a single quarter, up 25% — no competitor filing this site tracks describes an installed-base market of its own. | co leader The 10-K states Arista is a leader in high-speed Ethernet switching while also stating that 'The data center and campus networking markets have historically been dominated by Cisco', with Dell/EMC, Extreme Networks, HPE, Huawei, Juniper and Nvidia also competing. |
| 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 Q2 2026: total revenue up 9% with non-IFRS operating profit up 7% — profit growing slightly behind revenue, and the 2026 profit outlook 'updated to reflect dilutive impact from Dremio and Prior Labs acquisitions' rather than raised. | strong SEC-reported operating income in this filing was 42.8% of revenue in fiscal 2025, up from 42.0% in fiscal 2024, even as the 10-K warns that new entrants and white-box alternatives 'may create downward pricing pressure'. |
| 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. | SAP monetizes the stickiest software estate in enterprise computing twice over: a declining on-premise support stream and a growing cloud one, with the 20-F's 'flywheel' — Business AI enhancing Cloud ERP, which feeds Business Data Cloud, which fuels the AI — as the argument that the transition compounds rather than cannibalizes. The caveat is regulatory, in the filing's own words: the European Commission opened formal proceedings over on-premise maintenance and support policies, with suggested remedies market-tested in 2025 and 'pending final EC approval in 2026' — the moat's support-pricing half is under review. | Arista's edge is a single software image across every box: the 10-K describes EOS, NetDL and CloudVision as one operating model 'from client to cloud', deliberately built on merchant Broadcom silicon and open standards rather than on proprietary hardware lock-in. |
| 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-10 application incumbent embedding AI (Joule, Business AI) into the enterprise system of record. | Networking layer of the AI datacentre; two customers were 26% and 16% of fiscal 2025 revenue and Broadcom supplies the switching silicon. |
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| Long-horizon vote | +0.13 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.38 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.17 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. |