Interview with Ingemar Lanevi, Treasurer, NetApp
Transcript: What is your role at NetApp? |
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Ingemar Lanevi: So, anyway, I’m Ingemar Lanevi. I’m the vice president and corporate treasurer for NetApp.
And I’ve been with the company now nine years, since 2000, and came aboard to set up and run the treasury organization for the company, and early on was asked to look at the whole leasing concept and what we, as a company, needed to do in the area of customer financing and have some background having worked at HP in the past and being involved with leasing type of transactions and business.
Therefore, I was asked to head it up and start looking at this.
So early on I started the whole concept of setting up an organization called NetApp Financial Solutions, which is our pseudo-internal captive program, which offers captive leasing products to our customer base.
People who buy NetApp solutions can finance them using NAFS as a vehicle.
Interviewer: NetApp is one of the leading computer storage manufacturers in the world.
Ingemar Lanevi: Correct. We do data management, three and one-half billion dollars in the last year’s revenue. One of the leaders in the market segment in terms of storage management tools. Do both hardware discs as well as a lot of software, obviously.
All of our value that we sell is related to our software products and it’s been very successful in the marketplace selling our solutions.
Interviewer: And you’re a global company, both in terms of your clients and your employees.
Ingemar Lanevi: Correct. We effectively have about 130 or so offices throughout the globe covering pretty much the entire world. Both Europe and even some countries in Africa are being addressed as we speak. And Asia-Pac obviously as well. So it is truly a global organization both in terms as people as well as the reach from our products.
Interviewer: Your organization is a little unique in terms of the treasury organization because you have a background in equipment finance. You set up network appliance financial solutions, which is focused on equipment finance, so you’re kind of in that market every day, both in the capital market side and in talking to clients.
So, as a lessee, you are probably more experienced and have a greater depth of expertise among your staff in regard to leasing, would you say?
Ingemar Lanevi: I; yes; I would definitely agree with that. And I did start, for NetApp, I did start the exercise on the captive side, although I also was working very hard with the IT organization to make sure that we internally looked at financing and leasing alternatives when acquiring capital assets as well in the IT space primarily.
And it took me a bit of time to convince the IT organization at the time that doing leasing has a certain amount of economic value to the lessee and, as such, we should really start looking at that as a way of acquiring technology and get the benefits that are inherent in those kinds of transactions.
So, about four or five years ago, now, I actually got to the point where I was able to put a mandate in place that we no longer would buy any major IT equipment and pay cash for it. Instead, it would be put on a lease schedule of some sort.
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