This week Sunnyvale based, NetApp Inc. reported fourth quarter net income of $145 million, more than double the $68 million in the same period last year. Its revenue jumped to $1.17 billion from last year fourth quarter's $880 million.

The company also completed the acquisition of Vancouver ,British Columbia based Bycast Inc. this month as per the terms agreed upon during the announcement of the deal back in April. Bycast ‘s product helps clients manage globally-distributed repositories of images, video and records adding another dimension to Net Apps’s unified storage pitch . NetApp thinks that the acquisition would help it consolidate its position in niche areas within the data storage tech sector and to break fresh ground in healthcare, digital media, Web 2.0, and cloud services providers market.

A big part of NetApp’s success is attributed to the way it has managed to stay on top of things by forging strategic alliances. It has especially been able to leverage on some key partnerships in the increasingly growing markets that revolve in and around virtualization and cloud-based infrastructures. When the Industry was predicting the death of Net App with the advent of server virtualization technology, the company cleverly embraced the trend instead of fighting it and has skillfully built its stack around virtualized infrastructures. Though NetApp and EMC are rivals in the storage market, EMC owned VMware which is also the virtualization leader has partnered with NetApp on many technology solutions. NetApp recently announced that it will support VMware vSphere 4 in a Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) host environment. NetApp also augmented its FCoE portfolio from Brocade and introduced a DCB-only version of the Brocade 8000. The storage vendor has managed to more than double its SAN (storage area network) business in just two years mainly thanks to integrated solutions with companies such as Brocade, Cisco, Microsoft, and VMware. The company has been targeting service providers with enhanced offerings that enable them to better manage their cloud services. It also extended its partnership with CA, inc. relating to a combined cloud management stack and said that it will resell a new Converged Network Adapter from Emulex.

• Cloud Computing Growing Pains in 2010
• Ulitzer and Leading Cloud Computing Experts
• Vertical Scalability Cloud Computing Style