To accelerate customer adoption of AI data intelligence, data sovereignty and cybersecurity, and flexible hybrid cloud
Dubai, UAE; 5 May 2026: NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP), the Intelligent Data Infrastructure company, today appointed Jurgen Hofkens as Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Sales Engineering for EMEA and LATAM, effective 1 May 2026. He reports to Willem Hendrickx, SVP and General Manager, EMEA and LATAM, and will lead the region’s technical strategy and customer engagement as enterprises operationalize AI, strengthen data sovereignty and security, and seek the flexibility to run workloads wherever the business needs them.
“Every CIO and CISO I speak with is asking the same three questions: how do I turn my data into an AI advantage, how do I keep it sovereign, private, and secure, and how do I keep the flexibility to run it wherever the business needs it — on-premises, at the edge, or in any cloud?” said Hofkens. “NetApp sits at the intersection of those questions like no other company. I intend to spend the coming months on the ground with our customers and partners across EMEA and LATAM — listening, challenging, and co-designing what intelligent data infrastructure looks like for their business.”
“Our customers and partners are navigating a once-in-a-generation shift: making their data ready for AI, hardening it against new cyber threats, and running it seamlessly across clouds and on-premises,” said Hendrickx. “Jurgen’s appointment reflects our commitment to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them, backed by the deepest technical expertise in the industry. We are also growing our sales engineering, AI, and cybersecurity teams across the region, and welcome talented people who share that customer focus to join us.”
Hofkens joins NetApp from AWS, where he led the full Go-to-Market for AI Infrastructure across EMEA, owning strategy, technical field execution, and customer outcomes as enterprises scaled from experimentation to production. In parallel, he led the EMEA technical teams covering AWS’s core services and advanced computing portfolio, spanning security, networking, compute, edge, HPC, IoT, and hybrid cloud. Earlier, he co-founded GIG Technology, building a distributed object and block storage platform from the ground up, and served as EMEA CTO and Head of Sales Engineering at Alcatel-Lucent, where he also ran its Telco Software P&L. Hofkens is based in Belgium.
Customers and partners in EMEA and LATAM who would like to engage with Jurgen can reach out via their NetApp account team or connect with him on LinkedIn.
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About NetApp
For more than three decades, NetApp has helped the world’s leading organizations navigate change – from the rise of enterprise storage to the intelligent era defined by data and AI. Today, NetApp is the Intelligent Data Infrastructure company, helping customers turn data into a catalyst for innovation, resilience, and growth.
At the heart of that infrastructure is the NetApp data platform – the unified, enterprise-grade, intelligent foundation that connects, protects, and activates data across every cloud, workload, and environment. Built on the proven power of NetApp ONTAP, our leading data management software and OS, and enhanced by automation through the AI Data Engine and AFX, it delivers observability, resilience, and intelligence at scale.
Disaggregated by design, the NetApp data platform separates storage, services, and control so enterprises can modernize faster, scale efficiently, and innovate without lock-in. As the only enterprise storage platform natively embedded in the world’s largest clouds, it gives organizations the freedom to run any workload anywhere with consistent performance, governance, and protection.
With NetApp, data is always ready – ready to defend against threats, ready to power AI, and ready to drive the next breakthrough. That’s why the world’s most forward-thinking enterprises trust NetApp to turn intelligence into advantage.
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