HCLTech and NetApp Expand Partnership to Fuel Enterprise AI Adoption through Hybrid Cloud Storage-as-a-Service

On August 13, 2026, HCLTech and NetApp have expanded their partnership in order to advance their hybrid cloud storage-as-a-service capabilities and to help businesses speed up their implementation of AI. The partnership brings together HCLTech's technology and managed services experience with NetApp's data infrastructure and storage capabilities. The partnership illustrates a wider trend among enterprises that are focusing on hybrid data architectures that can support generative and agentic AI infrastructure. This strategy provides organizations with a highly resilient foundation for managing data across on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud environments.

Through the use of a storage-as-a-service model, companies may be able to reduce the complexity of their infrastructure while syncing their capacity and spending to transforming business needs. The new offering is intended to make storage management easier, increase scalability, and enable AI workloads that need reliable access to large amounts of enterprise data. Additionally, at the same time, maintaining governance, performance, security, and control over central corporate information in distributed environments.

Impact on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Banking Industry

The global artificial intelligence (AI) in banking market size is calculated at USD 34.58 billion in 2025 and is predicted to increase from USD 45.59 billion in 2026 to approximately USD 451.50 billion by 2035 expanding at a CAGR of 29.30% from 2026 to 2035.

According to Precedence Research, as AI becomes increasingly important for fraud detection, risk analysis, customer intelligence, and automated operations, banks could adopt more robust hybrid cloud storage. The hybrid approach makes it possible for sensitive financial information to stay within controlled environments by allowing AI applications to use the relevant cloud resources.

Major global and domestic-scale banks will still need to put in place strict controls regarding regulatory compliance, access management, data residency, encryption, model governance, and operational robustness. By adopting a storage-as-a-service approach, they would have access to flexible infrastructure that enables them to scale with growing data volumes without constantly redesigning their physical storage setups. Additionally, it follows that this collaboration would assist financial organizations in achieving a balance between scalability and security as well as governance.

Impact on the Life Sciences Industry

The global life science market size is valued at USD 100.88 billion in 2025. It is predicted to increase from USD 112.93 billion in 2026 to approximately USD 305.98 billion by 2035, expanding at a CAGR of 11.73% from 2026 to 2035.

According to Precedence Research, major life sciences companies are now producing larger and larger amounts of data from electronic health records, genomics, medical imaging, research activities, and connected devices. Using a hybrid cloud storage-as-a-service approach could offer the kind of flexibility necessary to handle these workloads while maintaining proper control of sensitive information of patient. 

The partnership might assist organizations in simplifying their infrastructure management and in scaling up their storage as their AI projects grow. AI applications can make use of reliable access to large and distributed datasets in order to carry out R&D practices, drug discovery, clinical analytics, and operational optimization. Additionally, the extent of its impact will rely on strong privacy protections, data governance, interoperability, regulatory compliance, and the attentive management of access to sensitive patient and research data.

Impact on the Manufacturing Automation Industry

The global manufacturing automation market size is calculated at USD 14.85 billion in 2025 and is predicted to surpass around USD 34.28 billion by 2034, expanding at a CAGR of 9.74% from 2025 to 2034.

According to Precedence Research, Manufacturers need to address latency, cybersecurity, operational persistence, data integration, and intellectual property protection. The expanded HCLTech-NetApp partnership may therefore reduce infrastructure management burdens and accelerate deployment of data-intensive AI projects. Manufacturers can use hybrid cloud infrastructure to support AI applications for predictive maintenance, supply chain optimization, digital twins, quality inspection, and factory automation.

These workloads generate considerable volumes of sensor, video, machine, and operational data that must be stored and accessed efficiently. A storage-as-a-service model could enable manufacturers to scale infrastructure to meet manufacturing and AI requirements by connecting factory environments to cloud resources.

Expert Opinion

From an expert perspective, the expansion of the HCLTech-NetApp partnership is of strategic significance since growing enterprise reliance on AI is increasingly based on data infrastructure rather than just AI models. Hybrid cloud storage-as-a-service can help deal with this issue by increasing the elasticity of the infrastructure and possibly lowering the operational load linked to capacity planning and storage management. It is impossible for organizations to effectively scale their AI if the data stays scattered among old systems, private environments, and various cloud platforms.

The partnership could prove especially valuable should customers be able to show concrete improvements in the speed of AI deployment, infrastructure efficiency, and business results. The best value offered by the alliance therefore comes from the combination of flexibility, managed services, and access to enterprise data in a variety of environments. The integration of artificial intelligence enables progress but also requires strong data governance, cost controls, cyber protection measures, interoperability, and AI-ready data pipelines.