NetApp Adds Independent Director to Strengthen AI Strategy

NetApp ( (NTAP) ) has provided an announcement.

On January 8, 2026, NetApp’s board expanded its size from nine to ten members and appointed Paul Fipps, President of Global Customer Operations at ServiceNow, as a new independent director, a move formally announced in a January 12, 2026 press release from the company’s San Jose headquarters. Fipps, a veteran executive with more than 20 years’ experience in technology-enabled growth, digital customer transformation, and AI solution deployment at ServiceNow and Under Armour, will join NetApp’s non-employee director compensation program and standard indemnification framework, further strengthening a board in which nine of ten directors are independent and half have been added in the past five years. NetApp’s leadership highlighted that Fipps’s background in aligning global sales, customer success, partner ecosystems, and AI-driven digital experiences is expected to sharpen execution and innovation as the company seeks to consolidate its position as a trusted provider of AI-ready data infrastructure, with implications for accelerated growth and enhanced support for customers’ AI and digital transformation initiatives worldwide.

The most recent analyst rating on (NTAP) stock is a Buy with a $130.00 price target. To see the full list of analyst forecasts on NetApp stock, see the NTAP Stock Forecast page.

Spark’s Take on NTAP Stock

According to Spark, TipRanks’ AI Analyst, NTAP is a Outperform.

NetApp’s overall stock score reflects strong financial performance and positive earnings call sentiment, driven by growth in cloud and AI solutions. The high leverage and mixed technical indicators present some risks, but the company’s strategic focus on high-margin segments supports a favorable outlook.

To see Spark’s full report on NTAP stock, click here.

More about NetApp

NetApp is an intelligent data infrastructure company that for more than three decades has helped leading organizations navigate shifts from traditional enterprise storage to a data- and AI-driven era. Its core offering is the NetApp data platform, an enterprise-grade, unified data foundation built on its ONTAP data management software and operating system, enhanced by automation tools such as the AI Data Engine and AFX to provide observability, resilience, and intelligence at scale across clouds, workloads, and environments. As the only enterprise storage platform natively embedded in the world’s largest public clouds, NetApp focuses on enabling customers to modernize IT, scale efficiently, and run any workload anywhere with consistent performance, governance, and protection, positioning data as a strategic asset for AI, security, and digital transformation.

Average Trading Volume: 1,954,116

Technical Sentiment Signal: Hold

Current Market Cap: $20.91B

See more data about NTAP stock on TipRanks’ Stock Analysis page.