GDT Named NetApp North America Growth Partner of the Year for FY26

Based on the GDT announcement (Dallas, October 6, 2026). Only claims present in that release are asserted here.

GDT named NetApp's North America Growth Partner of the Year for FY26

NetApp has named global technology solutions provider GDT its North America Growth Partner of the Year for NetApp fiscal year 2026. GDT announced the award on October 6, 2026 from its Dallas, Texas headquarters. The recognition cites GDT's ability to generate significant year-over-year growth in NetApp revenue across the portfolio — not a single product line, but the whole book.

The North America Partner Awards, per both companies, recognize partners that exemplify NetApp's goal of being customer-centric and of understanding and selling solutions across its cloud, flash, and NetApp Keystone portfolios.

Third NetApp partner award in three years

The FY26 win extends a run: GDT previously took NetApp Growth Partner of the Year for FY24 and Flash Partner of the Year for FY25. The relationship is not new — GDT has partnered with NetApp since 2004, holds more than 60 NetApp certifications, and serves over 150 NetApp customers.

For storage teams, that scale is the interesting part: this is a reseller winning on breadth — cloud, flash, and consumption-based Keystone — rather than on a single SKU. Partners that only move array hardware rarely sustain three consecutive award years.

The AI infrastructure angle

Both quotes in the announcement frame the award around AI-ready data infrastructure. GDT Chair and CEO Shawn O'Grady:

"With deep expertise in enterprise data storage, management, and protection, we're helping customers build the data foundation they need as they move into the next phase of AI adoption. NetApp plays a critical role in our AI factory reference architecture, built for the speed and scale that enterprise AI workloads require."

NetApp's Senior Vice President and Chief Commercial, Partner and Ecosystem Officer Alvaro Celis tied the award to hybrid, security-first data:

"Now more than ever, we must empower customers with AI-ready data that is secure by default and built for hybrid environments... Their use of the NetApp Platform to help customers simplify data ecosystems and solve complex problems exemplifies what it means to drive innovation in the AI era."

If you are planning the storage layer behind an "AI factory" push, the data-services questions that decide success — how you monitor and rebalance folder growth and capacity as datasets land, and how you keep a protected copy in cloud object storage — do not change because a partner won an award. They simply get harder at scale.

What to watch next

The full list of NetApp North America Partner Awards for FY26 lives in NetApp's own press release, which GDT's announcement links out to. Two things are worth tracking if you buy NetApp through the channel: whether the award narrative shifts from "growth" to specific AI-platform attach (BlueXP and ONTAP-based AI data services), and whether Keystone shows up more often in partner-led deals now that it is named in the award criteria.

Takeaway: a three-years-running partner award is an ecosystem signal, not a product launch. Nothing here changes an ONTAP release, a CVE, or a support boundary — read it as a hint about which partners are being pushed toward cloud, flash, and consumption-based storage.

Sources: GDT — "GDT named NetApp North America Growth Partner of the Year for FY26" (October 6, 2026); NetApp North America Partner Awards FY26 release (linked within).