George Kurian

George Kurian
Born	Kottayam district, Kerala, India
Nationality	Indian-American
Education	Princeton University (B.S., Electrical Engineering) Stanford Graduate School of Business (M.B.A.)
Occupation	Business executive
Company	NetApp, Inc.
Title	Chief Executive Officer
Children	2

George Kurian is an Indian-American business executive who has served as chief executive officer and a director of the data storage and infrastructure company NetApp, Inc. since 1 June 2015. He joined NetApp in 2011 and rose through senior product and operations roles before being named chief executive, succeeding Tom Georgens. Before joining NetApp, Kurian spent time at Oracle Corporation, McKinsey & Company, Akamai Technologies and Cisco Systems.

Kurian was born and raised in India before moving to the United States at the age of seventeen to attend Princeton University. He has an identical twin brother, Thomas Kurian, who spent nearly two decades at Oracle before becoming chief executive officer of Google Cloud.

During Kurian's tenure as chief executive, NetApp has pursued a series of acquisitions and divestitures aimed at repositioning the company around all-flash storage, cloud services and, more recently, artificial-intelligence data infrastructure, while also carrying out several rounds of workforce restructuring. As of NetApp's first-quarter fiscal 2027 results, reported on 2 September 2026, Kurian remained the company's chief executive officer.

Early life and education

According to the technology trade publication CRN, Kurian was born in Kottayam district, in the southern Indian state of Kerala. He was the youngest of four brothers born to P. C. Kurian, a chemical engineer who served as general manager of the graphite-products manufacturer Graphite India, and his wife, Molly. His identical twin brother is Thomas Kurian.

Accounts of the family's early life differ in detail. The Register's 2016 profile of Kurian placed the twins' birth in a village called Kothala, near Pampady, and described the household as a disciplined Christian one in which their mother insisted on a structured upbringing. A separate 2015 report in The Hindu, based on an interview with the twins' uncle, the cardiologist George Jacob, described the four brothers as having been "born and brought up" in Bengaluru, in the neighbouring state of Karnataka, where their father was posted for work, with the family's ancestral home in the village of Pampady, near Kottayam, to which their father retired; Jacob's account was given in connection with Thomas Kurian's 2015 appointment at Oracle rather than George Kurian's own career, but describes the shared family background of both twins. Kurian has recalled that his family had modest means, telling CRN in 2019: "I grew up during a time in India where computing and information technology didn't exist. We didn't have a TV until I was 15. I never saw a computer." He has said he is grateful for opportunities his parents made possible: "They were both phenomenal role models, self-starters. They came up from poor backgrounds and made extraordinary contributions to their communities. They encouraged us to not be afraid."

As their father's career took the family around India, George and Thomas Kurian boarded at the Jesuit-run St Joseph's Boys' High School in Bengaluru. Both were admitted to the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 1985, but left after about six months when they were offered partial scholarships to Princeton University in New Jersey, having sent their SAT results to a number of American colleges. Their family covered the remaining costs, and the twins moved to the United States in 1986, at the age of seventeen, taking part-time jobs to help cover their living expenses. During his college years, Kurian also worked as a valet, a pizza chef and a bartender. He graduated from Princeton with a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering. He later earned a Master of Business Administration from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Sources disagree on Kurian's year of birth. The Register's 2016 profile stated that he was born in 1968. NetApp's proxy statement for its 2026 annual meeting, filed on 28 July 2026, listed Kurian as fifty-nine years old.

Career

Oracle, McKinsey, Akamai and Cisco (1990 to 2011)

After graduating from Princeton, Kurian joined Oracle Corporation, where over five years he progressed from a software coder to senior manager in engineering, working across Oracle's software engineering and product management teams. He left Oracle in 1995 to become a senior engagement manager at the management consultancy McKinsey & Company, where he remained until 1999. He then spent three years as vice president of product management and strategy at the content delivery network company Akamai Technologies, from 1999 to 2002.

In 2002, Kurian joined Cisco Systems, where he spent nine years in vice-president and general-manager roles. He led Cisco's video networking business unit beginning in 2002, its application delivery business unit beginning in 2005, and its application networking and switching technology group beginning in 2009, remaining at Cisco until 2011.

Rise at NetApp (2011 to 2015)

Kurian joined NetApp in April 2011 as senior vice president of its storage solutions group, and was named senior vice president of its Data ONTAP group that December. In September 2013, he was promoted to executive vice president of product operations, a role in which he oversaw technology strategy and product and solutions development across NetApp's portfolio. He became chief executive officer of NetApp on 1 June 2015, succeeding Tom Georgens, and joined the company's board of directors that same month.

Chief executive officer (2015 to present)

Kurian took over a company whose revenue had been flat or declining for three years amid competition from all-flash array makers, hyper-converged systems and public cloud providers. The Mercury News wrote in 2018 that Kurian had "shepherded the storage technology company into a new era of emphasis on flash-based storage, the cloud, and software," a shift NetApp described internally as its "data fabric" strategy. Kurian said the changes were necessary to "use the market transitions that are going on in the industry to our advantage." NetApp's board, in its 2026 proxy statement, credited Kurian with having "achieved record financial performance while executing a successful transition to all-flash and cloud storage and rapidly scaling an AI infrastructure business."

As of NetApp's first-quarter fiscal 2027 earnings release on 2 September 2026, the most recent primary-source filing available at the time of writing, Kurian continued to serve as chief executive officer, and he was quoted in that release describing the quarter as NetApp's "strongest first quarter ever." The NetApp 10-K for fiscal 2026 listed his formal title as "Chief Executive Officer and Director," and identified him as the company's principal executive officer and principal operating officer.

Leadership and management style

Kurian has described his approach to leadership in terms of a "growth mindset," telling CRN in 2019: "I always believe in what people call a growth mindset that talent and success is not determined by your innate ability but by persistence and getting up and trying new things and not being afraid to fail." He has attributed NetApp's product innovation during his tenure to a willingness within the company to tolerate early failures, saying: "We've done a lot of innovation over the years because we had the courage to try. We didn't always get it right the first time, but we didn't give up the first time we failed."

Under Kurian, NetApp organized its business around what the company called a "data fabric" strategy, intended to let customers manage data consistently across on-premises systems and multiple public clouds; the strategy was later folded into NetApp's broader positioning around "Intelligent Data Infrastructure" and hybrid cloud. In its 2026 fiscal-year business highlights, NetApp described its strategy under Kurian as focused on "the accelerating markets for enterprise AI and cloud," citing more than 1,100 AI and data-preparation customer wins during the year, including approximately 500 in the fourth quarter alone.

Major deals and strategic decisions

Early in his tenure, Kurian ended in-house development of NetApp's FlashRay all-flash storage system. In its place, NetApp acquired the privately held Colorado-based all-flash storage maker SolidFire, Inc. on 2 February 2016, paying $850 million in cash, funded by an $850 million term loan. The following month, NetApp initiated a restructuring plan under which it notified approximately 1,110 of its roughly 12,030 employees that their positions were being eliminated. By April 2017, NetApp's worldwide headcount had fallen to approximately 10,100 employees.

NetApp's acquisitions continued through the second half of Kurian's tenure, extending the company into cloud-management and cloud-native software. On 28 April 2020, NetApp acquired Cloud Jumper Corporation, a North Carolina-based provider of virtual desktop infrastructure and remote desktop services, for $34 million in cash. On 9 July 2020, it acquired Spot, Inc., an Israel-based provider of cloud compute cost-optimisation software, for $340 million in cash. On 18 June 2021, it acquired the Paris-based cloud analytics company Data Mechanics Inc. for approximately $15 million in cash. On 5 November 2021, it acquired CloudCheckr Inc., a cloud optimisation and compliance platform, for approximately $347 million in cash. On 18 February 2022, it acquired NeurOps Inc., trading as Fylamynt, a cloud automation company, for approximately $27 million. And on 20 May 2022, it acquired Instaclustr US Holding, Inc., a provider of managed open-source database and data-pipeline services, for approximately $498 million.

NetApp later reversed part of this cloud-software build-out. In the fourth quarter of its 2025 fiscal year, the company sold its Spot by NetApp cloud-optimisation and management software business to Flexera Software LLC. On 2 September 2026, NetApp announced the acquisition of DataPelago, Inc., an artificial-intelligence data-infrastructure company, which the company said would help customers "simplify and accelerate AI deployment at scale."

NetApp also carried out further restructuring under Kurian in the years that followed the SolidFire-related cuts. The company recorded $120 million in restructuring charges, consisting primarily of employee severance costs, in fiscal 2023, describing the plan as intended "to redirect resources to highest return activities and reduce costs." It recorded a further $44 million in restructuring charges in fiscal 2024, which included costs associated with establishing an international headquarters for the company in Cork, Ireland.

Financial and market performance

NetApp's net revenues rose from $6.268 billion in fiscal 2024 to $6.572 billion in fiscal 2025 and to $6.925 billion in fiscal 2026, a year in which the company also reported record gross profit, record operating income of $1.67 billion (up 25.2 per cent year over year), and record operating cash flow of $2.07 billion (up 37.3 per cent). Non-GAAP earnings per share reached $8.13 in fiscal 2026, up 12.1 per cent year over year, and GAAP operating margin reached a record 30.2 per cent, up 190 basis points. The company returned $1.36 billion to shareholders in fiscal 2026 through share repurchases and dividends.

NetApp's growth accelerated further in the first quarter of fiscal 2027: net revenues of $2.03 billion were up 30 per cent year over year, with record all-flash array revenue of $1.3 billion, up 47 per cent, and record Public Cloud segment revenue of $206 million, up 28 per cent. The company raised its guidance for full fiscal year 2027 to net revenues of between $7.975 billion and $8.225 billion. NetApp's next quarterly dividend, of $0.52 per share, was scheduled to be paid on 28 October 2026 to shareholders of record as of 9 October 2026.

NetApp's five-year "pay versus performance" disclosure in its 2026 proxy statement showed that a hypothetical $100 invested in NetApp stock at the start of the disclosed measurement period would have grown to $163.57 by the end of fiscal 2026, compared with $260.29 for the same hypothetical investment tracked against NetApp's compensation peer group, indicating that NetApp's total shareholder return lagged that peer group cumulatively over the period. The same disclosure reported NetApp's net income across the five fiscal years from 2022 to 2026 as $937 million, $1.274 billion, $986 million, $1.186 billion and $1.276 billion, respectively. As of 24 October 2025, the aggregate market value of NetApp voting stock held by non-affiliates was $17.1 billion.

NetApp's worldwide headcount fell from approximately 12,030 employees in April 2016, shortly after the SolidFire acquisition and the restructuring that followed it, to approximately 10,100 by April 2017. It later recovered, standing at approximately 12,000 in April 2023, approximately 11,800 in April 2024, and approximately 11,700 in April 2026.

Kurian's total compensation as chief executive officer, as reported in NetApp's summary compensation tables, was $18.88 million for fiscal 2022, $11.36 million for fiscal 2023, $17.74 million for fiscal 2024, $23.13 million for fiscal 2025, and $22.16 million for fiscal 2026. His fiscal 2026 compensation consisted of a base salary of $1 million, stock awards valued at approximately $19.55 million, non-equity incentive plan compensation of approximately $1.6 million, and other compensation of $7,188. NetApp reported that the ratio of Kurian's fiscal 2026 total compensation to that of the company's median employee was 163 to 1. As of the 2026 proxy statement, Kurian beneficially owned 151,298 shares of NetApp common stock, then valued at approximately $15.3 million.

Board memberships and outside roles

Kurian was appointed to the board of directors of the health services company Cigna Corporation on 6 January 2021, with the appointment effective 1 March 2021. He serves on Cigna's compliance committee and its people resources committee. As of NetApp's 2026 proxy statement, Cigna was the only other public company board on which Kurian served. Because Kurian is an executive rather than an independent director of NetApp, he does not serve on any of NetApp's own board committees.

NetApp has disclosed that it conducts business, in the ordinary course, with Google Cloud, a division of Alphabet Inc. led by Kurian's brother, Thomas Kurian, and has stated that these transactions are conducted on an arm's-length basis and are not considered related-person transactions under SEC rules, noting that NetApp's relationship with Google Cloud predated Thomas Kurian's employment there.

Personal life

Kurian is married and is the father of two children. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has said his mother taught him humility: recalling how he told her he had been named chief executive of NetApp, he said she responded, "Great, but we don't carry business cards at home." He has cited cheering on his two children at their sporting events as one of his favourite activities.

Kurian's identical twin brother, Thomas Kurian, followed a related path into the technology industry: after nearly two decades at Oracle Corporation, where he rose to president of product development, Thomas Kurian became chief executive officer of Google Cloud, a position he still held as of NetApp's proxy statement filed in July 2026. CRN wrote in 2019 that the brothers were among a small number of chief executives of Indian origin in the technology industry.

Philanthropy

Kurian has said that NetApp's culture of employee volunteering reflects a personal commitment to the school he attended as a child in India. Describing the effort to CRN in 2019, he said: "We try and do that personally by helping the children at the school I went to ... to have meals and have a good lunch every day, that's important. My dad was one who didn't have access to a hot lunch and here's a way to recognize his memory and give back."

Recognition

In September 2026, CRN named Kurian to its list of the twenty-five most influential executives of 2026, citing his leadership in data storage "amid the age of cloud and AI." In the same month, NetApp's AI Data Engine product was named a finalist in CRN's 2026 Tech Innovator Awards, and NetApp was named a leader in Forrester's Wave evaluation of object storage solutions for the second quarter of 2026.

See also

• NetApp
• Thomas Kurian
• Tom Georgens
• Cisco Systems
• Akamai Technologies
• Cigna Corporation

External links

• Official website
• NetApp, Inc. filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission