NetApp, the US-based storage and data management company, has opened a Global Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru.

The new engineering facility also houses the company’s first startup accelerator programme titled “Escape Velocity” that will help nurture technology startups.

“The innovations at our Bengaluru Global Centre of Excellence will help customers around the world get ahead of the competition by enabling their data-powered digital transformation strategies,” said NetApp CEO George Kurian.

The company’s Startup Accelerator Programme is aimed to expand Data Fabric ecosystem.

“As we evolve our Data Fabric approach, the Escape Velocity program will help to share our technology expertise and business acumen with startups who will add to the robust cloud data management ecosystem our customers need,” said Deepak Visweswaraiah, managing director of NetApp India.

NetApp registered a revenue growth of 238.2 percent year over the year, which was 2.7 times faster than the all-flash array market as a whole, a report by the market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) said last year.

All-flash array is a data storage system that contains multiple flash memory drives in place of spinning hard disk drives, allowing for much faster data transfer rates and more efficient use of data centre resources.

According to IDC, NetApp has moved to the second position from fourth in the tracker quarter over quarter, with 22.8 percent revenue market share — ahead of Pure Storage, HPE and IBM.

NetApp recently acquired leading all-flash storage system SolidFire with the promise of providing storage for the Next-Gen data centres.