That reseller base was also key to NetApp's purchase of the company, giving it an opportunity to expand into more channels that they otherwise could not have entered into, Georgens said.

Georgens said the digital video surveillance, movie-making and high-performance computing markets will represent a $5 billion incremental market opportunity by 2014.

Georgens, who took over NetApp a year and a half ago, that once the recession ended and refresh cycles began anew, corporations would be focused on "very different architectures," and would not simply be upgrading to new versions of arrays they already have.

NetApp said it expects to close the deal in the next 60 days.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at or subscribe to . His e-mail address is .