NetApp continued its months-long buying spree, this time acquiring cloud cost management platform provider Spot in a move to bolster its application driven infrastructure (ADI) business.

Spot provides tools for visibility and automation into how an organization manages its workloads running on public clouds. This provides a way to manage the deployment of those workloads while maintaining service-level agreements (SLAs) and service-level objectives (SLOs).

That platform will be merged with NetApp’s ADI focus to allow customers to more easily deploy their applications to those public cloud environments in line with their cost and compute needs. NetApp said the combination can help customers save up to 90% of their compute and storage cloud expenses, which will in turn support more adoption of public cloud resources.

Amiram Shachar, founder and CEO of Spot, explained in blog post that the two companies have been focused on providing organizations with the ability to trust their infrastructure: NetApp in terms of the storage component, and Spot in terms of the compute component.

The deal follows on the heels of NetApp’s acquisition in April of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) provider CloudJumper for an undisclosed amount in a deal that propels the data services company into the remote desktop market. Specifically, CloudJumper allows NetApp to provide a management platform to provide virtual desktop infrastructure, storage, and data management across cloud hyperscalers like Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud.

And NetApp in March acquired Talon Storage for an undisclosed amount. That deal boosted its software-defined storage assets, tapping into Talon’s cloud data platform that aims to simply file sharing between remote and branch offices.

NetApp late last month reported its lowest full-year revenue since 2011, and a corresponding dive in net income for its fourth fiscal quarter of 2020. The vendor blamed the drop on the broader economic uncertainty tied to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite the more recent struggles, NetApp remains a strong player in the storage space.

It was tagged in the most upper-right of Gartner’s 2019 Magic Quadrant for primary storage vendors. This put NetApp in that “leaders” quadrant with rivals like Dell EMC, Pure Storage, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Huawei, Hitachi Vantara, and Infinidat. NetApp was lauded for its data fabric, Active IQ analytics, and solid-state arrays, but dinged for inconsistent post-sales customer service, lack of global reach, and a lack of data management services.

More recently, NetApp launched a technology preview of its Project Astra that is a storage and data services platform for Kubernetes that enables application and data portability. The platform offers a normalized application data management approach that results in the portability of data rich or stateful applications, moving them from one cluster to another.

The Project Astra launch also continued NetApp’s growing Kubernetes focus with its eyes set on becoming a leading on-premises hybrid cloud platform capable of automating infrastructure for Kubernetes.