Lawsuit alleges he poached staff, lifted trade secrets, and set up Red Stapler before quitting

NetApp has accused its former senior vice president and CTO of secretly building a rival cloud control platform while still on its payroll, triggering an urgent legal scramble.

The lawsuit, filed on November 6 in the US District Court for the Middle District of Florida, alleges that Jón Thorgrímur Stefánsson spent his final months at the company quietly laying the groundwork for a competing business, siphoning off confidential information and attempting to recruit colleagues before selling his startup to rival VAST Data in September 2025.

According to the complaint [PDF], Stefánsson spent eight years at NetApp and played a "central part" in the development of its cloud data management stack. Court documents say he helped build NetApp's "advanced service delivery engines for cloud data management technologies, including its cloud control plane," and was "directly involved in the development and integration of NetApp's first-party, cloud-native storage products with the ...