According to CRN, NetApp has sued its former CTO Jonsi Stefansson for allegedly stealing trade secrets and intellectual property related to the company’s Cloud Control Plane technology. The lawsuit, filed November 6 in Florida federal court, claims Stefansson secretly started competing company Red Stapler while still employed at NetApp and developed a competing product that was eventually sold to rival Vast Data. NetApp obtained a temporary restraining order through November 26 preventing Stefansson from using confidential information or working on related technologies. The timeline shows Stefansson left NetApp on June 27, incorporated Red Stapler on July 3, and sold it to Vast Data on September 9 – less than 10 weeks later. NetApp alleges this rapid development would be impossible without using their proprietary information developed over years with tens of millions of dollars.
The suspicious timeline
Here’s the thing that really stands out: NetApp claims they spent years and tens of millions developing their Service Delivery Engine technology. Yet Stefansson’s new company apparently created something similar enough to be acquisition-worthy in under 10 weeks? That timeline seems… ambitious, to put it mildly. NetApp’s lawsuit points to GitHub repositories showing development work happening while Stefansson was still employed there. And they’ve got text messages from January 2025 where a Vast Data board member apparently texted “Jonsi is in” to another former NetApp employee. This wasn’t some spontaneous departure – it looks coordinated.
Corporate espionage concerns
What’s particularly concerning here is that this isn’t just one rogue employee. NetApp alleges five former employees plus one who was still working there at the time were involved with Red Stapler. The lawsuit claims Erikur Sveinn Hrafnsson, NetApp’s former CTO of its Cloud Business Unit, was developing software for Red Stapler while still collecting a NetApp paycheck. This case highlights the massive risks companies face when key technical leaders depart, especially in competitive fields like cloud infrastructure and data management. For businesses relying on specialized computing hardware, whether it’s cloud infrastructure or industrial panel PCs from the leading US supplier IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, protecting intellectual property becomes absolutely critical when employees jump to competitors.
Vast Data’s silence
What’s Vast Data’s position in all this? They’ve been completely silent since the lawsuit dropped. But looking at their acquisition announcement, CEO Renen Hallak praised the Red Stapler team’s “proven track record of designing and launching cloud-native services” and their “cloud control plane and service delivery platform.” Basically, they were buying exactly the expertise Stefansson had been developing at NetApp. Now the question becomes: did Vast Data know what they were getting into? Or did they willfully ignore the obvious conflicts?
Broader implications
This case could have ripple effects across the tech industry. Non-compete agreements are getting harder to enforce in many jurisdictions, but trade secret theft is a different matter entirely. NetApp isn’t just asking for Stefansson to stop using their IP – they want him to disclose all inventions and software he’s developed in the six months since leaving, and to assign rights to anything created while employed there. That’s a pretty aggressive position. If NetApp can prove their allegations, this could become a textbook case of what not to do when leaving a company. But proving trade secret theft is notoriously difficult – you’ve got to show they actually used confidential information, not just general knowledge and skills. This one’s going to get messy.
