 Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Sapphire Now. Headlines sponsored by SAP HANA Cloud, the leader in platform as a service. With support from Consolink, the cloud internet company. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Orlando, Florida for SAP Sapphire Now. This is Silicon Angle Media's flagship program, theCUBE, where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Peter Burris, I want to give a shout out to our sponsors, SAP HANA Cloud, Consolink at Consol Cloud. Check them out, it's a hot new startup in Silicon Valley. VirtuaStream, EMC, Cap Gemini, thanks to our sponsors for us being here. Okay, our next guest is Henrik Wagner, who's the global SAP GTM for VirtuaStream. Welcome back and Mike Harding, Director of Architecture of EMC IT. So I guess it's a little tie in here. Henrik, good to see you again. Fantastic to see you. You look great. I've been following you on Twitter, I've been very impressed with your Twitter, tweeting action, your social, been sharing a lot of great data. It's been great to follow the VirtuaStream action. What are you seeing? What's the update? We saw you last night at the VirtuaStream party, saw Rodney the night before. Everyone's still got a spring in their step with the act, it was just with EMC, so is the honeymoon over or is it just the day? No, I don't think it is. I think it's going to last for a long time and that's because of customer demand and where the partner community is going. I think first of all, we've built, Rodney and team has built a fantastic platform, purpose built for enterprise, for SAP, for HANA. But what we're seeing in the community with the use cases is we're being pulled in in a lot of places. In a lot of places that a year or two ago that you wouldn't think that they would look at a enterprise cloud for mission critical workloads like SAP or HANA. So not only are we out there pushing it, but we're being pulled in both from the customers and from the partner community, which is pretty exciting. So what's the big update for VirtuaStream? Why are people using VirtuaStream? What was the main value that you guys were such a hot target by EMC? And I heard others as well. It wasn't just SAP. You guys were doing some other cloud stuff, but it was really a lot of early SAP running, bolting it together. Take us through that progression of why VirtuaStream was so powerful on SAP. I think a couple of things. One is that Rodney and KR who started the company, they started in 2009, 2010. So they didn't have legacy baggage of infrastructure and software and solution. They built something fresh with the latest technology. And when they started building the platform, they took a look at what other challenges SAP and HANA customers have, silos of infrastructure, silos of groups, automation, all the manual stuff that is not happening, billing, how do you consume the cloud? How do you do consumption-based billing? How do you get better resource management out of the infrastructure? So they went and built a cloud platform from scratch, the software, what we call Extreme Cloud Management Platform, set that on top of our infrastructure service, our data centers, and then deliver a purpose-built enterprise cloud to tackle all those challenges that many of these SAP customers have. And a lot of those value props and how we solve those problems are right, right in the heart of where these customers are wanting us to help. And I would say the last thing is a fantastic experience and portfolio of services from advising the client, understanding, advising, assessing, migrating and onboarding the client, whether it's HANA migration, OSDB migration, migrate them on to the cloud, and then do managed services, whether it's infrastructure managed services or basis managed services on the whole package. And I think combination of the software and the functionality and the services that we're able to offer, we can offer a better SLA, lower TCO overall, and our SAP clients are really happy. They're moving more and more of their HANA and SAP workloads to our cloud. But you guys started with deep domain expertise of the platform. And that's one of the advantages, especially as SAP makes it more of a platform play, that's one of the advantages that you and others can bring to try to drive that deep expertise in the platform and come up with conventions and models and digitization techniques that allows customers like EMC who are using the platform to more rapidly implement that expertise in the form of those digital assets. Talk a little bit about what you guys did together to accelerate this process within site EMC itself. So, in fact, it's a great point, Peter, right? Before joining EMC, I had been an SAP consultant for years and I'd gone through quite frankly, a couple of different battles with hosting providers with SAP. And to your point, they didn't quite know the platform and whereas here with Virtustream, they knew the platform quite well. Not only that, but they had, I would say a little bit of a niche and a unique play with this concept of a consumption-based model, right? The micro-VM capabilities. So as a customer, not only am I attracted to the fact that there's an availability and a reliability play because they know the platform, but I actually get much more granular cost management out of the platform. And so as a consequence, you're able to make commitments to your organization that you might not be able to make if you were using other partners? Absolutely and I can be fully transparent with them, right? Whereas in the traditional kind of CapEx investment model, it's a little more difficult to be as transparent as possible with those financials, right? So talk about the thought process that you went through as you conceived of the challenge of doing it on-premise, but also now thinking about how you might incorporate the advantages of the cloud in your implementation. Obviously in how Virtustream's helping with that. Right, great question. Because that's actually a question I get from a lot of different customers as we're starting to tease out, what's the roadmap? What's the methodology or the approach? We are still a growing SAP customer. We've been live now for roughly five years. Very, very, very- You guys virtualized. Virtualized everything, yes, as we went off the gate. Now we've got quite a bit of, I'd say, a mixture within our portfolio of HANA, more traditional database platforms, some virtual, some physical we've had to do for HANA. And now we're at the point where it makes sense for us to actually reduce how much more capex we need to, investments we need to make and start to take kind of what we'd term maybe your low-hanging fruit and push those assets off-prem. So some of the tenants we thought about are things like, is it going to introduce any latency to my end users, for example? Am I going to have any security challenges from a compliance perspective? And so what we started to do is map out one by one from an application perspective where it's going to make sense to push some of our assets off-prem. And then at the same time, we're starting to flesh out, this is now a whole level of flexibility I didn't have in the past. If a project came to me and said, hey, I need an environment by tomorrow, I couldn't do it. So now with that kind of, the fact that we have that cloud of environment available to us, it's giving us a lot more flexibility to meet our business needs. So you can stand up stuff really quickly. Really quickly. That was the whole goal. Yeah, well, that's a piece of it. Yes. Is virtual stream providing some of that thought leadership and some of those models and some of those methods? How are you working with Mike to help the business think those issues through? Yeah, I think it's interesting because we've really, he's built a fantastic private cloud on premise as the journey began, started for them, right? Now, if you think about it on what I described, we deliver the performance and security of a private cloud but the economics of a multi-tenant cloud on our platform. So one of those use cases then was actually SNOP on HANA. So sales and operations planning deployed on HANA. It's a new application that only runs on HANA and they are now taking that and putting it on virtual streams cloud to create that hybrid use case. Which applications are it? Sales and operations planning SNOP on HANA. Probably want to share a little bit more about that particular use case. Yeah, so it's as we released actually a whole new coding solution to our sales engineers. One of the things that came up early was the ability to get a little more granular on sales and operational planning, right? So we had kind of invested in this, started to deploy it on-prem. It's growing faster than we have capacity for right now. So we're kind of at the point where we have to make a decision. Do we invest in more infrastructure at this point or do we start to push some of our workload out to the cloud? And again, considering some of those tenants I mentioned previously. So this to me was a really good candidate to start to push off-prem and into a cloud-based solution. Let me take you through that a little bit. Let me guess how that thought process went. So the sales and operations with a lot of configuration planning, complex product set, end of the month. Correct. Much of the rest of the time. So the cloud offers you the scalability. You don't have to manage your own network without mobile application because a lot of it's happening on the ground in front of the customer. You can do that out of the cloud. So those are the types of things that make this type of a deployment so attractive. Correct. And the thing I want to harp on a little bit, you just nailed it, right? The usage of this particular application is very much peak driven and it's let's say three or four days out of the month when it's really hitting that peak volume. Why would I make an investment in supporting this? Especially when I get that consumption-based visibility of extreme in the micro-VM when I can leverage that directly. And by the way, now it's an immediate charge back directly to the business. If this is what you guys really want, we're giving it to you and this is what you're paying for it. And if they want to find ways to level that out over time then your CEO's like, fantastic. Exactly, exactly. That's really one of the key components of what the IP and the solution that we deliver. This consumption-based billing, really the light switch like your house. So in those busy period, consuming more resources, so obviously higher consumption when we're not the busy period going down. And we measure that with the micro-VM in a five minute increments and we aggregate it up through a month. So really much lower TCO and also, like he said, don't have to go buy those really expensive infrastructure to meet that peak low. And look, as a guy who has worked with a lot of CIOs over the years, nobody likes a job where you're constantly having to defend your charge back system. This is real time and money and it's really clear what the bill looks like and why. So that means the CIO can spend more time focusing on the business issues and building out those new applications and putting the next thing into the cloud because the billing and the certainty- The squabbles going on over who did not buy it. Let's get down to the bottom line. He can go out and innovate, which is what exactly he's expected to do, right? Yeah, so we've heard a lot about partnership here at SAP. Is this arrangement making it easier for EMC in particular to reach out into the SAP ecosystem and start to find either software that is a little bit more sanctioned by SAP like the extension partners or other partners? Are you finding your business saying, well now that we can do this, there's a lot more options to pick and choose from and is it making it easier for you to bring up that new function? Yeah, I mean, probably for sure, yes. Without question, it's giving EMC as a company better exposure I think to the, let's say the SAP ecosystem, right? And so from my perspective, somewhat selfishly having been being an old stalwart in the SAP space, I'm definitely excited about the opportunity that's ahead. And for Virtus.gim, I mean, because Rodney and Kevin Reed, right, our founders had a 30-year history starting with SAP and Accenture and started a joint consulting and sold out to Capgeminat, because of the history of SAP in the background, they have extremely good relationship with SAP. As you know, SAP was a D-Round investor of 40 million. They know exactly the whole place. Exactly, so. And they have history. Yeah, and so now you're being here at Sapphire as an example, the demo showroom that SAP Salespeople uses, it sits on Virtus.gim's cloud, the NS2 platform, their DOD FedRAM certified platform that SAP sells, sits on our cloud. We just launched our HANA Enterprise Cloud platform, so that's our joint ability to work with SAP and contract customers on HANA Enterprise Cloud and then Virtus.gim delivers out of our data center, both infrastructure, service and basis, and the customer really gets accountability together with SAP, but the benefits of all the flexibility and all the values, all the platform that we provide. So the relationship and the doors are opening up fantastically well, it's really, really been exciting to be here at Sapphire. Guys, final question, just share with the audience the vibe of the show this year. What's the overall take? You can be specific about Virtus.gim and what's going on in your world, but outside that too, what's going on outside of what your world is, what's the general vibe, what's the aroma of ventilation? So for me personally, it felt like two or three years ago when you were coming to these, we were, as a customer, one of the few that had already been invested in and live with SAP HANA. Nowadays, that's totally a thing in the past. We did interview with Tom Peck back in 2010 to, you know, everyone in between, and then the CIO, what was his name? Sanjay was on theCUBE. Yeah, Sanjay mentioned that. CIO at the time, and he virtualized everything. You guys were one of the first to product. Correct. And now all of a sudden it's like, the foundation? Right, and so now I think the next step that folks are now starting to think about is, okay, what is this S4 thing? How real is it? How can I start building my business case around it? Because there's a lot there. I can start building my business around it. Yes, as well. Great point. And so that, I think, is a little exciting in starting to have those conversations around, you know, as a community here, well, here's our, what's our what's next move? Henry, I want you to answer the question in two languages, first in English and second in Swedish. You know, somebody did that to me just recently, and I literally, even though I'm from Sweden, I speak fluently, I stumble through because there's all this English world you're trying to translate in real time. I need a HANA database in my brain when I do that. But I'll start with English. Okay. Okay. I think, you know, two things. On the SAP side, I'm really excited about the innovations they're doing around HANA and then S4 HANA from an application perspective. A good friend of mine said something a couple, I think it was two years ago. He said, you know, there's a reason we drive cars today, right? The first cars before the horse and carriage, you know, they learned a lot of lessons. They weren't perfectly built. They, you know, things broke and they fixed it. Well, today we drive cars and we drive Teslas today, right? We're not on horse and carriage. So the innovation and the courage of SAP to take that next step and drive innovation and still balancing the risk, both from the platform perspective and then on the application S4 HANA, that's why I'm really excited to be around SAP because I think that's so cool. I'd rather be around and work around a company that's willing to drive and take that next step. There's joint development going on. So you see a lot of SAP co-innovation going on. Exactly. And then I would say the other thing from the cloud perspective, I mean, we've done, you know, 12 years at EMC cloud, private cloud on-premise, but we always had service provider partners from an off-premise cloud. And I think now we do touchy sponsorship and Rodney acquiring virtual stream. Not only do we have the enterprise mission critical cloud, right? That we talked about around SAP use cases, HANA use cases. At EMC world, we just launched the storage cloud. So extension for archive, for backup, for object store, the Rubicon cloud. And you know, for us to see that innovation of EMC going into that EMC federation of virtual stream, really going into the different use cases, specific use cases to solve customer problems. I just been very impressed of touchy of willing to do that innovation and go to the next step instead of just relying on the existing revenues. And final comments in Swedish. Yeah. Okay. World cloud for virtual stream is the only button for SAP. So now, I just told you that you have to lose weight. No. Put it Danish. I'm going to go translate, hold on, let me translate Iran. So what I said was that virtual streams cloud is the easy button for enterprises around SAP. Woo! I like that. Virtual stream is the easy button. Thanks for coming out. Thanks for sharing your insights and your linguistic knowledge and prowess. Congratulations. We are live here in Orlando. This is theCUBE. SiliconANGLES flagship program, John Furrier with Peter Burris, you're watching theCUBE. There'll be millions of people in the near future that want to be involved in their own personal well-being and wellness.