 Now, SAP's conference live in Orlando. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the advanced instructor to signal from the noise. We talk to anyone. We talk to the deputy commissioner of the MBA today. We talk to all the top executives at SAP, entrepreneurs, analysts, press, you name it. We talk to them, but we love to talk to customers about what they're doing. Because at the end of the day, the story from the companies is always the same. Everyone's doing great. When we talk to customers, that's the ultimate testimonies and we're here with the customer. And our two guests here is Henry Wagner from Global SAP Support with EMC. Welcome, and James Yin from West Pharmaceuticals. Welcome to theCUBE. So, Henry, set the table for us. EMC, not a stranger to big customers. We were just at EMC World where we talked and the transformation message is clear at EMC side. Certainly at SAP, they're marching on the same drumbeat as EMC in terms of transformation, mobility, speed. Same kind of message is all kind of tying together. You have large customers and we want to talk about some of the mechanics around the SAP environment. So set the table for us. What is happening and what are we going to talk about here? Sure, last week we were at EMC World and the theme was transformation, right? And when we look at transformation and now being at Sapphire, there's a tremendous opportunity to transform as an SAP customer. And why do you want to transform? Well, you want to improve business agility. And the only way you can improve business agility and move faster and innovate with SAP, if you fundamentally reduce the cost of the infrastructure and the whole applications and landscape. And we think at EMC, one of the best opportunities to do that is to deploy a private cloud infrastructure for SAP. Either you do that on-premise or off-premise with one of our service provider. And today, we have a client here. We have many clients that have gone through this journey but particularly a client here that has deployed and transformation from a previous physical infrastructure to virtual infrastructure in a private cloud for SAP manner. James, talk about the situation that you're in now and before we get to the specifics of the solution at a high level, what was the problem that you were running into and how did you look at and frame the problem and how did you attack it with the virtualization of the V-Block and the private cloud? It's not that easy. Yeah, thank you. Before we implement a V-Block, we faced a very critical challenge. This is a challenge is we are running out of the data center space and also our backup solution is not, cannot meet our demand. So we cannot make up a production system within 24 hours. So that's why we think about facing this challenge here. We are trying to move to have a West, have a private cloud. So we think about EMC, have a solution. So last year we started to have a migration project. So, talk about the technology involved and the operation to do the project. Can you give the key, what were the key variables? Yeah, basically we have the three factors to, for this project, this cost consideration and timing and also the resources, skill set. So, my CIO give me a direction. We have to complete this device within six months. Otherwise, data center renters out. So I have to complete by last June or July. And also we have to have a good backup solution. So having said that, we did everything in-house and migrate everything from Dell physical server to the VBlock, but 100% virtualization. Henry, six months, data center's out of space. They have a lot, it's a lot of pressure. Can you add some color because you guys were close to the situation. You see a lot of fast movement before, but can you just describe the umbrella project and what that is? Sure, it's amazing. We've run into many customers recently. They've had these projects where they said, they have these compelling events where they're going to go through these changes. Application upgrades, data center moves, tech refresh, they want to virtualize. And normally they calculate, they would take anywhere from 12 to 15 months to go do this. In some cases they wouldn't take on that much change because of the risk factors James just spoke about. But we have multiple clients that deploy the private cloud for SAP solution. And because of the time to market and provisioning capabilities, they've been able to reduce their risk and substantially reduce the project time to six months. So obviously there are a lot of planning going into that, having the right resources, the right time and the right risk, and then deploying that solution. And then most of those customers are not only seeing a successful cutover, but a very short cutover as well when they go live. So I saw that David Floyer, we've been analysts who's been really digging deep in this area. Who's talking to me about the private cloud and VBlock? What role does those two, what the VBlock play in this? I think the private cloud with VBlock, you know the compute network and storage is fundamental components of building out virtual infrastructure, private cloud for SAP infrastructure. And VBlock is purpose built for that, right? Single integration, single deployment, single engineering and single support, right? But most interesting is when you look at capabilities before James went into this journey, there are other things like data protection, monitoring strategies, security, how am I dealing with all these things before in my physical world? And then I deployed in private cloud with VCE and the VBlock, but then there's all these components that the EMC adds to private cloud solution that helps with these BCDR data protection, security, monitoring. So James, do you mind talking maybe a little bit wider around what was deployed as well above and beyond the VBlock for SAP that helped you through this project and reduced the risk to accomplish it? Yeah, actually that's a good question. By using a VMware virtualization function we can provision the usage of the system. And normally before we migrate from physical to virtual, we have a system landscape. And then after I migrate, we have nine system landscape. But during the migration, we did not increase any CPU. In fact, after using VBlock, we reduced the 70% of the number of CPU. That means we save lots of license fee regarding Oracle license fee. It's based on the, because the Oracle license fee is based on the number of CPU. And also because the provision function we can easily provide based on the demand instead of customer waiting a month for a new system. Now it's only a few hours after the request. So that's a kind of problem. What was the percentage of reduction on the processors? What was? 17%. 17? Yes. Okay, so how big of an order of magnitude cost savings was that? Was it like, you know, small, medium, large? Put it, tell us a dollar amount, that'd be great. Yeah, seriously. I can say before migrate we use 180 CPUs after it's only less than 160, okay? And we have more system landscape before migration we have 86 instances, after migration we have over 110 instances. So how does it impact your data center problem? Was it space or was it just a new facility? Actually both. See, we have more instances and we slay less space. So our rental, although still the same because we can fit more instances, I mean more hardware on the CUBE. What about the end users? One of the things we look at is SAP end users, right? You're building these systems, you're building these environments to make sure that the business is running, they can move faster. What was the end user response? And is there any examples of how agility and faster time to market through a private cloud strategy gave you a better end user experience? Sure. First of all, performance wise using convert from physical to virtual, the performance did not impact. And the hardware resource actually, I just mentioned is less resource, I mean less hardware and within the same or even faster speed. The other thing is that when user want to have a new system we can easily deploy the new system within hours. Within hours. Yes. Very nice. Henry, talk about the business benefits. Obviously you guys look at a lot of customers. How does this compare and contrast other SAP type implementations that you've been involved in? Is it representative? What kind of use cases does it represent to you guys? It's very representative. What we see in large SAP clients is they constantly have the need to go build a new project landscape or do system refreshes, build out another systems or complete this end to end project. And what consistently we see, if something that used to take a week takes day and something that used to take days takes hours, I can not only deploy a project end to end much faster but I can react to end user demand, right? So when the business asks and saying, hey, I want to be able to provide new systems or when the business is going through a merger and acquisition, if I can integrate that new company in three months instead of nine months because of the underlying private cloud capabilities of merging in system much quicker because my provisioning is much quicker, it's a huge win. I actually think it's such a big win that I think IT then gets a seat in the boardroom and it becomes more relevant in the boardroom because it becomes a competitive advantage for your company. Well, we heard the tech athletes up there in the stage, I was on a sports references because of the profile sports franchises and the mindset there is, you know, it doesn't matter if we can win whatever it takes and they want to kind of make the back office kind of transparent me as software driven or software led, as we say, it's looking angle, a wiki bond. So James, I got to ask you as, you know, EMC's got their opinion and SAP has their opinion, you know, you're in the trenches, and you're spending money, you're deploying. What was the biggest thing that you saw as a result besides the processors outside of the processor which you just noted, the biggest impact and what advice would you give others that are looking at a similar kind of challenge? That's a good question actually. Let me give you an example, not only the hardware saving by virtualization but also the people resources. For example, we have a new system, a CM system, want to implement and the business already ask a lot of consulting waiting there. If the system is not ready, every month that's another. The labor cost, yes. The labor cost is huge. So your savings on the labor side. Consulting fee. Consulting fee. He's standing around. Yes. Consulting fees to eliminate those, but also, you know, people waiting around, right? That's correct. That's very easy. Another intangible. John, we have other clients that we talked to that normally at middle of the night had to do these changes because of outage windows. We have Vblock for SAP and private cloud customers. They're making changes during the day because they can move in V motion within the data center within the infrastructure and therefore they have the consultants working during the day versus at night, which is a huge saving as well. So the many facets of that savings. So final question there is what have you learned that you can share with folks? I mean, folks, a lot of folks out there who are looking at this transformation, we heard it today, modern era. People are pivoting to a new architecture and that includes cloud, a lot of retrofitting. It's at the beginning of that journey as you said that. What advice would you give people? It's about time, don't be afraid. Virtualization is there. I mean, it's not in the future. You have to do it now to start saving. And we did this for the past five years, but there's no unplanned outage production outage. So feel confidence. Don't worry about it. So the unplanned outages are not there? No. Okay. All right, well, we're here inside the cube here from a customer. We love it. EMC, you guys are great. Like SAP, you guys like to show your value with customers. We'd like to hear it. We're going to bring in David Floyd to break it down. After the short break, David Floyd is the co-founder of Wikibon with Dave Vellante and our lead researcher in this area, and he's been researching SAP virtualization. Before we bring David in, I feel like we're like a jury. Before we bring David into the jury box. Henry, give you the last word. What do you think David's going to be commenting about? What are the analysts saying about EMC's SAP strategy? I think the private cloud for SAP strategy is there, right? A couple of years ago, we were talking about clients getting there. I think we've gotten to the tipping point. They're a mass amount of clients moving to private cloud for SAP. Many of them doing on the V-Block. I talked about last week that we had a $100 billion retail that had just deployed a V-Block for SAP. So the customers, it used to be that you could gain a competitive edge from time to market if you deployed private cloud for SAP. But honestly, this year, if you're not reducing your run rate, if you're not getting that business agility by deploying virtual SAP for SAP, you're actually going to fall behind, which is a measurement of the fact that we think we've seen the tipping point of this opportunity for customers. Great, and James, your experience with EMC, solid? Pretty good? Very good, a few comments. Don't take it, don't be afraid. James said, pharmaceuticals, they're risk averse. They don't want to take chances because they have a lot of risk, a lot of big business there and the pharmaceutical business. Thanks for coming inside theCUBE. Don't take any chances, get out there. Virtualization save on license fees. That's a real enabler, but also a lot of cost savings. Thanks for coming to theCUBE. We're going to bring in David Fleur in our next segment with James to kind of break down and go deeper under the hood to look at some of the nuances around how that's all works and to break it down for it. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back here live at Sapphire in Orlando. We'll be right back.