 The conference for SAP's annual event. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined with my cohost for this segment, David Floyer, co-founder of Wikibon and chief analyst over there and CTO, who gets into the details of SAP virtualization, software-led infrastructure, has been leading the research at Wikibon on many fronts. David, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you. Okay, we have James Ian back, West Pharma, Sudeckles here, a customer of EMC, SAP virtualization, putting this all together. Now we got you all alone in the air. Okay, all right. So we had Hunreak Wagner on, great guy. He's been on theCUBE before, articulate, smart, and I could say those guys have had the journey and have had success, and they were talking about this years ago, like SAP. But David, I want to get you on to see what you think. I mean, obviously you heard EMC's story, you were sitting off camera. What do you think about EMC's story and then we can jump into some questions with James? Well, I think that the overall story of virtualization itself, virtualizing the database, all of the application servers, and providing that as a service is exactly right. I've talked to a number of customers and that journey is being undertaken not only for IT reasons for lowering the cost, et cetera, but also for business reasons to consolidate it so that there are less instances, less different versions of SAP around the place. So that's one of the areas I'd like to ask you a couple of questions on. When you were taking this journey, you were taking it fairly early on at the time. What about some of the issues like certification from SAP? How did you tackle that with them? Because both Oracle and SAP have been a little reluctant to take it on. What was your journey then in talking to SAP and Oracle about that side of things? That's a very good question actually. Back to December 2007, SAP certified SAP running on the VMware and West Pharmaceuticals is kind of like first customer. We install our first instance back in December of 18, 2007, running on VMware Oracle. So for the past five years, before we moved to VBlog, we running a non-production system under VMware Oracle environment. That's why because SAP did not certify. The Oracle running production system under VMware. Right. So after I think 2010, it's certified. That's another reason we can fully move 100% from physical to virtualization. Before this, they got certification. We running our production system under physical hardware. Right, yep. Okay, so that's good too. Now you've got full certification of that. That's correct. So let me just drill down a little bit in how you set up the VBlog. Because one of the findings I got from my research was that if you spent more on the IO and got lower latencies, you actually helped reduce the number of cores required to run it. So if you use virtualization and better IO, faster latency, you would actually reduce the number of cores because there's less IO wait time to give it its technical name. Is that what you found? Did you measure that at all? Can you talk about how you did that? How did you improve the response times on the IO? Oh, sure. Actually, that's actually a major reason we pick up VBlog because EMC, NewSend technology, there's a different tiers of the disk access time. So before we implement it, we have an EMC consultant to help us to isolate different kind of IO access requirement. So we did, for example, the Oracle redo log need a fast cache size. So we put on tier one. And for the other offline redo log, it's not that critical. So we put a lower priority and lower speed disk. So by doing that, yes, it did improve a lot on the system performance. And that led to the reduction in the number of licenses that you actually required there. That's correct. So you said you went from 180 to 160, but you also increased the number of instances. That's correct. So what was it, as a percentage of instances, what was the reduction that you got? Basically, the original instances, seven system landscape, not including solution manager, that's a special landscape. That's around 15 to 17%. 15 to 17% reduction in the number of cores. That's correct. And that's directly, how did you negotiate that with Oracle? Did they allow you to reduce the bill or did they suggest you use the licenses somewhere else? The license structure actually is very special in SAP. You can deal with, bundle with SAP and Oracle. You can buy an Oracle license from through SAP. That's why we did. Okay. The other thing is that if you have an Oracle application, then that's a different story. So it's based on the CPU and REC. So if you have less REC, which is after virtualization, you'll have less REC and you'll have less license fee. The other thing is BI, SAP BI, it's charged by the number of license, I mean, number of CPU. Right. So that's another niche. We reduce the number of CPUs so we reduce the number of BI licenses. BI licenses as well. Yes. So it's a very significant reduction in cost for you. Yeah. So from where you're going in the future, what are you looking to do now? What's the next stage in your evolution of SAP? Other companies doing the private cloud on non-SAP application first. Our companies are different. Actually, we are like a first age. So after we implement SAP on the virtualization of VMware and we did everything other than SAP application, we did the SharePoint, we did the Exchange, everything is now on VMware now. Right. And running on the VBlock. Right. So in the future, we try to utilize this and try to utilize the EMC vCenter, vMotion, all those VMware functionality and try to have a better performance. For example, the usage for non-production system is not as green as used because most of the time non-production system nobody use during the holiday, during the weekend, all those by using VMware. We can easily just shut down our clone to save the energy during the non-working day. That one is on our plan. So utilize VMware functionality and reduce the cost, not only the hardware cost, but also the energy. And so let's go green, that's our direction. Right. Okay. We had sustainability on earlier. David, how about clustering? That was brought up earlier in the cube earlier in the day. The new environment on storage, a lot of multi-vendor. How does that all relate in to the virtualization play? I mean, I really don't have a good visibility, but you've done some research and James, you can also comment how you look at the multi-vendor because multi-vendor of today as we've heard at EMC world is open, openness and choice. So how did you deal with multi-vendor? Is it an issue or not an issue? For me? Yeah. Oh, it's disaster, it used to be. You know that one issue, okay? You have to identify the issue yourself first and then find the vendor who's responsible for the issue. Right. Otherwise, each vendor will pinpoint each other. That's your question, that's your issue. So by using one single vendor, it's easy to, one, just a single from, yeah, single point of contact, that's it. I'm going to VCE and you have to give me an answer. You find the expertise and help me. So that's a very good- And you went with one vendor? Yes. At EMC? Yes. And they're supporting both the SAP side of it as well as the- No, basically the VBlock, that means the whole infrastructure, including the SAP consulting part of it, but most of part is like a disk, right? All of the infrastructure. The infrastructure network servers, yeah. So they do that and then you have a separate contract for SAP and the Oracle together, right? Yeah, because SAP and Oracle, we have Oracle expertise in-house. And SAP, we pay license maintenance licenses so we have SAP support. Support, in that way, yeah. So in terms of clustering, how did you set up your availability clusters and things like that? Did you use Oracle's features for high availability or did you use the virtual, the VMware features? How did you set that up? That's a very good question. The old one, we use the Oracle Windows cluster, but after, that's physical server, but after my way to VBlock, we only use a VMware HA function. We try to utilize VMware for torrents function, but it's only because of the limitation, single CPU, they say next year you might have multiple CPU support. But for the past, based on my experience, but for the past five years, again, there's no unplanned production outage. So we did, that's another reason why I can reduce the number of CPU by not using Windows cluster. We're using VMware HA function and we test that it's working fine. So site recovery SRM, you're using? Yeah, that's other than HA, HA function, we use VMware HA, then for DR, we did SRM, yes. SRM, yes. James, what are you worried about going forward? Obviously, you're in a good spot right now. You met your six month deadline, which was very aggressive. That's a lot of pressure. And it sounds like HP was, I mean, EMC was great support for you. But what do you worry about going forward? I mean, the world's still evolving and growing. What technical challenges or opportunities do you have? Challenges, as they always say, challenges are opportunities. But we have an evolving ecosystem of changing business models, new technology, we hear from SAP. Cloud services. What are you thinking about? What's on your mind the most, technically? Well, actually, my idea is in our future, it should be go get it green. That's my idea. Reuse the resources, including the hardware, including the software skill set. That's why virtualization, that's the spirit of virtualization to maximize your usage of your resources. That's my, actually, that's my direction. That's your top priority. Yeah, and of course, virtualization eliminates servers. If you do it right. So, I mean, David, what do you think? What's your research show you? Is it consistent? Is that a use case that everyone's thinking about? Obviously, everyone's green is great, but this is a resource issue. Not just the- I think there's another dimension, which is a business dimension, I think. And there's this business dimension of consolidation as much as possible in order to have as the most flexible, the most useful workflows within the organization. So, I think that's, I don't know what you're doing about that, but I've seen that, that people want to centralize, consolidate the SAP instances so that they can create more flexible workflows, make SAP more effective for the business. Is that what you're doing as well from your work with the consultants, improving the workflows? Yeah, basically, we try to consolidate some of, like we did the consolidated data center. We migrate to the data center, and migrate Europe data center to North American because of the VBlock. And also, we make it global and try to consolidate the business function and workflow make it the one, yes, Europe. So, how much saving did you think you made from that? Because I've been talking to some other people. They said that they made as much or more savings from the consolidation of the workflows and the reduction in the number of different instances because they didn't need the same number of financial analysts or the same number of people in each of the businesses to support that. We are still, we still have a five years plan to move to globally, and we are in the middle of the process. And this is a big challenge, especially, you know, consolidation, lots of people think about out of job. So, yes, you reduce, I mean, reduce the workforce and then improve the productivity. But, yeah, but again, we have, at West, we try to develop a new business, actually. So, the same people, we can have more product, design new solution, and grow the business in that way. Within the same population. That's correct, yep. So, what sort of impact do you think that can have a 10% impact? At least 10%. At least 10%. More than that. Right. For example, from my team point of view, I have at least four basis people, system administrator, and used to be support 86 instances, now have to support over 110 instances. I meant from the company as a whole, you know, how much more revenue could those people generate? Actually, at least more than 10%, our company goal is from 1.2 to at least 1.4 in the next few years. Right, yeah, excellent. With the same number of people. With the same number of people, yeah. That's a big jump, that's a big jump. Final word on a technical basis, what's surprised you the most in this experience of the private cloud and the reblocking of the virtualization of SAP and all the things that you've done? What's the biggest technical surprise that kind of, you didn't think about what happened, a side benefit? I didn't know that's, it's not easy. That's easy. It was easy. And not many issue that I didn't expect. Just a migrate from the physical. Lots of people say, hey, you migrate from physical and this oracle will not be running on VMware and they are not going to support. No, actually they will support and it's not different between physical and virtualization. That's the fun you hear from a lot of vendors and competitors who don't want it to be replaced. And again, virtualization, no surprises. That's a great advice. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. This is SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage with West Pharmaceuticals, with David Fulia breaking it down. We'll be right back. We love hearing from customers and we'll hopefully hear from more later. Stay tuned, keep watching. We'll be right back after this short break.