 All right great, so Blake and Volker come on in. Good to see you guys, thanks for coming on. Volker, Dave Vellante, pleasure to meet you. Dave, Blake, you all must meet you. Pleasure to meet you, grab a seat, gentlemen. And welcome, this is theCUBE, this is our mobile studio where we capture knowledge and share it with our audience. We've got a big audience out there. Thanks you all for watching. This is Dave Vellante and we're live here at SAP Sapphire. So far the show going well for you guys? What's happening out there? Tremendous amount of activity, just a lot of interest in many different areas. I mean, just came off of EMC World last week, Dave. And so the buzz is transferred over here to Sapphire. It's all about cloud computing and big data analytics. Couldn't be more excited. Yeah, we were there at EMC World and yeah, big data meets cloud was the big theme. Here you're hearing a lot about analytics, in-memory databases and simplicity. Of course, SAP has a base of customers that's very large and not necessarily known as we were just talking to Reiner Zenow about its simplicity, but they're working hard on that. And now EMC is obviously a partner of SAPs. Well, let's start with what you guys, Blake, are doing here at the event. What's your big push here? So as many people may know or not know, EMC's had a long-term relationship with SAP close to 15, almost 18 years of deep engineering co-innovation with SAP. And the reality is what our customers are asking us now to do more than ever is to really integrate our product sets with SAP in terms of providing services. The biggest challenges that we're seeing are around database management, performance management, change management, and the attributes associated with the cloud solve a lot of these issues. One of our clear partners who've been out in front and we've been working very closely with Secure 24 has been a long-term partner with EMC as well, providing services as a service provider to the marketplace. Volker Straub's been out in front in terms of leading a lot of that co-innovation with us, as well as SAP, and maybe you could talk a little bit about your confidence. Now you guys are a big customer of SAP as well. We had Tony Pagli Rulon earlier talking about, from a consumption standpoint, so you're firing on all cylinders here with that. But Volker, tell us about Secure 24. You guys are a web hosting company, right? Traditionally, but also I would consider you more of a cloud provider now. Is that right? It's right, yes. I wouldn't consider us a web hosting provider. If you look at Secure 24, we used to provide enterprise hosting solutions around SAP for clients and Blake alluded to it. I mean, specifically over the last few years, migrating more and more into the cloud, providing specifically private cloud computing services around SAP, I think is a big push here at the show fast. Yeah, so we talked to Tony Pagli about the EMC's journey to the private cloud. Now, EMC is ahead of most companies in terms of that journey. But last year at EMC World, we saw the notion of the journey the private cloud starts here, right? And a lot of customers I talked to were saying, ah, we just getting started on that journey. This year was a little different. The discussion was, yeah, we were well down the path of the private cloud, really as measured by the degree they've virtualized their applications and what some call their crapplications. But now they're looking at this hybrid notion, which is really where you guys come in. Is that, you've seen a lot of demand for that? A lot, absolutely. If you look at the development and specifically at the partnership here we have with EMC, and EMC provides a tremendous asset to us, specifically around their technology and the push into the private cloud. We have another alliance here with Cisco, and if you look at the VC alliance, you know, having VMware part of the mix, having Cisco and EMC, they are great providers for us. And as you alluded to, they are, I think, the leader in that cloud-enabling space. And we as a hosting provider and a managed cloud provider, you know, we bundle those services together and provide like a service-leveled agreement around that to our clients. One of the channel pathways, the marketing pathways that you use, it's got to be different than traditional belly-to-bellies, you know, knocking on doors. It is quite different. Certainly we have a direct sales force, but a lot of our business, almost 50% of our business comes through system integrators. System integrators like Deloitte, you know, they go out and sell projects and they need the flexibility of a cloud provider on the back end, helping them, you know, to carve out dev systems and sandboxes because they have projects coming up and providing complex production systems. Our cloud offering ties right into that. So we work a lot with system integrators and they are our channel, you know, for selling private cloud services. Moga, what about this notion of an app store? I hear a lot of CIOs talking about the metaphor of an app store and actually putting in their own app store. Are you seeing a demand for that within your customer base? Absolutely, you know, we are developing that, but you know, there are certain limitations around SAP because SAP has very restrictive license key models and you can provide services and applications to the clients where they subscribe to. So we are developing a model right now with SAP where we can put something together and provide applications for clients to try. We are not there yet, but we are high-speed developing that right now. So I'm inferring from your earlier comments that you mentioned Cisco and VCE, are you actually utilizing their services, the Vblock, for example? Absolutely, so we, you know, our alliance with Cisco as well as with EMC and VMware, so we bundle those services together and you know, if you look at a private cloud provider like us, what the capabilities we have, we can, instead of a client going out and buying a huge Vblock, which might be much too expensive for an SMB client, you know, we can carve that in little pieces and provide that enterprise solution to smaller clients or mid-sized clients and they don't need to go out and need to make that investment. So we make that investment for them and we can carve it out and provide that like in slices to them. So we're talking about Vblock and Vblock is a logical chunk of infrastructure that includes storage and networking and compute that goes in and supports applications across the portfolio. Some of the audience may not know this and whereas previously we would buy compute and storage and networking in silos and you'd have a storage admin and a server admin and a network admin, and you still may have those admins today but you've essentially got this block of infrastructure which is more consistent with cloud, right? I mean, really the cloud you think of abstractions to think of infrastructure not in silos, you think about infrastructure in this logical block and is that, first of all, is that correct? And how is that changing the way in which you manage your operations? What it ends up doing for our clients, we can provide much more flexibility to them. So look at an example, every SAP client runs a month in process, for example. So the demands they have, hardware resource demands, CPU resource demands, they have at the end of the month, might be much higher than they are during the month. So consider that in a Vblock situation, we can provide them the scalability on demand. So they need more resources at the month and we can provide that. They need less during the month so we can cut the cost down and can provide that efficiency and that utility model, what they always bring into the cloud computing model is the utility building model that's something we provide to our clients. So Blake, talk about why SAP? A lot of your focus, obviously, is SAP. What is it about SAP that's so attractive to SAP? Pure on simple, Dave. They're the monster of the midway, right? I mean, when you take a look at what SAP does historically is where they're moving to the future, right? It's really managing a company, whether it's a large enterprise company like a Merck, a Pfizer, a Honeywell, right? They're crown jewels or whether it's a small to medium-sized business, right? But with employees less than 50, right? This runs, this is the bowels of their business. It's very important to them in terms of how they run their business and we're very confident as we start to solve these problems for customers, right? We're going to be able to provide great value to them and help to move the ball significantly. And if you look at SAP, they own what they say at the last statistics, 43% of the ERP market. So I agree, it's the big company out there who owns almost like 50% of the market. Yeah, and we hear a lot from SAP about things like mobility, obviously the side-base acquisition and sort of moving beyond the traditional market. Even they announced EPM 10 today and the big themes there, performance management beyond the traditional financial analytics. But let's face it, the majority of SAP's business is that legacy traditional business. They're getting most of their business out of their existing customer base, which by the way is true for most large companies, right? We all know, a salesperson will tell you, we are getting more business out of our existing customers. We've got to treat them really well. And I think SAP does a really good job with that. So, but having said that, a lot of the messaging that we're hearing is around things like on demand. We just had the head of the business by design unit on. You hear a lot about mobility. Do you see that as a near-term opportunity for you or is that more mid to long-term? Well, we see a lot of products around SAP, like business object. We see a huge push towards business object. We see a huge push towards BI. We have many legacy clients who still run whatever 4.6, version 4.6 up to ECC to take advantage of the Java stack and all the functionality around that. Absolutely, we see that trend in using just a core financial package and using all the other third-party products. SAP developed now over the years based on that ECC 6.0 platform using much more of those services in our existing client base. What do you guys, as partners of SAP, what do you want to see out of them? What's on their to-do list from your standpoint? What do they need to do better? Well, I think very simply, right, and I think they've done it this year, right, is to really provide a little bit more clarity in terms of their direction, right, and with the acquisition of side-base and some of the direction they're driving around, mobile computing, we're starting to see that shake loose, right, big companies making large acquisitions, it's not easy, right, both in terms of how you message to the market as well as how you start to execute. I also are starting to see some very interesting changes and we hope that they would accelerate is broadening their partner ecosystem around some of their in-memory computing capabilities. This is a very exciting space for us. As you know, Dave's being at EMC World last week as we start to see a convergence of cloud computing as well as big data, we really need large companies like SAP, EMC, VMware, Cisco, we're closely with the service provider market to be able to provide accelerated solutions, differentiated solutions to this marketplace, and we're really starting to see some of that activity take place in there. Blake, that's an interesting point. I mean, we've talked a lot on theCUBE at Wikibon and SiliconANGLE about the partnership vacuum and you take a company like Oracle, which is now sort of gobbling up and going really vertical. It's created a vacuum in the marketplace and we think that SAP is in a perfect position to fill that void. So they've become, I mean, they've always partnered well but they're becoming much more aggressive around the partnerships. Is that a correct perception in your view? Absolutely, right? When you really look at it, you get the best of both worlds. EMC, VMware, Cisco, we're going to take the strengths of our capabilities both in people, processes, as well as technology, and really address this from an infrastructure perspective. But as you start to look as we move through this journey, right, the next couple of phases, really understanding business process change, really understanding the applications and the depth of that integration, there couldn't be a better partner in the marketplace. So Volker, we're going to talk a little bit more about the whole Vblock VCE thing. Obviously, we talked about how it's changed the business and really simplifies the whole infrastructure management. But there's some complexities in that business too. You've got three companies forming this new company and they're hiring like crazy. There's got to be going through some growing pains. How's that all working? Who's throwed you a choke when there's a problem? Talk about that a little bit. Hopefully it's not mine. I think if there's one thing, those three companies did fantastic is building support structure around. And not just the support structure, but also the integrated management tools they have to not, as you said, being able to just manage a UCS platform or the Cisco storage and VMware isolated. No, they develop tools to integrate everything centralized and also do capacity management in a smart way, which is important for us. We need to know when we need to bring in more hardware resources, storage-wise, CPU-wise. So, this is a fantastic job in those management tools. All right, okay, so, all right. Well, we're here talking about SAP partnerships. Volkastrab is with Secure24 and Blake Yule was an alliance manager at EMC. We're talking about the importance of SAP to Secure24 and the EMC Secure24 partnership, which seems to be evolving. Where do you guys see this going? So, we're in this era of sort of private cloud and now it's extending to these hybrid clouds. Where do you see all this going, Volkastrab? Let me give you an answer towards the market. I was excited to hear Cho Choo Chee's keynote speech last week at VMworld and EMCworld, sorry. I get him confused all the time. I call VM where VMworld sometimes, I get it. Yeah, exactly. He talks about that wave of change and how it threatens and disrupts the traditional way of doing IT management. And, you know, he addressed three things. He said there are three pain points around. If you look at an IT budget nowadays, 100%, 73% of our IT budget are just spent on keeping the lights on. 27% are spent on innovation, creating competitive advantage. What that model does for us, we block virtualization, the cloud aspect, is we can go into an organization and lower that to lower than 50% and give that company the flexibility to invest more money into innovation, competitive advantage. I think that's going to change. It's not going to just change the IT infrastructure. I think it's going to change the way we do business. Yeah, that's 70, 30, I call it the CIO dilemma. And it's been that way for a long time. 70% being run the business, 30% being grow the business or transform the business. Mobility has to be a big part of that, doesn't it? As an underpinning of that transformation. And, you know, what are you seeing there? Absolutely. Mobility, I mean, the site-based acquisition of SAP was certainly interesting. What we did at Secure24, we were sitting down thinking, what does it truly mean for us? And how can we provide more comprehensive services around mobility? So what we did in hosting SAP and managing SAP in the cloud, we also adapted services around end user support. So we support a whole bunch of like, you know, BlackBerry infrastructure. We support all the iPhone infrastructure for our clients. So they can, you know, have their SAP on their iPad or on their iPhone and can work mobile. And we support basically the entire nine yards for them. Falker, thank you, Blake. We live in a world of increasing co-opetition these days, right? We're partnerships with various entities is really coming together. And I appreciate you guys coming on theCUBE. Absolutely. And it was good to have you and thanks for sharing your perspectives. Thanks so much. It was my pleasure. Good to meet you both. Have a nice senior day. Thank you. Appreciate it.