 with Bob Kyla of Columbia, Columbia Sports, Bob, welcome. Great to have you inside theCUBE. But yesterday we covered you remotely and we were so good, you know, we saw you last night. We wanted to have a conversation. We got a great audience here. We got a couple thousand people watching live. And we just want to have a conversation about what you guys are doing, what you're seeing at this event, you know, kind of why you're here. We had a lot of fun. We met yesterday, or was it yesterday or the day before? I can't remember, it's been three days. So you're in the trenches with, as a customer of SAP, well, moving the entire system over to SAP. The new SAP, clean sheet of paper almost. What are the, and using virtualization? So, one, tell us a little bit about the company and some of the issues around the tech that you're involved in. Sure. So we are in the midst, as you'd mentioned, migrating from our current ERP system, JD Edwards, today, i-Series over to SAP. So it's a supply chain transformation, essentially transforming the entire business. And from an infrastructure standpoint, Columbia Sportswear already invested heavily in terms of storage with EMC. And we're essentially, 80% virtualized already. So going in, 80% virtualized, yes. There are some applications that are still in the midst of migrating over. Okay, so that's an application number, not a physical server number, right? That is correct, it's an application number. And so, going into the SAP project, we obviously wanted to go with the technologies, with the expertise we had in-house already. Since SAP was going to be new to the business anyways, and we knew that we were going to build talent within, and also bringing talent in from outside, we didn't want to invest that heavily in terms of technology. We wanted to go with technology, number one, what we knew, and what we knew that worked well for us. So that transition with our current environment was relatively easy to make. So essentially, going completely virtualized from our Sandbox Dev Q&A production environment was relatively easy from a technology perspective for us to make. So what's your role at Columbia? So I'm the SAP Basis Manager. So I handle the application basis from the SAP perspective and all the way down. We also have a expertise from a storage perspective, a server and a VM side of things too. So we are a very cohesive group. You say we have as part of your group? That's correct. But is that part of your responsibility? Absolutely, yes. So it's interesting that you've got, you're trying to play this dual role of application and infrastructure. Yes. And a lot of times, especially at events like this, there's not a lot of infrastructure talk. I mean, infrastructure is like the raw material that you need, but putting on your application hat, what's changing in infrastructure and why does infrastructure even matter? Isn't that somebody else's problem? Well, that's a great question. It does because we want to make sure we're able to scale as businesses change, business processes change. We're able to spin up environments on a relatively very quick fashion versus past life where you would have to either have that equipment available or place orders for it, right? So we're able to utilize the technology within the VBlock is what we're running our SAP and our entire infrastructure on, allows us to spin up environments very quick and also be able to scale out if that's needed, right? So for, give you an example, if we are in a position where we're growing and in the past, you would have to acquire more hardware, now we're able to spin up these other environments, essentially push of a button versus business waiting and holding the business from a growing perspective. So VBlock's interesting, it's the single logical block of infrastructure, it's compute, it's storage, it's networking. You put it in, people say it's, EMC says it's cloud optimized. Is it cloud optimized? Yes. What does that mean? So from a cloud optimization perspective, we are, everything's in the cloud, right? So it's a single point of call in terms of if you have issues. In the past, if there was a storage issue, you would have to call a storage vendor. If there was a blade issue, you would have to call the blade vendor and if there's a networking perspective, you would have to call the networking folks, right? That's assuming you could figure out which it was. That's the problem, that's the issue. And actually we ran into that very, the very problem, not knowing where the issue was and we had very critical business, tier two, not tier one, tier two applications that were down and we essentially had the entire group calling the respective vendors. We finally figured out what the issue was, well now we're calling VCE, right, which is managing that infrastructure for us and they know where to route that call because they're all there. So VCEs come through a few name changes, right? There's some growing pains there, there was Acadia and it was a virtual computing environment, sorry, now it's a virtual computing environment. So there is one throat to choke, right? It's not what I call VMware or Cisco or EMC, it's what I call VCE, right? Yes, exactly. You've got a big staff and that's working. I mean, you have issues, support issues, you call a single point of contact, is that right? Exactly, exactly. Which allows us, again, we also take advantage of their center of excellence in Santa Clara and basically what that is, yeah, we've been there, and theCUBE has actually filmed there. Hong Kwek, do you know Hong? Yes. He runs the center of excellence and Ralph Lindenlob I think is, we saw him last night. Okay, okay, yeah, and it's been great because it allows the VCE to really constrain and have the engineers on staff what they're really good at, right? It allows us to help the business, right? So we can constrain the business processes and they can actually help us POC some applications that we're just thinking of or they're coming from the business, right? So we can make sure that things are integrated seamlessly so we're not actually prototyping in our infrastructure and they've got all the labs and they've got all the experts on staff and that's helped us prototype and evaluate the various tools within the VBlock. So you're kind of breaking down some of these stovepipes of infrastructure. Does it change your organization at all or how does it change your organization? Yeah, so from an, yeah, the SAP has changed your organization, right? Also, in a way that it's a new application, it's an unknown, it's the unknown, right? We do have 30 SAP experts on staff full-time that Columbia has, so essentially a Columbia-led project, this SAP project is, and we have about half a dozen or so SAP consultants that are helping us along, making sure we're doing things best practice-wise but at the end of the day, it is a Columbia-led effort and we are going to be the ones that are going to be supporting that application and versus typical implementations where consultants coming in and they're doing the implementation and they do the knowledge transfer and they roll off. Well, we're actually doing it ourselves. We're not really having the consultants in a lot of the configuration for us, so that's different. So that's really changing our business model. There's a lot of experience on that group. Couple hundred years of experience from SAP Respectos there's a lot of different experiences, good and bad that's come together and really helped us, really launched this project and everything's going fairly well. We're on track, everything's green, which is essentially a good sign from... The dashboard side says green. Yes, so it's green. Correct, yes, so that's very important. The requirements are coming in, development is starting to take off. Do you use a formal portfolio management system? We actually don't. Spreadsheets? No, SharePoint, we're using SharePoint, we're using Solution Manager for all of our document management. Okay, so that works for you. That works very well, so all of our KDDs, our BPDs, all those documents are all stored within Solution Manager and we're able to prove them and what have you within there. We're also taking advantage of the whole charm, change management within Solution Manager as well. The ticketing system is also integrated with our remedy environment, which we do today for help desk tickets, things like that kicks out a ticket to remedy and also goes to SAP if there's SAP particular issues. Paul, what do you make of all the messaging that SAP is putting forth today? A lot of HANA and memory and mobility are some of the two big things. Do those resonate with you as an IT practitioner? Are they near-term fundamental tactical to your business or are you still sort of in the experimental stage? We are still in the experimental phase, but we want to keep that in mind as we grow, right? Meaning that if there are other pieces within SAP that may make the Columbia vision, then we want to keep that in the back of our minds as we grow within the V-Block environment. There's talks at the keynote that HANA, basically with an ERP, it's going to start supporting by 2014, I believe, was a timeframe. So we're still ways out from that. By then we should be completely live globally, and so we're able to at least swap out the technology we have in our V-Block if we make that decision. So it's not like a complete rip and replace, right? So we'll be able to kind of take advantage of the infrastructure that we have today. What are your concerns about sort of virtualizing some of your mission-critical or business-critical applications? Were there concerns around that? Were there performance or just putting in another layer? Was there some discussion that went on? Absolutely. Was it heated? An FW, we're not doing that, or was it, so wait a minute, how do we make sure? Take us inside and share that, because there's a lot of practitioners out there that we talk to have a concern about putting that extra layer in front of their app or on top of their systems and in between the system and the application. I want the raw hardware. You're absolutely right, and you hit it right there. Yeah, it was very vocal, and because it was relatively new with, from that SAP ERP perspective, right? And especially folks that weren't familiar with VMware. So with the talent that came on board when we said virtualization SAP, they're like, whoa, why? I've never seen it, never seen it done. It's just folks experience and not the exposure around it. From a technology perspective, this is actually my second company that I worked at that we virtualized. So I knew it worked. And also we've got folks internally that knew it worked. So it was really trying to make sure that we talked to other customers and we built a case around the, with the help of SAP and EMC to provide the business to make sure that they're at ease. And that was actually the kicker right there. They all felt comfortable enough that with all of our expertise and understood there was, it's not an alienated way of implementing ERP solution. And they're happy with it. We were able to prototype it and all that stuff. So it's, yeah, it was challenging, absolutely. Well, all the practitioners have told me it's a big deal that the ISV, in this case SAP, was behind it. And clearly SAP is very embracing of VMware and virtualization. Obviously EMC is, because they own VMware. But not all ISVs are. I mean, we've seen a lot of friction in the Oracle base. Actually, most other, I mean, IBM seems to be very much embracing SAP, Oracle's embracing of Oracle VM. But that's a big issue with a lot of people. So my other question is, what was the business case around virtualization? Was it just efficiency, cost savings, flexibility? What were some of those drivers? Recovery, talk about that a little bit. Yeah, so all the above. Operational expense was obviously the big one. Again, we didn't want to add additional infrastructure bodies if we didn't have to. We had the expertise already internally, right? We already knew that we were going to get, the SAP group was already ramping up in terms of body counts anyways. That was obviously one of them. The other piece of it was, we wanted to go with the technology that we knew. And then that we knew that worked well. We've got, again, 80% of us, 80% of our applications are virtualized. Tier one, tier two applications, all tier three applications are virtualized. Our current ERP system, JD Edwards, doesn't allow us to virtualize it, which was unbelievable from the standpoint of, yeah, we're able to actually virtualize our ERP environment and we're able to scale the footprint of hardware and the actual physical folks that we needed, the talent on staff was relatively small. So, yeah, it's been great from that perspective. And plus, we've got a lot of great support, right? I mean, we continually talk to, with EMC and customers around different experiences and how we can do things more effectively and how we could help them out along and why we made our decision. As peers. Absolutely, that's what it's all about. It's all about networking. It's all about real experiences and it's about sharing those experiences together. That's the founding premise of Wikibon, is that peers talk to peers and get much better information. That's why we love talking to IT practitioners like Bob, we're here with Bob Kyla of Columbia Sportswear, an IT practitioner that is using SAP, using a block, a logical block of infrastructure, in this case, a V-block using virtualization, looking at off into the future, things like HANA and mobility. I would think mobility at some point, given your supply chain comes in, I mean, the whole mobile enterprise, is that getting a lot of discussion? Is it on the roadmap? Yeah, it's definitely getting a lot of discussion. Being here at Sapphire, those are the two buzzwords, mobility and the HANA. Yeah, the memory, right? Yeah, that's the whole buzzwords here. And it's funny, because my director actually had pointed out, hey, what are you hearing about the whole mobility and HANA thing? I'm like, oh, it's pretty big. So I've got a lot of information. Now, this is a brand new implementation. We don't, right now the scope is ERP. But as you know, it's- A lot of the traditional legacy stuff, right? Right, but it's starting, it starts to build up a little bit. You know how that goes, right? The business, can we do this in SAP? Can we do this in SAP? Can we do, yes, we can, but let's take it piecemeal at a time, right? In thinking specifically about your SAP implementation of ERP and the virtualization, and maybe even let's throw in that whole V-block discussion, what, if anything, would you do differently? And what advice would you give your fellow peers if they're thinking about going down this path? I would really, we were fortunate enough that it's a Greenfield implementation, right? So we were starting from scratch. We were migrating from an R3 or an older version of SAP. Now, if any recommendation I can give to customers, I would recommend that you'd want to attack it per module. I wouldn't do a big bang migration. You want to make sure that you're able to scale enough with the various SAP applications one at a time. I highly recommend that. But if you're doing a brand new implementation, then we can definitely share our experiences around that and our learnings around that and what we would do different. Right now, we wouldn't do anything different. I think we've got great talent and great partnerships with customers and what have you that have shared their experiences and it's worked out very well for us. Did you use a third party service provider or a consultant or at the services capabilities of any of the vendors involved, instrumental? They were because we essentially did a bake off with some technologies. We looked at it from a standpoint of, okay, the only new piece of the whole Vblock for us was the compute, right, was the UCS. We already had EMC storage. We already had the VMware for Hyper-V and we had HP blades. So we did the bake off with the HP blades and the UCS blades, essentially. And from what we were getting or not getting out of it was pretty much equal. So it was, everything else was already owned and we already were quite familiar with it. So that was the only bake off that we had was with the compute power and the decision was relatively straightforward. It wasn't totally off the left field type of thing. It was really, really simple to decide. What do you make of these? I think EMC calls improving solutions. IBM calls them red books, right? They're basically either reference architectures or white papers or technical documentations. Here's an actual solution, real world solution that we've deployed, tested. Here's all the best practices. Here's how you configure it. Here's the business impact. Do you use freebies like that? I call them freebies, right? There are services that are sort of lost leaders for the vendor. Are they useful to you as an IT practitioner? Yes, yes. We definitely looked at a lot of the white papers around SAP best practices, virtualization. And how we could utilize HA, DR around those two technologies. And I find them very useful because they're actual real-life experiences versus listening to a sales guy, right? So it's very important that you get those... The web does that. The internet creates democratization of the vendor pitches that really eliminates the fluff. We sort of maybe just touched on it, but I always ask practitioners like yourself, what drives you nuts about vendors? What drives you nuts about vendors? I mean, if you had to give advice to the vendors out there, what would you tell them? Just tell me how it is. Tell me straight up. No surprises. No surprises, yeah. Tell me the why's and tell me why not. And roadmaps around what the plans are. I know it's obviously they make it seem like it could do anything, but let's be realistic and let's share some other experience. What other customers have done it to kind of acquire or attack that solution versus they could do everything? Just tell me the way. Yeah, because at the end of the day, I mean, you guys are savvy. You talk to each other. You're going to get to the truth eventually. You're not going to spend a lot of money until you get to the truth. And it's all about relationships. And if you can build those relationships and that trust, then it's a vested interest for both parties. And I think that's very important. Share the risk. Absolutely. Yeah. All right, Bob Kyler, Columbia Sportswear. Great interview. Thanks for coming back on theCUBE. Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks, guys. It was a pleasure meeting you last night and today. Yeah. Love to have you back. And I'll see you around. Great. Yeah, see you again. Yeah.