 Our next guest is Ganesh Rahad Krishnan, who is the CEO of Worfdale Technologies. Worfdale is one of the leading SAP integrators, infrastructure integrators on the planet, and we're going to talk to Ganesh. Welcome to theCUBE. Welcome. Great to have you here. So, Worfdale, we were talking off camera, Ganesh. You were talking about how you guys really focus on delivering those high availability, mission critical applications, right around SAP. You're 100% focused on SAP, is that correct? That is correct. So you must love this show. Definitely. This has been a great show. In fact, we as a company were in business for the past 10 years, and we had been one of the biggest integration partner for SAP and EMC, and that is what preliminarily we do in the industry. So, when you talk about integration partners, you're talking about taking infrastructure, applying it to mission critical applications, whether it's supply chain, ERP, et cetera, and then making it even more robust, is that right? What's your essential value proposition? Basically, our value proposition comes in because within an SAP, SAP is a very complex application, and when it is being implemented inside a data center, inside an infrastructure, it is, multiple technologies has to be stitched together. We call it different technologies like EMC, as storage, Cisco, as network, and other technology server. We try to put them in order so that it can be optimally operating within an SAP environment. So, you've got complexity all through the stack. You've got complexity at the infrastructure. You've got complexity at the application. Now, you've got an exploding complexity at the device level, and you're talking about attacking that infrastructure layer, correct? That is absolutely right. So, how do you do that? Basically, we go through the entire stack within an infrastructure because when you have to run SAP, the fundamental thing what people need to understand is storage, the backend storage. If you do not place the data in a proper location, the performance is going to really stagger, and that is one of the major partnership we have done with EMC in the past years. So, customers buy like a Porsche. They buy an EMC equipment. If they don't get it configured right, it will perform terribly. So, that is one of our major thing that we concentrate on. And not only that, it's not just the customer data center, but it is also their disaster recovery. Their high availability is very, very critical, and that is one of our other major initiatives we do with an infrastructure. So, there's a lot of talk these days about a single logical block of infrastructure. Some people call it converged infrastructure. You know, obviously the EMC's V block. First of all, is that something that you're using, and what does it do for the complexity equation? Sure, since V block was announced as a joint initiative between EMC, VMware, and Cisco, we had been chosen as one of their partners, and we are part of SAP Cloud Advisory Council. We had been deploying V block for SAP. We had been doing multiple proof of concept for customers. The major advantage, customer gain a benefit with V block, it is complete infrastructure put together, and it is like a prefabricated hardware and network, everything combined, which help benefit customers to get those systems up and running faster. Ganesh, a question that I have for you is, and this has been coming up as this idea of delivering on promises. SAP's changing their environment. They're dealing in a multi-vendor environment. They've been open. That's clearly an ecosystem strategy for SAP, unlike Oracle, which is fully integrated. SAP has this open strategy. So what are you seeing from your perspective around the new SAP, because they are dealing with the big companies like EMC, who have a huge presence in these big enterprises. What are some of the new challenges, and what are the new opportunities that you see? Basically, SAP has come a long way since we had been seeing SAP for the past 20 years, and with the new products, new technology, even though there are more complexity, SAP has really worked hard to make it simpler for customers with all their new features, like an enhancement pack, rather than doing a full upgrade, or trying to come out with some landscape management tools which can help enable customers to do system refreshes easier, and also to help customers transition or migrate their systems into their new areas like cloud computing. In fact, their business analytics is something which is going to be really helpful for customers. Moving into cloud can help save a lot of cost because of the elasticity and the scalability they get within a cloud infrastructure. We've been hearing in the keynote around this, delivering on promises, increases trust, increases loyalty, increases employee satisfaction. EMC world, the sizzle was big data, but the stake was, as Dave and I were talking about, is the services angle. There's a services explosion going on, both from a delivery of services and also offering services via the cloud. How is the role of services in all of this make sense? Because obviously EMC has VCE and all these new integration points, it kind of changes the definition of services. So when you talk to CIOs out there, they have to look at two services from two angles. One, people who deliver services to them, and then the services that they have to then deliver to their customers. What's changing in that landscape? Basically, what we feel in the market when we speak to the CIOs, we see that there is a great opportunity and there is a lot of improvements a customer can gain out of this cloud computing and SAP coming out and really certifying this cloud computing is going to enable customers to really utilize unused resources which they primarily have within their data centers, which can be eliminated. Like for example, the non-production systems in a typical SAP landscape, you could see that if there are 15 production systems, there are about 80 to 85 non-production systems. Now, even if the customer have the worry in terms of security of not moving their production system, they can extend their network into a virtual private cloud whereby putting all their non-productions into a cloud which can help customers save a lot because non-production development test trainings are not being used from evening 5 p.m. till the next day morning. So those resources as pay as you go model is going to do a lot of cost reduction within SAP data centers. On the services side, Jim Snobby, the CEO, was on here yesterday and we were talking and we were talking about how he handles partners like EMC and he highlighted the notion of best practices and he mentioned the statistic, I think Dave was like, I don't know, a big number of best practices that have accumulated over the years and that these are essentially becoming prefabricated opportunities to literally lock those in as opportunity services. The role of best practices we're mostly more of a reference architecture, how is the role of best practices changing on the services side? Meaning, if there's best practices out there and they can be harnessed either on demand or with mobile, how does that change that edge scenario with mobility and so on? Because if they can be tapped as a resource rather than some case study, what can you share with us kind of how you see that market, I mean, is it going to be like libraries of best practices that you can just use and is that going to be integrated into the software world? Basically, as we all understood, no single SAP customer is having a typical implementation or installations. So every SAP customer differ slightly from one customer to the other. That being said, over all these years a lot of best practices has been put together but it is not so that it has been implemented in every customer's sites. Now, with all these best practices going to get harnessed together into the prefabricated as with the VBlock kind of technologies and also EMC has partnered up with other players in the industry for tools which can help enable them to deliver a better product for customers so the customer do not need to spend a lot of time investigating how to make SAP runs better within their organization rather than they can concentrate on how to improve their businesses within their company. You know, Ganesh, last year we didn't have a lot of proof points with the whole VBlock and SAP. It was early days, we have a couple but it wasn't an overwhelming number of proof points. Can you share with us some proof points? Do you have any that you can convey? Yes, yes, sir, definitely. In fact, as I referred earlier, we had been one of the chosen partners by EMC, VMware and Cisco for running these VBlocks and we had been doing this for the past one year and we had done pretty much for five customers in the industry right now. One customer is out, very big customer out in California. We have a customer right out on the floor, like CAC. We did a proof of concept for SAP on HR and we have done for a very big Cisco retailer called Vescon and the most important thing we have done right now is the biggest implementation which is going to take place for Columbia Sportswear out in the West Coast. We have done their blueprinting and we are testing their proof of concept. In fact, it is not just, we are using EMC, VMware and Cisco. We also use some additional products which can help enable them to do a complete landscape copy within minutes. So you're largely vendor agnostic? We are vendor, yes. And but obviously you're talking about VCE and VBlock. It's kind of unique in the industry, right? I mean there's, I've said before, to me it's a two horse race. John, we talked about this, HP and VCE are really going after this opportunity of converged infrastructure. But it somewhat changes that position of being a platform agnostic given that you've got a value proposition that is somewhat unique, doesn't it? Absolutely, I totally agree with you. In fact, we had been given the opportunity as Warfadel Technologies to develop the best practices to put SAP on top of VBlocks and we had been currently working on it to deliver those best practices so that customers can take additional advantages rather than configuring SAP on their own. Are application heads going to buy into this? I mean a lot of the application heads I talk to, they don't want to mess with the application, they just want it to run fast, they want it to be highly available. You know, let cost be somebody else's problem. Are they buying into this notion of this logical block of infrastructure to support their applications? Is there still some friction there? What's your angle on that? Definitely, because VBlock, the biggest advantage people are going to have is with reference to private cloud, it is a very easier transition for customers to get to private cloud. Now, with VBlock being prefabricated and it is already there, customers can take real good advantage in terms of not only scalability, which they had been gaining with the virtualization technology, but they're also going to gain elasticity. That factor is going to help a lot and people can do a lot of, if they go into a private cloud with a single dashboard, they can control all the factors. That is the major advantage right now people have been suffering to control storage, to control their servers as well as their virtualization component. Now, VBlock is giving that opportunity to have a single interface to do that. And they are also working more to integrate like schedulers and backups and other factors like a push button to do a DR. So, Ganesh, I got a question here from somebody on Twitter and I wonder if they could get your perspectives. VBlock in many regards is simplifying the infrastructure, right, I mean we can agree on that. That is correct. Okay, so the question from somebody in the audience is complexity in an SAP context is a synonym for billable hours. You're in the systems integration business. And then people have made billions off of SAP complexity. Curious to see how SAP's ecosystem will react on this notion of simplicity. So, how do you feel about that? Definitely, I feel more confident that this technology is going to help customers as I said earlier. It is going to make things simple because they have a lot of templates which people can deliver systems. Basically I'm talking about provisioning and SAP systems. Today, customers feel it really hard to provision a system. But whereas in a VBlock, that has been made very, very simple. Most importantly, as I pointed out earlier, a lot of resources within an infrastructure is being not utilized properly. That being said, if you can use test systems or sandbox systems, those resources in the nightly times of leveraging to create additional application servers on the fly during the night times which can be retired in the morning before other people can come in which can leverage to run your batch processes and other processes more faster and within their SLA time. We're not worried about lost revenue to your business. This whole simplification, it's not going to, you're not looking at that as a lost revenue opportunity. No, this is not going to be a lost revenue. It is going to be an added advantage for customers. Do you think some system integrators and services companies will look at it as lost revenue because they're living off of SAP complexity or do you feel like that's just an old outdated 1990s model? Not really because every time a new technology is being introduced in the market, it's always that technology integration companies get new opportunities because the complexity is always remains the same. Whether we are talking VBlock, whether we are talking, because it's not just the VBlock. VBlock provides you the compute, it provides the network and it provides the storage at the back end but still you have application complexity which still need to be managed. Kinesh, the vision that they're putting forth out here in SAP Sapphire in Orlando in 2011 is mobility in memory, actually speed, reach with mobility and then end to end processes kind of their core messages. One of the things that we dug out at EMC World, Dave and I was that there's some downstream impacts to this as they say the value chain of the businesses. Customer support and disaster recovery are kind of like those other things like, oh yeah, big vision, cloud, mobiles, great stuff but ultimately there's some other meat and potatoes stuff that goes on like, hey okay, does this change my customer service equation? Does this change my disaster recovery equation? Do you have any angles on those two points and how the delivery of using mobile and cloud changes the customer support angle and also more importantly the disaster recovery? Because the new data sets out there, all the new data, I mean we got Avon that uses an example, 6,000 people throwing more data into the system in real time, that changes the game on backup and recovery, disaster recovery and customer support. What's your angle on those two points? Yeah, that's a very good question. I really appreciate you asking that question. Definitely, the moment customers come into virtualization world, I call it like they're going to deal with a file, no longer it is a block. The moment it is a file, you can easily move around. That gave the simplicity within a V block environment to easily do a disaster recovery. That means you can move from point A to point B seamlessly with a push button. Again, we have to understand that we are dealing with systems, which are on an x86, we are talking about mid-medium high customers can take a lot of advantages with these new technologies and what is going to happen with cloud if customers are moving in? Definitely, there are certain things which customers have to look into it, like backups are going to be different because currently to the international standards whatever the requirements of country-based like SEC or Saban Oxley, they have to keep those tapes externally. Those are all going to be slightly different, but the benefit at the end is going to be what customers are looking at. The CIOs of companies are really trying to look what, how to take advantage of this to reduce cost. With this current economy, it is going to definitely help data centers or companies to take advantage of these new abilities like particularly on the mobility computing. Now, with that being said, customers can access these systems from anywhere. Now, those complexity what they have today from external world to access those systems through a VPN, secured VPN, all those stuff is still going to exist in cloud, but it is going to be made simple. Are you just saying because of the file, the move from block to file essentially changes the game on the operational and technical architecture? Absolutely. And that will change the game on the delivery side, service side, on customer service because they can get stuff faster to the edge and on the backup side, disaster recovery side because they can deploy new techniques, is that what you're saying? That is absolutely right because I just wanted to share to the customers, to the viewers about disaster recovery. Think about a game change in a disaster recovery. Today, customers, SAP customers are managing a complete disaster recovery site. Think about with this new cloud computing coming into play, how about a customer moving their disaster recovery into a cloud? That being said, the storage replication will be happening from their on-premise primary data center to a cloud provider, but all the systems what is required for them to bring up a disaster recovery, those systems can be configured and it can be kept down, it can be shut down. Because of a pay-as-you-go model, these disaster recovery systems do not need to wait and customer do not need to incur those expenses. During a testing phase or during the real DR scenario, they can step up and they can bring up these systems according to whatever the primary system requirements are because of the scalability. Well, this cloud, the cloud disaster recovery, first of all, I love that vision, but there are issues in the news today, we're hearing, you know, we're reporting that 99% of Android phones leak secret account credentials. Basically, the majority of Google and Android operating systems are vulnerable techs that allow people to steal information. And we heard Jim Snabe say on stage at the keynote that they are absolutely hyper-focused on not letting that thing out. Now, when you get into the moving stuff in the cloud, can you just share, obviously this, you got to protect that. How do you view that? And you got to answer and the critics are going to come out of the woodwork and say, you know, Cloud's not ready for prime time. So just address that, because that's what's on everyone's mind right now. Good question, that's a good one. Actually, basically, that hackers are still going to be getting more and more smarter. We all understand that cloud providers are really working very, very hard to protect going forward. In fact, there was a survey done by research firms that clearly states if typical data centers, their network security, when they surveyed 98% of the companies, I'm talking about ACP customers, enterprise customers, lack true network security. They do not carry a good backplane which can stop these hackers to come in. So that being said, a cloud providers, because they have to go through all those certification requirements. And today, federal government of U.S. has decided or running already things on the cloud. With that being said, they are working very hard. They are protecting the backplane much better from hackers attack, but these kinds of incidents are we going to see. But to answer your question directly, this is not just going to be in a public cloud. In a public cloud, people are going to create a virtual private cloud. It is a VPC, which is going to be protected. It is going to be your extended network into a virtual private cloud. I think that can help secure these kind of problems. It's a great conversation. I mean, this disaster recovery day, we've talked about this. I mean, it's one of those things that it's in between the toes, details that we say, but it's really mission critical. Well, Ganesh's point is that a cloud service provider is going to have better practices than many, let's say, for instance, small or even mid-sized businesses. That is a fundamental premise. There's a flip side of that. Of course, one of the evil twins of the cloud is obviously security. And so we've got to, as an industry, and we heard Pat Gelsinger talk about this, design, look at new ways of designing security in. But I agree with you. I know that as a small company, we look to a cloud service providers and we see some of the security practices they have. They're much better than what we could do on our own. So I think that's a point well taken. In fact, EMC, I just want to share the last point. EMC, as a product company, had been working pretty hard. And one of their major thing is their acquired RSA. And since their acquisition of RSA, they had been working pretty hard to harness these data to be more secure. So people can do encryption on these data going forward. Those things are also happening at the same time. I just want to share that. We're here with Ganesh Rahad Krishnan, who is the CEO of Warfdale Technologies, a big infrastructure systems integrator. Ganesh, it was great to have you on. Thanks for sharing your perspectives. Good luck with the new SAP initiatives. Looks like you guys are blazing new trails. And thanks again for coming on theCUBE. Sure, thank you. Thank you.