 back, this is Dave Vellante and we're here at the EBC of EMC SAP Week and we're here with Dominic Ulyano who's with SAP to bring that angle. This is SiliconAngle.tv's The Cube, our continuous coverage. We go to events, we extract the signal from the noise. Dominic, welcome to the Cube. Thank you very much. Glad to be here. Appreciate you coming on. So talk first about this event. What's SAP's role here? What's your role here? Well, SAP in general sees ourselves in a support role with EMC and VMware, NVCE. My role is to help work with the customers, meet one-on-one, help deliver some keynote presentations. It's been a great experience. So talk about what's going on at SAP. You guys are obviously doing great. The dual CEO thing is working beautifully. Your stock's up, customers are happy. Things are going really great for SAP. Talk about that a little bit. It's really all about innovation with us. Innovating with some new products, innovating with our partners, helping our customers innovate, and it's all coming down to really great results at the end of the day. So SAP, there's no secret, right? SAP's big. It's complex. From an installation standpoint, a lot of people have spent a lot of time and effort getting it to work. And now you see virtualization come into the fold and things are getting simpler. Talk about how your customers are transforming why they're driving you to simplify from an infrastructure standpoint that component of their business. Yeah. So simplification is a great aspect of it. Our customers are asking us point-blank. Make SAP cheaper to run, are on-premise, and make us more agile and more flexible so we can be more responsive to the business. A very good aspect of this is the simplification of the landscape as well. So the customers, the ones that are driving it. And of course SAP can't do this on their own, which is why we've partnered with VMware and EMC and VCE to help get our customers adopted into the new virtual landscapes on X86 using VMware. And really our customers are experiencing great benefits, great TCO, great simplification, and great agility. Can you give some color, add some color to great, can you quantify that in any way or provide any other proof points? Yeah. So typically 75 to 80% of the overall cost of running SAP year to year is operational expenses. So we've seen anywhere between a 14 to 25% reduction in operating costs in just the first year alone by going to a virtualized, converged infrastructure type environment. And how about in terms of, again, I've talked about a lot today, but early on, I mean, we mentioned off camera, this would be our fourth year being at Sapphire with theCUBE. And the first year we were talking about virtualization, we had some CIOs on, and they were like my head of application development doesn't really want to do it. But now the stories are more, we've done it, we bit the bullet, we went, actually it's performing better than our old environment or at least comparably to our own environment. But the big thing is speed to deployment. Can you talk about that a little bit and maybe even help quantify that? Sure. So typically in a traditional environment, deploying SAP using conventional SAP tools took a matter of weeks, whether you're copying a system, whether you're installing a new system. From the time you got the hardware to got it set up to installing SAP took a matter of weeks. The virtualization environment is the enablement layer now that with some automation and orchestration type capabilities from say vCloud director or LVM, we're talking about deploying SAP systems in a matter of hours now. So that the project team can actually do more rapid testing, more agile testing. They can follow an agile project methodology, which is much different than the ASAP methodology. So that's really what's helping customers deploy much faster and really satisfy their team's business requirements. How about the cloud dynamic? Let's talk about that a little bit. A lot of people want to use the public cloud to do test and dev, maybe spin up virtual machines, run an SAP instance, or maybe run a HANA instance on that. What role is the cloud playing in the SAP customer base? So cloud is one of our strategies. We've got four pillars at SAP, IAS, SAS, PAS, and of course the Ariba network. So when you look at a cloud, our cloud strategy has a multifaceted approach. From an infrastructure side, we see customers doing that. So it is driving, but most of the North American customers are still not quite comfortable with the cloud for their production systems and even some of their critical QA and test systems. So they're still right now moving very aggressively to a virtualized private cloud environment and probably cloud down the road will be something they consider. So what's their concern? Well, concern is a lot of it could be FUD, but there's also some things where they want to have better control of their resources. They don't trust the security. There have been some outages that have been publicized with some of the cloud vendors. So it's those types of things. It's just overall comfort level. The second thing is, organizationally, our customers are not quite ready. With converged infrastructure, you'll see that their roles change with the resources. So their technical teams are no longer siloed. With the cloud, it changes even more. So they're just not ready. Let's talk about virtual private cloud. It's more than just virtualization, but let's dig into it a little bit. What makes the private cloud cloud? So really, it comes down to the ability to provision. It comes down to the ability to manage capacity and the ability to be elastic. SAP normally, when we size it, we size it for peak loads. That really, unfortunately, is a paradigm that doesn't allow you to use your hardware most effectively in a traditional environment. In a cloud environment, we now can release those resources when we don't need them and use them somewhere else in the infrastructure. So we get this elastic. The second thing is cloud architectures or private cloud architectures are really meant with provisioning in mind, rapid provisioning. So to provision a server, it's a matter of minutes. To provision storage, it's a matter of seconds. To provision an SAP system on top of that, as you would serve up any application, it could be a matter of hours. That's where you see the advantage of moving to a private cloud infrastructure. So what's SAP's point of view? You guys are generally hardware agnostic. I mean, you work with all the hardware players. You're obviously here at EMC, and you've talked about VCE as partners in VMware, infrastructure players. But generally, SAP, if anybody wants to run on anybody's hardware, you're going to applaud that clearly. But talk specifically about things like, you've got a big install base of Unix. You're seeing x86, HANA runs on x86. Is that a major initiative within SAP? Are you guys more hands-off on that? Are you really trying to get that migration going? So really, it's around what our customers are asking us to help them with. So a lot of our customers are in the middle of a technology refresh or a data center consolidation. They're starting to ask the question, can I run this more cheaply and be more agile? SAP is there to help. So SAP is not driving customers to any particular platform, but we are reacting to our customer base. In addition, we know we can't do it on our own, which is why we've partnered with the market leader and virtualization on x86, which is VMware. So it's really not SAP driving. It's us reacting to the market. So let's talk about HANA a little bit. I mean, it's the hot topic. You can't go to an SAP conference. You hear Hasso and Vishal up talking about it. It's a fascinating topic in memory. Of course, in memory, databases have been around since there's been memory. But now, the costs are coming down where it's getting much more interesting. Talk a little bit about HANA. Talk about the uptake. Talk about what it means in this whole ecosystem. So HANA was designed to run on x86, commodity hardware, essentially. It was designed to be a more scale out. And really, it takes advantage of the new capabilities at the x86 level. So what it's doing is it's transforming businesses. We have customers that run MRP runs. They take 8 to 10 to 12 hours to run. They're seeing HANA being able to run this in a matter of minutes or perhaps seconds. That changes entire business processes. No longer are they waiting for a batch job to finish. They can do more dynamic planning, more dynamic analytics. That's changing their business model. They're becoming much more proactive and being able to react much quickly to their changing environment. We're talking big, fast data here. Absolutely. So what's the role of the ecosystem here? What's EMC doing there with regard to HANA, other partners? What role do they play? Well, they're key because obviously, we're an applications company. We're a software company. And without key participation from EMC, they're in our co-innovation labs, VCEs in our co-innovation lab, VMware's in our co-innovation lab. Without those folks helping us innovate around HANA, we probably wouldn't be near where we are today. All right. So flip side of that is what could they do better? What could EMC, VCE, VMware do better to make your customers' lives easier? Oh, that's a good question. You know, I think helping with a unified set of solutions as we're starting to do now, unified consulting. I think those are the things that really help our customers. Our customers don't want to see separation between infrastructure providers and SAP. They want to see one face to the customer, one approach, one set of best practices. So we're cogent, sort of go-to-market and service model. Sure. Dominic, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for being here. Really a pleasure meeting you. All right. Keep it right there, everybody. We're here at EMC, EBC. We'll be right back. This is Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE.