 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018, brought to you by NetApp. Welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin. We are with Keith Townsend. We are in Orlando in the NetApp booth at SAP Sapphire 2018, joined by the CIO of NetApp, Bill Miller. Bill, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, great to be here, really appreciate it. So NetApp, 26 year old company, you guys have been on a big transformation journey. Give us some nuggets of NetApp's transformation story. Yeah, it's really a fascinating story and it all centered around the customer. And going back a couple of years, when we realized the story was evolving from a storage story and a storage history to a data, a data-centric story going forward. We spent a lot of time listening to our customers. We listened to them in briefing center meetings. We listened to them through strategic customer account sessions, and we really were drawn to this notion of providing outcomes for our customers rather than providing storage, long-term storage, like all other appliances, ironically, in the name of the company, and a very well-established respective company network appliance. It was not going to be about appliances in the future. It was going to be about data management and leveraging the value of that data for our customers. So our transformation was about bringing that journey to life and giving customers choice, giving our customers choice, choice around where their data resides and how they utilize that data and how they leverage that data for their customers. So as we listened and we kind of absorbed the impact of this, it became clear that for the foreseeable future, we were going to live in a hybrid cloud world. And really what I mean by that is our large established customers were going to have very consequential private cloud data centers for a long time to come. We had very large complex applications that serve their customer communities. They weren't going to be able to pick up those large applications and move them quickly to the cloud. So they were going to run in high intensity, private cloud, very efficient data centers. But at the same time, they were looking to transform digitally, to go in this digital transformation journey. And the vast majority of them wanted to lean in to the hyperscalar clouds, the cloud suppliers and build their future strategic applications in the cloud. And it became clear to us that their data was now going to be bifurcated. It was going to reside in their on-prem facilities but critical, mission critical and advantageous data was also going to sit out there in the hyperscalar cloud and a company like NetApp could build this data fabric to connect them seamlessly so that the customers have choice. I mean, that's really what was behind the initiatives to transform NetApp. So as we talk about that transformation, NetApp identified the opportunity. Yes. Identified, looked at the product portfolio, looked at the gaps. Right, right. Identified where they needed to go. Right. NetApp, the company needed to go to a digital transformation itself. Yeah. So as an SAP customer, as a NetApp customer. That's right. As the person responsible for enabling developers, application teams, product teams to execute on that digital transformation. Right, right. What were some of the challenges, lessons learned as the CIO of NetApp that you experienced? It's an awesome question. Let me, you kind of went from, we're going to transform for our customers to what I did to, or my teams and myself did to enable that. There's a middle step, which is all of our business partners in the company. You know, whether that's finance or sales or marketing, having to realign their business processes to this new need. So let me give you an example on the sales, the go-to-market function. You know, we call this a go-to-market, a go-to-market motion. You know, how you sell. Well, if you're selling an appliance, you know, a piece of hardware with some software with it, that's one very well-defined and familiar motion. If you're going to sell software solutions, if you're going to sell advanced professional services that advise our customers on how to leverage data, those are very different motions that you have to enable to be successful. So what that means is taking that set of business processes that are unfamiliar to us. You know, when a customer wants to buy our products, want to pay as you go, a consumption model, rather than a capitalization acquisition, that's a whole different set of processes we have to put in place behind the scenes. Financial processes, legal processes, and of course, IT systems. So it started with the business functions, figuring out how they were going to transform their workflows. And then IT had to come in underneath and say, do we have the systems, the tools, the platforms, like SAP and other partner-provided platforms, to enable that and make those workflows come to life? So it was really a partnership across the whole enterprise. And if you really listen to our CEO, George Curian, George will tell you, this transformation affected every single employee and every single leader in the corporation. It was a major change for us to figure out, you know, how are you going to take a business steaming in this direction and turn them 45 degrees on a dime and quickly embrace those new processes and mobilize them through new systems, tools, and platforms? So this was a wholesale change in the corporate. I mean, it was a burn the ships model. We're never going back. This is the new way of doing business for NetApp. Very exciting. And at the beginning, a daunting journey. What's the lesson that? We had Dave Hitz on theCUBE during NetApp Insight last year. And one of the things that he said, he had to come in and say, and tell the on tap engineers, on tap in the cloud is OK. We're NetApp and we can burn down what we've done before and do it again and we'll make that journey. So it's enlightening to hear that NetApp was willing to burn down the old stuff to build the new. So as we talk about that new, what are the major drivers? As you're talking to other CIOs, I'm sure the sales team wants more of your time than you can give. And as you're- Very perceptive. Very perceptive. You're talking to CIOs. What is that conversation? Like what are they, what jewels are they trying to get out of you? So, we spent a lot of time with our customers. One of the enjoyable parts of my job is my customers are my peers. Our customers are my peers. So I could spend a lot of time looking at what's on their agenda. They're driven by two passions almost globally and consistently across the industry. They're driven by a desire to move to the cloud, to move to the cloud aggressively for flexibility, to take advantage of these new marketplaces that the hyperscalers are offered. Hyperscalers and their partners. But if you come out to our home base in Silicon Valley, what you see, all the startup companies are being designed in the cloud functionality. So that's where a lot of the new R&D and the new IP is being created. So my peers want to invest more heavily in the cloud. And the second thing they want to do is enable digital transformation, real digital transformation. How do they monetize the wealth of the data that they've acquired through their relationships with their customers? And then how do they leverage that for their customer benefit? That's what digital transformation really means to CIOs. And how do I engage in the cloud to do that? So when we looked at that, we said, okay, the story's about data. It's digital transformation around data and it's enabling that cloud journey for our customers. Add a rate of consumption that's acceptable and digestible to them. Because every customer has a different rate of motion to the cloud and depending on their industry type and their degree of risk and enthusiasm to embrace change, they're in different places. So we had to be very flexible in guiding different customers in different industries to that cloud database journey. And so that's why we have to spend an awful lot of time listening to our customers to help them do that. Did you find during this time where, not only are you having to burn some ships down and transform yourself while still transacting business in a competitive way? That's right, exactly right. Did you find customers going, all right, so NetApp's talking about data is key, data fabric, are you going away from storage? How, did you find that was a question that was commonly asked and if so, how are they responding now to NetApp's transformation? That's a great question. Let me get back to that as NetApp going away from storage and it's something both of you said. This journey of transformation, you can do transformation a number of ways, but the two common ways are I do it and I'm done. In other words, I get through the fiery pit and I'm on the other side, I'm like, wow, I'm glad that's over, okay? That's not the nature of our company. It is a, what George would call it, a culture of transformation, right? It's about being willing to change directions, we need to change direction and go in this dynamic world. Based on the customers, what they think, not what as a company NetApp. And we're in one of the most dynamic areas of high tech when you look at data and you look at the cloud and the solution. So we realize it's not over, we haven't transformed and we're done. We're in transformation 2.0, which is the whole next generation and most of our leadership team is very comfortable with the discomfort associated with continually transforming ourselves. Comfortably uncomfortable. Yeah, and I think it takes a certain kind of person to lead in our company and you have to be bold. You have to be bold and want to do that, okay? So George gave some emotional examples last year of data-driven capability in order to make these transformations. NetApp itself has to be driven by data. That's right. Why are some of the key capabilities as a CIO that you've given the business to be data-driven? George can't make these decisions unless he has data. What new capability has NetApp provided George? I'll give you an example, sitting here at this wonderful SAP conference. We rolled out SAP C4C Hybris this past year, a big journey for us. We were on a separate platform. We knew we needed to build these new workflows into our day-to-day processes. And as we thought about what potential solutions would be to kind of break the mold from where we were and move forward, we really liked the SAP HANA platform. We think the HANA platform, very dynamic, in-memory high-performance computing platform that's built on a NetApp framework, right? It's a NetApp high-performance infrastructure with an in-memory processing capability that's second to none in my opinion. So we looked at data availability, reporting insights that we could get and the commitment from our partners to continue to evolve in insights. So you hear about Leonardo here and some of the AI and machine learning platforms that are being developed. We felt like that HANA platform would give us a lot of flexibility in the future to be data-driven, to pull data and to do it fast and dynamically to help our business make the right decisions going forward. I'm curious as we finish up here, how influential is NetApp's transformation? And you're right, it's a journey, right? It's when you're going to get to a destination, oh, and now we're in intelligent enterprise, if only. How impactful and influential has NetApp's transformation been on really continuing to establish NetApp's relevance in your customer base? Is that, have you seen that make deals happen because look what they've done? Yeah, a couple of things I'll say to that. First of all, customers admire companies that are bold and that really want to lean into technology and make change. So our journey of transformation is absolutely a fascinating one for our customers. They feel like if you're willing to do that, if you're willing to change dynamically on the behalf of your customers, we got a lot more confidence that you're serious about what you're doing and you're committed to the future. So number one, they love, number two, they just want to know how to transform themselves. So any nuggets they can take away from our journey and reuse and position in their business for future success is much appreciated. And then the third thing I would say, and it gets back to an earlier question you asked, as we give them more choices, we give them a choice to either advance the current data center with high performing flash or build a really cost effective, high performing private cloud with converged infrastructure or really venture out into that digital transformative space of the hyperscalers. We're giving them choice every day. So we're not afraid to offer them data management solutions in all three of those environments and not only choice by going out to a hyperscaler and AWS or an Azure or a Google cloud platform, but to be able to choose multiple cloud supplier platforms. So they can put some workloads in Azure, some workloads in GCP and get a confident feeling that NetApp's going to be there for them in any of those platforms and any of those configurations. They really feel more confident when they hear that story. And I would argue to some degree, they're more likely to buy our traditional storage if they feel confident of our future vision in the enablement to allow them to succeed with that future vision. So it's been well received at that level. NetApp bold, I love it, Bill. I think we are. Thanks so much for stopping by and now you're a CUBE alumni, so congratulations. Well, thank you and I hope to come back sometime. Absolutely, we'd love to have you back. Thank you for watching the CUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and the NetApp booth at SAP Staffire 2018. Thanks for watching.