 The coverage of Sapphire Enverge of the event. We heard Jim Hageman-Snaabe this morning with a big keynote. We heard McDermott yesterday. Very good messaging, very upscale, elegant, you know, SAP Sapphire is quite an event. We're here with two executives from EMC, Sylvie Otten-Solid, who is heavily involved in the EMC and SAP activities. And Andy Citizen, who knows every customer on the planet, I think, and also very much involved in the SAP and application ecosystem. So folks, welcome to the Cube. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Thank you. So I was saying, you know, this event is very upscale, you know, everybody's in suits and it's really quite elegant. We're going to be at EMC World next week, and of course we do VM World every year. They're real technology shows, you know. I wouldn't define them as elegant. They're great shows, but, you know, this is a lot of suits, a lot of talk about wallets, right? What do you, what's your vibe here at the show? You know, what's great is, I don't know if they did some magic and shrinking it, but it is really tight walking through the floor here. There's people everywhere, right? There's no chairs to sit in. There's very, very few spots to stand even. It's very packed. The keynotes are packed, you know, and it's quite impressive. I think that, you know, SAP, you think of, Sylvie, you think of SAP as complex, low, expensive, but that's not what we're hearing now. We're hearing cloud, mobile, speed, personalization. Yeah, more and more customers are requiring, you know, these applications to ensure that they remain agile, that they remain flexible, that their infrastructures are agile and flexible and that they can gain efficiencies. I mean, in a world where, you know, we're all looking at our pockets to make sure that they're full. And, you know, it's very important to ensure that we do have an agile, flexible and efficient infrastructure for them to be able to rely on. You know, EMC got it all started with the whole cloud meets big data messaging, you know, a couple years ago. Actually, we started to talk about on theCUBE, I think three EMC worlds ago, and then, you know, EMC evolved that. And now everybody's talking about it, right? Last year, if you recall, you really didn't hear much about big data. Not here. I mentioned it, you know, 10 or 15 times in this discussion yesterday. Now, Schnabe, not so much today, but he talked about analytics a lot. And that's their big data play. So, Andy, you're starting to see customers make this stuff real, aren't you? I hope we have 30 minutes, because I'm not going to be able to stop. You're starting to see a message you talked about three years ago. You're absolutely right, and it has been proven to be true. What you're going to see from us a lot is transformation. A lot of transformation coming out, and if you look at what's transforming right now, it's the database, right? It's interesting. We all grew up in the 70s and the 80s and 90s with scale off, right? You know, build the big data center, support some of those traditional databases. Now you've got scale out. You've got MapR, you've got Green Plum, you've got MongoDB, all these fully sharded databases. And now we've got HANA, and we have an in-memory database. So how do our customers make the right architectural decisions when it comes to the database? This is a big expense for them. And as they stage, not only what should they do, how should they deal with what use cases and what's the right timing, that's where we're spending a lot of our time right now getting not only our game together, but working with our partners. So people at HANA are crazy. You heard the executive from Clarence today talk about he said, quote, we are blown away by HANA and the impact it's going to have on our productivity. That's quite a testament. Now, I've got to ask you, being with EMC, Snobby said, imagine a world without traditional disk-based databases. Imagine a world where all data is in memory. And now that was sort of a little slight of the oracle, I guess. But as EMC, you've got to be looking at that saying, times are changing and we either got to brace that change, or so what's your response to that? I heard something about the Stone Age in that comment. It was a great line. What was that? Let's share that line with our audience, because we haven't mentioned it today. You know, the Stone Age did not end because it ran out of stones. The disk age won't end because we ran out of disk. It's innovation. And ultimately, I would say it's the decision that matters, right? Ultimately, when you come to analytics, it's the decision, stupid, right? That's really what we all care about. What we're in right now is a period of great technology growth to apply that to analytics. So we're testing out new ways of going about that. But ultimately, we want to get back to where it's simple and automatic, just like an iPad, right? Or those types of technologies. And the comments around disk, this is a great target to prove out that we're going into new areas. We're going into solid-state disk. We're going into the new software that can do this. But reality is, our customers have exponential growth in data. We're talking to a customer that has a 60-petabyte Hadoop instance sitting beside their SAP instance. These things aren't going away. Disk is going to be here. It's going to look like something different. It's going to be 3,000 times faster, but it's still going to be part of the equation. We're going to have business continuity. We've got to deal with day mobility. All these things will continue to be core functionality our customers need. I actually wish we did have a half hour, because I'm going to come back to that comment. Sylvia, before we go there, I want to ask you about this whole concept of solutions. You're in a marketplace where a lot of application focus. And people don't really care about the infrastructure. So a lot of these people's infrastructure is irrelevant. I mean, obviously, you live in... It's like plumbing in your house. It's kind of, you don't think about it until it breaks. And then you're like, oh boy, there's water going everywhere. So you're in solutions marketing. What does solutions mean to you? Maybe talk about solutions. What do you mean by solutions? I mean, it's a good question. Solutions are a lot of different things for a lot of different people, I think. But fundamentally what solutions are is really when you take the customer's needs and you package it up into something where it actually is the software, the products and services all combined into one offering that allows customers to address their needs from an overall product, software and services aspect. So if I look at the partnership pie, how much is sort of EMC delivered content or intellectual property and versus say, friends of EMC, guys like VCE, Cisco, Intel versus just the ecosystem. Right, and that's a very, very important point is one of the things that EMC is really founded on and based on is really this idea and similar to SAP in fact as well is this idea of choice. It's an idea that you can have a huge partner ecosystem in order to build better solutions. Solutions that actually address customers' needs in the right way so that you're using leading technology, best in class technology in order to provide the best solution for our customers. So Andy, you mentioned Hadoop before. I think you said a 60... Did you say petabyte? I did, yeah. I love Hadoop. Sitting on the side. As a storage person which is fantastic. But speaking of solutions, it's really hard to spin up a Hadoop cluster and you've got to have the right skill sets and there's all these new terminology like Pyg and Hive and HBase and it's like I don't necessarily have all those skill sets so we're having need of solutions. My question is do you see a world where those sort of that Hadoop on the side instance comes together with things like in-memory databases and the operational data? What's your vision there? Be a little bit salacious here or at least early in my conversations I think the cloud eventually gets us there, right? If you think about client server we did in the 90s. We spread out and we came back together. Consolidation is always a massive optimization opportunity. Right now we're looking for performance. We break things apart to get better performance. We look at in-memory to get better performance but ultimately we still have data centers. We still have costs. You think about the companies that are just a bunch of disks like Google where you've got thousands of people swapping product out because you don't have production systems. You have this kind of a mismatch of technologies. Primarily our customers are still saying we still want to come up with the best data center strategies. Whether we own it, one of our partners own it, if it's over the cloud. So I think what you're going to see is some common democracy of the cloud coming back in to bring these technologies back into a consumable model. What do you guys see that cloud as looking like? I mean, you guys put forth the vision of the hybrid cloud quite some time ago now. It's had to be at least three or four years ago and you talked to customers about it back then and they're like, sounds good but not ready to do it. We did some surveys back then and not a lot of people are doing it. That's changing a little bit, isn't it? You talking about that? Yeah, I mean, we have... The cloud has always been a business model to me. It's a technology that you could make a similarity comparison to mainframes. It's not technology-wise that different. What's changed here is the alignment of partners and the alignment of that technology to business processes. So what we're seeing is a maturation of that going forward. We're seeing more customers buying by the drip and buying at a service level. And the good news is we have the partnerships and the alignment today to offer that in a really attractive way. A lot of customers still want to have that iron on their own floor plan. So the good news is it's become less of a technical decision more of a business decision. Sylvia, I wanted to switch topics a little bit. We heard today from a couple of guests inside the EMC project. I believe it's called Propel, which is a real transformation. Are you able to leverage that in your activities? Absolutely. Talk about that a little bit. So EMC's IT department is actually... We do drink our own champagne. When we talk about EMC and SAP and VMware coming together in a three-way preferred strategic partnership, this is what we're doing inside EMC as well. And we are implementing this strategy. And in fact, we are 100% virtualized today in all of our SAP test and dev environments. And we are actually going to be launching in production very, very shortly. So another couple months or so we'll be launching... We'll be live in production, fully virtualized. So it's very, very exciting. And it's something that we're seeing already with our test and dev fully virtualized savings. Operational expenses are being cut. It's just a tremendous amount of ROI already. Dave, I got to second that comment and say, there's a lot of talk at shows like this. There's no closer to walk-to-walk than that. This is going to be a showcase. And everybody's going to want to stop unless our competition, our customers, SAP. This is going to be a really great story. It's a lot of hard work that we've been getting done, not only for ourselves, but our customers. There's going to be a lot of leverage from what we've done that the market can participate in. Yeah, this is a big deal. You don't undertake an initiative like that lightly. I mean, I'm sure it's a big investment, not only in money, but also time. And I understand it goes live July 4th, but poor IT guys get no break. I would not want to be spending my July 4th deploying a major system and then making sure, but hats off to them. They've been working really, really hard. But I do have to say that I've been to a lot of these conferences last year for SAP. And I've seen the EMC IT folks, specifically Bill Reed, who's been extremely helpful. And I see him in action. And it's really, really interesting to see customers who are really reaching out. One of the things that I saw and I read was that over 50% of requests for proposals now coming out of the SAP Center of Excellence, they're asking for virtualization. That's something that a couple years back we would not have seen. And it's really, really interesting. And it says a lot about what people are doing and how, and really they're looking for advice. They're looking to EMC, the infrastructure leaders in stores to understand how we can virtualize our IT environment. And they're really looking not just for the answers, but also for the approach. Just for the approach in terms of what do we do first, what do we do next. And it's fascinating to see that it really is amazing to see that you can leverage your own, what you're doing yourself to really help the customers around us. Well, Andy, I remember, I think it was two or three SAP hours ago. It must have been two ago. When you had a dynamic where a lot of the application heads didn't want to virtualize their SAP. Just give me all the expensive stuff and let me purpose-build it and leave me alone. And inferring from your comments, Sylvie, that that's changing. Can you talk about that a little bit? We came up with a technology, this convergent technology called VBlock. And I've always said the value of the VBlock is it took the performance and risk equation off the table. It became a, we essentially leveraged new technologies that greatly gave us performance that allow us to virtualize all at the same time. So now customers could get that performance improvement from their traditional and drive a virtualization strategy. So I call it the virtual tsunami. Unfortunately, when we watched the video of Japan and as the water rolled over the farms and the silos, that's what virtualization is doing today. No one's too big. We can attack it if it's a business decision, but the technology's not holding us back. There seems to have been a tipping point. I mean, the application development heads have a lot of power within organizations, but the business case is so overwhelming that that's shifted, hasn't it? You can look at half the cost twice as fast. That's kind of the motto as you go to consolidate. Don't get called the lawyers on me, but that's generally what we see, right? It's a real compelling event. Well, guys, I told you this would go fast. We're out of time, unfortunately. And I really thank you both for coming on, Sylvie and Andy, for coming on The Cube. A longtime Cube guest and a great one. And Sylvie and Newby, nice job. Thank you very much. And congratulations how well you guys have grown. Thank you. It's been a lot of fun and I appreciate all your support. We'll see you at EMC World. All right. We'll be there next week. And thanks for watching everybody. We'll be right back after this word from our sponsors.