 Live from London, England, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to Nutanix.NEXT 2018 in beautiful London, England. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host, Ut Piscar. And happy to welcome back to the program, third time guest I believe, Chris Allenback, who's the senior vice president of database and data management with SAP. Fresh off the keynote stage this morning, where you with CEO D'Raj Pandey. It was a great time. So SAP, things are going well. I see SAP at lots of shows. You've been on our program at a few different ones. You are, you know, based here in Europe now, even though you're from the US. So, you know, Chris, introduce us a little bit. Give us some of the summary of, you know, what brings you specifically to the event? Well, I mean, several things. So my responsibility is looking after data platform and what we're doing from a strategy perspective, what we're doing, what applications we're building on that in the cloud, what we're doing, everyone asked, what are you guys doing with HANA? What are you doing with Data Hub? And so that's the core of what I spend time on. But equally, I think you need to step back and look at SAP's business, because we're also, we're our own OEM, right? HANA is what makes S4 possible. HANA is what powers all of our cloud applications. We're going to announce now that every one of the acquired companies now runs on HANA and not on any other database. And so you really see these three pillars of SAP. You talk about, I've been with SAP seven years ago and everyone said, why would you go there? Because they said this old applications company that seems to be getting, oh, and even Hasso Platon, our founder, was saying that was true. Came out with HANA, that we quickly screamed up, you know, past error data, become the number four database company in the world, still growing phenomenally. They re-generate, use HANA as a method of rejuvenation for originally S4, and now that's going to the cloud. And during that time, we were able to acquire all these cloud applications and build those success factors, or read about other stuff and that's become a wildly successful business. Chris, why don't we just step back for a second because you talk about data products. Yeah. You know, I've watched databases for my entire career. I've watched the huge growth of the importance of data, especially the last few years. You know, we went through that big data wave which was kind of middling success, but everything today, data is at the center of it all. You know, databases are where a lot of data live, but how am I getting, and how are customers getting more advantage out of their data when they're using your products? It's a great question. So one is, I mean, it continues to be the fact that now, people now have real-time access to that information, and it continues to actually be the biggest driver, to be honest. The other one where we see HANA getting picked, especially, is when you have tens or even hundreds of data feeds coming in simultaneously. Frequently, some are streaming, some are traditionally relational, coming from all different systems, and people then want to do analytics on that. But when we talk about analytics, I don't just mean a BI tool, although you could, but now we're doing predictive on that. And in fact, and then figure out how does the data scientist then go through, do machine learning, build a model, deploy it for scoring from a full lifecycle perspective. And that's where HANA's getting used tremendously is in these analytic systems, in data warehousing, and in particularly people going, I want a real-time data warehouse. The other one where we see it being, a lot more is in applications, where HANA originally was only for SAP applications. We've done a huge amount of work on that to make it work for OEM, ISVs, to port their applications over. And you've been seeing that continuously. I think there's some phenomenal work we've done with Esri. HANA is now the fastest geospatial database in the world, and Esri has about 80% of the geospatial market, now prefers and runs on HANA. So that's been huge. So customers are beginning to use it in more areas, not just SAP customers, or the CIO who ran the SAP systems. We're getting used a lot by the Chief Data Officers Division. We're getting used out by other groups. We're being used by specialty firms, doing things like geospatial, doing text analytics. And so it's been kind of exciting. So? I don't know if I answered your question by the way, but that was really good. All right. So that sounds like you've positioned yourself to enable customers to make the most out of the cloud, make the most out of data, make the most out of IoT. But I'm curious, how are you helping customers succeed in that digital transformation? Yeah, well, with digital transformation, the way I always look at digital transformation, people, it's like big data. What does it mean, right? But what you see the patterns are, is people are trying to remove layers between them and the actual consumer of the product. And if I can take those layers out, now you have people like Netflix who went all the way from just saying, let's make it easier to get a DVD, but now they're the movie studio directly to the consumer. They got rid of the 18 year old kid at the video store. They got rid of everything through streaming. They went into the business. They took out all these layers and got closer. Whether it's Airbnb and all these pure plays, that's exactly, they've reduced the number of layers. Well, existing customers are trying to do the same thing. They're saying, how do I get closer? How do I understand them? That requires, like if I'm running machinery, IoT data, tells me exactly how they use my machinery. If I can then start to take a look at that, if now they want to work with me in different ways, customers dictate how they're going to work with me. That means if they want to come in over the web one time, other time they want a phone, they should always be treated equally based on how important they are to me. Reducing layers. Equally though, you always have to be worried about someone coming out of nowhere, the pure play that comes in with a brilliant idea in your division. And you can't let them just take you out. What we're seeing is these traditional companies, not necessarily knowing what the digital transformation is, but saying, I've basically got to get fit. And I can't do that with a really complicated landscape. If my department says, oh, that's great, new business model, we can have the accounting up and ready in three years to compete with this new entrant. It's not going to work. Yet, you upgrade your systems, and let's say SAP is financials, somebody comes out of the new business model, that's a day change in the system. You know, you want to reorganize, that's a few clicks in the system and I have a new hierarchy. That used to be a two year process. And so we're working in all different aspects. We can do the IoT, we can do the agile work, we can have the data science machine learning, understand the customer, all the way back to the applications that are agile now as people upgrade to the S4 system. All right, I want to bring us back to the Nutanix show here, Chris. So- We like Nutanix, let's help them here. That's great. Let's talk about platforms out there. You have applications that they all want to get certified on, your application certified on their platform. So it's always, okay, I'm SAP certified, and okay, Nutanix even, they went through some redesign of their file system to make sure that they run really well for HANA and we're really excited for the certification there. Exactly. Talk a little bit about what goes into that, how much of it is there, you know, joint efforts between the companies or is it just, you know, they're going through and following the process that you've got pretty described? No, I mean, while, you know, as we, I was on stage with Dirage and this wasn't, although it's nice to say supported database, this was a year and a half effort. In memory computing, people get in and go, okay, it's not just a big data cache. This is a fundamentally different way software runs, how data stored in memory use caches. So Nutanix worked with us back and forth on how we would have this happen. Now it was worth it to us, our customers have been demanding simpler infrastructure and these hyper-converged infrastructures are exactly that. And Nutanix being the leader, we want it to be supportive. So this is good for both of us. If our customers can have agility, you know, on both sides of the business, running traditional SAP applications, they've got a ramp up, they need to add 100,000 users at quarter end, they can do that with a Nutanix platform. Equally, they want to quickly bring up an agile data mark for project basis, click a button to have a new data mark in seven minutes like they did on stage. And maybe they don't even want to do that with our on-prem cloud, they want to do that running on AWS or somewhere GCP, they can do that. Yet it's all controlled from the single interface running through Nutanix. So really, really good for both of us. SAP is purchased with a lot of companies out there. So you have kind of a neutral view when it comes out there, I think. I'm sure you have certain partners that you work more with and less. But what are you hearing from your customers? How do they think of cloud today and you know, love how, you know, and any more about the Nutanix connection along the way? Yeah, it's interesting because you know, talk about data density. The most valuable data company has is sitting and you typically, if they're SAP customers in their SAP system, it's exactly who is my customer? What did they buy? What is their service? What is their bill of material? All that, it's very value dense. It's the huge amount of security and governance. But what we've actually been seeing is a lot of them, yes, are moving those workloads to the cloud to save money. We've actually seen a fair number come back on premise because they're saying, look, I'm not getting rid of SAP for easily the next seven, but we have no plans. So then they're realizing I can run this on a private cloud infrastructure and actually save a ton of money. So they've been pulling back on-prem and we've been hearing that from all the Forrester and Gartner and IDC are seeing the same things. We have a lot of folks who don't want to go to the cloud with that core system yet, or they're saying, look, I got to save money and I think I'm going to the cloud, but I'm not ready. And so that's exactly where we see private cloud being really, really crucial and then the ability to then push out and be ready to go to the cloud and Nutanix really is a good solution for that. And in particular, on-prem database right now, depends who you get your estimates on is roughly growing at 5% to 8%, five-year Cager. On-prem private cloud is forecasted to go up 26%. I mean, that is massive. Cloud's only 40 overall for databases. It's a close second, so huge, huge growth. What's declining is bare metal on-prem. It's gone. Everyone wants to run in either virtualized or fully hyper-converged infrastructure now, even on-prem. So we see people, like I said, staying on, getting ready to go to the cloud, a lot of people pushing workloads to the cloud, but even some repatriation. All right, Chris Hollandback, really appreciate the updates. Thanks for everything. Well, thanks for having me. I always love speaking with you guys. Thank you. Awesome, thanks so much. For you, Piskar, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more programming from Nutanix.NEXT 2018. Thanks for watching the Cube.