 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018, brought to you by NetApp. Welcome, you're watching theCUBE on the ground at SAP Sapphire Now. I'm your host, Keith Townsend. We're in Steamy, Orlando. Great convention center, size of 16 American football fields. Got in about 3,000 steps this morning, you know what, I'm not here to talk about me, we're here to talk about the relationship between Microsoft and NetApp. We have Brad Burkey, Jim, SAP Global at Microsoft, and Kevin Zane, Tech Solutions Pro, and this is a mouthful SAP on Azure, Intelligent Global, and you're a black belt? Yes, oh wow. Yes, I can kick box. You can kick some SAP butt. Yes, we do great solutions. So first off, let's talk about the NetApp-Microsoft relationship. As it pertains to SAP, what's the story behind NetApp and Microsoft? You know, the great thing about NetApp and Microsoft is we both have the same vision, right? For us, it's about our responsibility to help our customers innovate. And NetApp is a key partner for us and our ability to help our customers innovate and provide solutions around SAP. So let's talk about those solutions around SAP. One of the things that is getting pushed an awful lot is that SAP is now cloud ready. We can go to the cloud, we can go to these hyperscalers such as Azure or Azure, and swipe a credit card and get up and running with HANA. Tell us about that experience. How does that go exactly? Kevin? Oh yes, I don't know if you have heard but we just announced we released a 12 terabyte memory size virtual machine. Our HANA large instances can go up to 24 terabytes. So we ran the largest SAP workload in the world. There are so many customers, about 400 SAP on Azure customers. Personally, I work about 30 SAP on HANA, SAP on Azure customers. And over 77 or 80 SAP HANA on Azure customers. So it's very exciting. And we see that the trend is just picking up, the demand is picking up worldwide. Wow, so 18, Bill Modermic on stage yesterday gave the numbers around SAP HANA in general. 1800 customers, so Microsoft having 400 SAP HANA customers. Sure, just to be clear on that. So when we talk about customers that are sitting inside of Azure for their SAP landscape, that's both traditional NetWeaver based and HANA based. And the number that you have is closer to 70 of that larger number. The real important thing that customers are seeing today is when people think of cloud, they think about cost reduction. I'm going to save money because I'm going to be running equipment. The true value is in your ability to be nimble to innovate. So imagine a customer puts their SAP landscape inside of Azure and it's NetWeaver based. It's the older stuff, right? At any point along that journey, they can call us up and say, I want the infrastructure for HANA. They can innovate at will, right? If they buy hardware that sits on premise, that hardware is set to run that particular landscape. It's not set to run HANA. There's some opportunities for the customer to innovate using Azure. It's not just cost savings. It's around efficiencies and the ability to innovate at will. So let's talk about hybrid cloud scenarios around that very concept. We had another NetApp partner on that talked about the scenario in which customers have this desire to innovate quickly. Traditionally, in a traditional enterprise to your point, if I wanted to spend up a HANA workload, I'd have to procure hardware. I'd have to get my basis team to lay down the NetWeaver stack along with HANA. It could be a couple of months before I'm up and running. Then I could innovate, do my innovation. How does Microsoft help shorten that cycle? I can speak to it. We actually have another partner here demo there as well, Susie. HANA is run Susie right ahead and the different flavors of Linux and the running on Azure. Today, we are able to deploy the entire SAP landscape using automated scripts inside Azure. In 30 minutes, you have the entire SAP landscape deployed, including the large virtual machine M-Series for your HANA cluster, and you also have the ASCS, the central instances, and also the AFS cluster, as well as your application servers. All those things running your automation in a close speed in 30 minutes instead of three months. So one of the obvious advantages of cloud, in general, is this ability to get to agility. There's a concept that once I've innovated in the cloud, I know what the workload is, it's stable, it's not changing, that I bring that back in-house. Is that something that you're seeing? Are people continuing to run these workloads steady state in the cloud as well? I think they're going to run more so in steady state. We don't see them kind of moving it back. The idea that in a traditional SAP landscape is that everything is always on, since the lights are always on, why don't I have my own equipment as opposed to running just compute from a hyperscaler like Microsoft? And the reality is, is again, back to that notion of innovating. If I'm going to roll out, let's say, S4 on top of HANA, so you think about suite on HANA and then S4, I'm going to set up all of these test environments, right? Multiple test environments, versions of it as I roll out. I'm going to be really big for a short period of time, then I'm going to roll it out and shrink back down. Also, when I do upgrades, you think about it like, if you're doing payroll at the end of the month, I'm going to be big for short periods of time, so we call that bursting. And it's that bursting that allows you to continually to reduce costs you wouldn't bring back on-prem, where you can't burst, right? Makes sense? That makes sense. So let's talk about some of these business conversations that you've had with customers. What have been some of the primary drivers other than obvious agility? What are some of the conversations that you look at the broader Microsoft portfolio of solutions that you're able to bring into customer conversations? Two things come to mind, one of which is when you think about enterprise-class security across all domains, right? So right now we provide Azure for Office 365, that's an Azure tenant, right? And we can give you advanced security for that. Imagine that I can provide that same security for your SAP system. And I want to give you an example of the type of security solution. We have an intelligent IoT-based security model that sits inside of Azure that will predict hacks, right? They'll look at your environment and say, you look just like a customer who has been hacked or you have the attributes of a customer who could get hacked and they'll proactively come in and say, you need to make these adjustments. That kind of stuff sits inside of the cloud in Azure. So it's not just, again, I think the misnomer is it's just about cost savings, right? Because if it's just about cost savings, then at some point your depreciation models for on-premise hardware, as long as you can stay and not change, so not changing would save you a lot of money. Right. So that's why I get back to, it allows you to change without burden of impact. So, talking about change in the industry, we can't have a $7.5 billion acquisition and not talk about it on theCUBE. We kind of eat this stuff up. You guys acquire GitHub. Let's talk about the relationship of developers. One of the things that I haven't heard a lot, at least in conversations I've had on theCUBE so far this week, have been about the developer. Talk about the importance of the developer relationship and potential integrations with GitHub, if you can, in SAP. Oh, that's one of the theory topics I have. I came from a developer platform called Enable Agility, allow you to run the continuous development and continuous integration. And GitHub has been an integrated part of Microsoft solution already. And we are probably the largest contributor in the GitHub. And before Google and Facebook, if you rank it based on the history. Now we, the open source has been cultural after the SIDA takeover SEO. Has been our, we embrace open source and we actually, majority of our code right now deployment is in the GitHub and in SAP workload world. We, the ARM templates for automation templates, JSON templates and all the automation scripts we deploy it in the GitHub and we share with customers as a community and they actually use those scripts and do that deployment, continuously improve the scripts for automation. So continuous integration, continuous development is not a term that we hear a lot in the SAP world. As we're bringing these concepts from, I think, thought into reality with services such as GitHub to store DevOps scripts, automation scripts, what has been the business impact of being able to bring a continuous integration, continuous development practice to SAP which is usually not being. I'll give you a good example. For example, when Brad Berkeley mentioned earlier during the SAP landscape deployment, you have an N-plus one deployment, you want to do a test environment, you want to assemble troubleshooting things. Today with the scripts automation, you can spin up an entire system in three hours, four hours, including S4, including the demo system, including the business object, BI and all the things together. You can test this and then shut down the entire system and delay the resource group inside the Azure and then remove the system. Then we spin up as necessary. Also, we're working with SAP called Netscape Manager which allow you to clone the system inside the Azure and the scripts behind it, yes, actually it's a continuous integration, the development type of scripts allow you to replicate system fast, allow you to deploy another testing system or training system. It gives you open up a lot of modern deployment methodology to give you fast agility to the business. So, Microsoft, the ultimate platform company, one of the things that designates a platform company is that your partners basically make more money than you off the platform. Windows is a great example of a platform. So, you have platform, Azure is definitely becoming known as a platform and then we have NetApp, the data-driven company. Talk through the value of the NetApp data fabric, data-driven technology and platform as it pertains to the ability to have the same data operation strategy on-prem and in the Microsoft Cloud. Okay, and I'll give you an example. It's a lot of our customers, Brad sells a lot of NCP on edge or to many customers, I'm supporting those customers. Many of them, because NetApp has a super, very high-speed fastest management, snapshot management to data protection and data recovery and backup and also the DR capability. We, customer demand access, can we actually work with Microsoft in the cloud to use a similar technology? So, they deploy the NetApp on-tap inside Azure today and we're able to support AFS file services to file sync from on-prem to the cloud from one edge region to another region, leverage those on-tap snap mirroring and other technology as well. So, to enable, provide enterprise-level file sync, file protection, file recovery and a one-image replication as well. So, you guys are pretty good. I'm trying to throw you curveballs, but you're pretty much knocking them out the park. So, I'm trying to throw another curveball. Bring the hybrid IT story in for me from a Microsoft perspective when it comes to Azure Stack. How does Azure Stack play a role in the overall vision, whether it's edge, core or the extension into the cloud? How does Azure Stack play a role in it? It is Azure Stack, so. Yeah, okay. It's not for SAP, but yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay, Azure Stack is a very important view, overall view from edge to the entire thing cloud. And we have the 50 regions globally. We have many data centers combined in the largest public cloud from region perspective, but still there are areas, for example, like a cruise ship and like a defense department. They may actually require Azure inside a prime type of technology stack. Azure Stack allow you to use the same interface, same view to deploy the technology. When you actually connect it, it can synchronize in your subscription. So it will allow you to have end-to-end access from your own premise into the cloud. And Microsoft has the perfect hybrid cloud strategy here and it allow you to do not only the eyes and past and also the size solution to our customers. So okay, let's bring the conversation back up a couple of levels and talk Brad. What have been the conversations here? After the keynote this morning, talking about the intelligent business, the conversations yesterday with Bill McDermick with the super high energy about SAP going into CRM, what has been the conversations with customers? Certainly, we've had a privilege for a lot of customer meetings where you've been here. I mean, these are very big, I mean, the great thing about SAP Sapphire is you get about 20,000 customer attendees here. Right. And they're the big ones. And at the C Suite, so we get to have some great conversations. The customer conversations have been around the notion of the responsibility that Microsoft and SAP have to them, right? To the point where I was speaking with the customer early and said, you have an accountability to help me be innovative, right? And that's a very important responsibility. A lot of that revolves around enterprise class security, right? A lot of that revolves around uptime, right? And latencies between those environments. What's my performance attribute? And are you going to be there with me forever, right? Now, when a customer chooses Azure and they choose, or they choose SAP and they choose Azure Portable, certainly it's really a three-part partnership. The partner or the customer, Microsoft and SAP as a partnership, right? And if I have to add a fourth one to that, it would be the systems integrator, right? Because in the case, Microsoft doesn't upgrade, migrate, move, or install anything. So we're going to lie on all the many partners that are here, right? To do that set of work everywhere from Accenture to Capgemini to Brave New World, right? That was ABC, right? I got those out, right? All of those partners are very key to both Microsoft and SAP to ensure customer success. So a lot of the meetings that we've had here have been with those partners and those customers. Well, to be a fly on the wall for those, I would love to go into more detail. We run out of time. I'm getting the wrap sign, but I would love to have a conversation around support, integration, way more areas than we have time for. We'll have to get you on theCUBE again. You're now on CUBE Veterans. From Orlando, this is Keith Townsend for the CUBE. Stay tuned or stay in the YouTube feed to find out more about what's going on about SAP Sapphire now on the ground. Talk to you soon.