 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Sapphire Now. Headlines sponsored by SAP HANA Cloud, the leader in platform as a service. With support from Consolink, the cloud internet company. Now, here's your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. Day two of exclusive SiliconANGLE theCUBE coverage at Sapphire Now. We are here on the ground for three days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, founder and co-CEO of SiliconANGLE Media with Dave Alonzo, who's in Las Vegas at the moment. You're watching theCUBE, and we would not be here without our sponsors. We want to thank SAP HANA Cloud Platform, Consolink, hot startup in California, of course, EMC, and Cap Gemini, if it's sponsors, we want to thank them. We are here, day two, our next guest is Christoph Struber, who's the global principal SAP Stras and friend of theCUBE from EMC. Welcome back. Good to see you. Thank you, John. Appreciate it. Thank you, good to see you. I remember four years ago, we were at, I think it's the Deloitte party and we're talking, and you had the group of experts, and we did a bunch of crowd chats together. True. And it was just the ecosystem is booming, and HANA was just getting off the blocks then. That was four years ago. But look where HANA is now. When you walk around here on the showroom floor, you can't go past HANA. HANA is everywhere, and it's definitely the future for SAP. And it's found at Swimlane. You're starting to see emerging, I was talking to the HANA Cloud Platform guys yesterday, and you're starting to see the emergence of HANA fitting into its spots. And you see the platform is a service, very compelling to startups. They're enabling a lot of action on there. Data and cloud are at the center of the value proposition that we're talking about here, and everything's working well. The speed of HANA, but the theme that came up yesterday was integration. I know you guys have a lot to talk about there with TDI. So what is TDI? What are you guys talking about? And why are you talking about? It's been around. What's the update? And what does it stand for? Yeah, lots of good questions. I'm very passionate on that topic of TDI because as you mentioned four years ago when HANA just started out with four and a half years ago, you were able to, if you run HANA on premise, you only could subscribe and run your HANA system on a certified appliance. So that means infrastructure, compute network storage subscribed and dedicated to HANA workloads that you can share that is designed for HANA and for HANA only. That means you also need such an environment and such an appliance for your production, for your non-production systems and for your DR. So cost is exponentially increasing with that. What is it stand for? TDI. So TDI that was actually announced 2013, also here at Sapphire, and it stands for tailored data center integration. Very complicated name for a very simple thing that many of us have done since decades in the SAP infrastructure system that means building your SAP system with the components that you prefer. Yeah, and one of the things I was talking to some folks as I saw from 2010 around when VBlock came out. I mean, I could run that interview from 2010 today with VBlock and be very relevant. So a lot of stuff leading up to, so it's really prime time now for the mass market, I say mass enterprise market, but mainly the early adopters kind of came in and this notion of hyperconvergence, purpose built and tailored systems were kind of like, people were questioning that, but now, like a suit, a fine tailored suit you wear at once, that was kind of a use case, but now you're starting to see this is now the new normal. People want to tailor their environments around the workloads. That's very true. And it's easier to do that, tailoring kind of being oversimplified in the word of custom. Yeah. What's the trend there? Is that usually the same thing? To that point, in fact, that form factor of a converged infrastructure, like VBlock plus TDI, plus the tailored data send integration, allows our customers to have an environment that is specifically tuned for the requirements of HANA, non HANA and associated critical applications. At the same time, you get a single support, right? Just one throat to choke, if you will, and the form of VCE that helps you implement that and also support that from our operational perspective. So yes, you get the VCE experience, but at the same time, and that's a lot of people also don't realize that, a VBlock can be specifically tuned, it can scale up and it scales out for most of the HANA requirements. So I buy the TDI concept, tailored data send integration, because integration now, and this came up all three yesterday, it's been coming up on the queue at a variety of events, integration generally is now the table stakes and the bar to get into the enterprise, meaning if you're a startup or you have a new point technology, that's all well and good, but if you can't integrate well, that is now the table stakes. So why are customers doing TDI right now? I mean, you guys, give us an update on that, because there's motivation, why they're doing it, is it economics, is it product, what's the deal? It's actually all of the above and a little more. So I used to be a customer myself for a very long time, helping to run a large SAP environment, and what a lot of vendors forget what for customers is critical is to manage risk. So managing risk means a few things, right? It means that you want to take advantage of the skill sets that you have in your data center, so you don't have to introduce specialized systems that require new skill sets that helps reduce your risk, you want to have choice for the components to build, for example, also your HANA system and others, based on the technology competence that you have in all of this. So existing skill sets, so like IT or whatnot. Absolutely, right, exactly. And what about components? What components? And also you want to have the ability to be flexible, because here's one thing. Now, you start with a HANA project, right? And you size your system accordingly, build the infrastructure accordingly, but now the business decides, oh, we want to also integrate Hadoop, so we want to add on HDFS component, right? Or we want to run another application. The idea of an appliance for HANA and the SAP ecosystem for such an on-premise deployment breaks down, it just doesn't scale that way, right? But if you started, for example, with a conversion infrastructure, and you've built everything around TDI, you have the ability to each component, compute network and storage, to tune them and size them and grow them according to your changed needs. And that's the kind of flexibility that I find incredibly valuable, right? At the beginning of a project, you have a certain set of requirements and there are more unknowns, which means flexibility is more important. As you move into your project. That's huge. That's a huge thing. Requirements become further. Yeah, so as you move into a project, you become more clear what your business requirements are, what your business scenarios are, and what your associated infrastructure requirements are. So you have to be less flexible. You can be less flexible and can be more specific. But usually at the beginning of the start-out of such a project, you don't necessarily know that. Peter Burrus, who's stuck in traffic, he's the head of research for SiliconANGLE Media and also GM of our Wikibon Research Group. He was talking with the global CTO yesterday of Capgemini and we were talking about this and he made a good point. I want to get your thoughts on this because this highlights exactly what you just said. In the old days of IT or looking back, you had known processes and unknown technology, meaning you figured out the technology for known process that will automate accounting, HR, things like that. Now we're living in a world where you have known technology and unknown processes. So the technology has to be in a position to deal with unknown or future requirements, whether in structured data or whatever that is. You have all kinds of new stuff. New use cases, IOT for one. That now is a challenge. So how do you look at that with the TDI lens? I have technology, I could be replatforming, I could be retrofitting, but now I have, yes, some known stuff, but really what's coming is unknown. Wearables, consumerization of IT. How does this all fit into that? A broker of services. So a CIO today, it's a really hard job because you see also here at the show, you see a lot of lines of business owners learning about new capabilities and deciding to deploy something that may be living in the cloud. Could be success factors, a reba, concur. That may not be in alignment with what the company is doing from an IT perspective and it's not under the CIO's control. Really hard to get your arms around. So that's a larger discussion than worthy discussion. The business broker, that's what the CIO has to become, business process broker. Well also an enabler as well because they got to try top line revenue growth. Now no more consolidation of cost. Right, well cost still plays a factor. If you can reduce your cost to run your IT environment that allows you to invest into disciplines like these and also help the business to be more agile. So that's part of this whole story of TDI and Converge Infrastructure to help be simply more agile and more predictable in your deployment, whatever you have to do on premise. Companies like Virtustream for example, they're building also many of their HANA offerings effectively around TDI. Most service providers wouldn't be able to live if they wouldn't build their HANA infrastructure on a TDI formula simply because appliances don't allow them enough margin. What's the relationship to HANA with TDI? Is it you get TDI, you do TDI to make HANA work better or is it part of rolling out HANA? Is it augmentation, is it accelerate? What's the dynamic? Good question. So there are very specific rules that all vendors including EMC have to obey by. SAP has defined KPIs for each components, for servers, for storage. That for example, we just recently announced VMAX All Flash is also certified for HANA TDI now. We announced that at EMC World just two weeks ago, right? I saw that, yeah. That's going to save VMAX. Yeah, right. I shouldn't say that, I was a little bit, not say it. That's all right. So every vendor has to adhere to these strict KPIs and they have to justify and show these certifications that are documented, they are publicly available. SAP maintains a product availability matrix. So it allows customers to compare very simple what I run in my data center, what I see on the product availability matrix and where I have an opportunity to build my HANA system with the very hardware that I have on the floor instead of having to invest in something new. And then we also offer TDI services. So it's consistent with previous gear. Correct. So you have already sunk in cost investment. Bingo. You can then retrofit building blocks, kind of create that. Right. And VCE actually, we have done about 80, nearly 100 TDI migrations, implementations. These guys drove it down to a science. They can build your TDI system in an afternoon. They've done this now within four hours. They have to, right, to make it cost effective for our customers. It was interesting, we were talking with folks yesterday and they're like, oh yeah, we can convert to HANA, your apps on HANA in 30 or 90. And I'm ready for him to say days. And he goes minutes. Minutes. And I'm like, oh, it went months to weeks to days, now minutes. Well, the more you automate. And I said, is that, hold on. Did you say minutes? Who were you talking to? It was the SVP of the HANA Cloud Platform. Okay. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah, but then the little trick question was, the data is a little different story, but. Well, that's where we come in, right? That's where we can help. Well, HANA Cloud Platform is also a very interesting integration point. And I think, I feel, and I believe it's a little undervalued at the moment. But this will change this year. Because just the topic we just touched on, organizations, for example, run workforce management through success factors. At the same time, they run a highly complicated and modified payroll on premise. How do you reconcile these two different data sets that still talk about and manage the same workforce? You need HANA Cloud Platform and its extensions to make them work together. That's exactly what it's designed to do. If someone asked you, Christophe, what should I know about TDI? Or, you know, kind of a summarize of what you didn't know. Kind of what you might not have known about TDI. What would you say to them? So I had two conversations with customers just yesterday. And first of all, a lot of people, including SAP employees, are unaware that TDI is productive. It's productive since 2013. If you combine TDI with virtualizing HANA on vSphere, which, by the way, just yesterday morning was announced vSphere 6.0 for virtualized HANA, for scale up, so single notes. That means you can run an up to four terabyte HANA system now in VMware environments, right? If you combine that with TDI, you have the ability to stand up your HANA system much, much faster for quick POCs and business value propositions to test out certain functionality, right? So TDI is production. TDI is production, and it's not rocket science. Actually, I wrote a little blog on that very fact. We have on emcee.com, we have a few very helpful white papers, a business white paper that describes TDI as become mainstream, and we have a second that we just announced last quarter that is an architect's guide on the very topic that goes into more of the technical details. So it helps. So it sounds like TDI is a great environment for rolling something out that I wouldn't say test, but like benchmarking. So just say I'm a CIO and I'm a CDI staff. Hey, I wanted to do HANA. Let's not take a big step. Let's get some of the arms around something workable. And that's what you're referring to, right? And that's how a lot of customers start, exactly. A large HANA project, a HANA migration, involves a lot of different parts of the organization, often SAP value engineering workshops are included. So it's a bigger story. But every IT organization and basis people specifically, they have to get their minds and their arms around these new skill sets that are associated with HANA. Not so much with the infrastructure. That's why HANA in itself is a new animal and it needs to be maintained in a different way than previous disk-based network systems, right? Which there's a lot of skill set out there. For HANA, it's still growing. So you don't want to complicate the infrastructure component and make that part at least easy and use existing components that you're familiar with. Well, congratulations on TDIs, great stuff. Let's switch gears to the ecosystem. What are you seeing? I mean, we've been chatting for many years now, seven years, seven years doing theCUBE, a lot's changing. What jumps out at you? I mean, looking at the landscape here in this show, obviously the largest show here for Sapphire. It's a big show, yeah. But it seems to be the same thing, but it seems to be just moving the ball down the field. But is there any noticeable ecosystem changes? So we already touched on that. And SAP early on recognized that that's necessary to cater to lines of business owners, not the CIO and the IT organization themselves only anymore. That's why SAP strategy on the topic of cloud, business processes, through success factors, Ariba, Concur, C4C and others, HANA Cloud Platform, it helps allow customers to subscribe to business processes as a service in cloud offering. So the cloud movement, that's for example, as one example to answer your question is real and it's very apparent here. What's the coolest thing that you've seen here? The coolest thing I would have to say, two things come to mind. For once, it's the buzz. Yesterday during the keynote, quite honestly I was a little disappointed, was interesting but nothing stood out, right? That did not kill the buzz on the floor at all. So with high energy, a lot of good discussions with customers and partners, so that high energy clearly stands out. The high people, the high amount of people that are here, but I hear numbers between 25 and 30,000, that's a pretty big conference, right? Secondly, I hear a lot of buzz also around HANA Vora. Vora is designed not so much for the typical SAP applications and I think the name HANA in Vora is unfortunate because it can live also without HANA or without any typical SAP system. It's designed for HDFS integration, Hadoop integration, larger sets and there's some really cool discussions actually happening in the Vora booth. What about customer meetings? What's the conversations that you're having, top conversations that are trending in your world? Yeah, so it has actually a lot to do with figuring out where to place my workload. No matter what the application is that customer is deploying and that was actually in several customer discussions on that TDI topic yesterday again. Tonight we're going to have a discussion with RTOS, we've invited a few CIOs and I'm looking forward to that discussion as well so it'll be two folds. One side it'll be TDI, but at the same time I think what is also very interesting and what customers embrace more and more is a more organized, architected enterprise architecture discipline that helps actually get the most out of your technology deployments that's talking about people and process which is much more important than the technology because I see it also with some of our customers that buy technology because the lines of business has subscribed to it but the IT organization has trouble actually delivering the value of it because it's not maximized in the organization. Okay, so for navigational purposes who would you recommend to follow on Twitter to stay in the circle of influence around this topic of HANA? HANA, well certainly the guy's a bluefin, right? John Applebee comes to mind. Clearly somebody who has a big voice in the HANA world I would also recommend VJ, VJ Sankar. He has been in this ecosystem for quite a long time, right? SAP of course themselves. I have a Twitter handle as well, right? At CStrubert, and I'm very passionate on the topic of TDIs you can tell, right? I keep bringing it up. Hadoop integration, big data integration, right? We're doing more and more of that and so yeah, that's a lot of fun. And what are you seeing with the Hadoop integration? You see that slowing down? Cause it's a big challenge. Oh no. Hadoop has been adoption for big data but it's not a pure play Hadoop thing, it's been. Hadoop has been just store it and pile it up but with sparking in memory, you're seeing a change in dynamic. Hadoop has almost become known almost as a categorical word now for the entire big data ecosystem. It's not just Hadoop. That's right. Can you share your thoughts on that? Right. That's my opinion. Oh yeah, I agree with that. It's a misnomer. Big data to a lot of people equals Hadoop and that's just not the case, right? However, and that's the buzz that I've been talking about. Hanavora is exactly designed to run on top of Spark so it gives more of a complete set of functionality and a more elegant integration into SAP data. The challenge that I see here is in organizations we're talking about two separate camps, if you will. There are Hadoop big data guys. Very agile, mobile developers, right? Source. Absolutely. Not much for change management and on the other side you have enterprise disciplines, HR, finance. Operationalized IT systems. Highly change management, right? I mean SAP comes with a great change management integration that's inherent in it. So these two worlds now start to collide and it's actually less of a problem of technology. Technology can get you there. It is more of people's minds have to come together and find the middle ground to actually benefit with new use cases for the business. Yeah, and then. That's exciting and that's where I see the challenge. And then what's going on what I heard at EMCworld which I thought was compelling was this whole capacity optimization vision. So you have obviously in memory a lot of stuff going on for speeds and feeds to increase the solutions on the front end but also storage is still scaling up. I mean more data being consumed and generated now ever. So you got to manage the capacity but yet make it addressable in real time. Very, very good point. So I've been talking to customers on that very topic since two and a half years. Three years ago we were here actually at Sapphire talking with Applebee on that very topic the petabyte platform that we actually offered since then already. Now SAP has come along and offered much better integration with data lifecycle manager on the HANA side, Data Warehouse Foundation, Vora on the Hadoop side. So it's easier to integrate these two. For us who help customers to simplify that deployment it still means converged infrastructure for example with an ISOLON extension. And what you're touching on is what SAP calls data temperatures like information lifecycle management. There are a bunch of solutions that fit all in that space. HANA, hot data right, more expensive simply because of the licensing as it relates to RAM, dynamic tiering, new line storage, Hadoop integration as well, ILM. The challenge here is and that's inherent different by business process in use case is which data you put where based on that requirement. My final question is for you, I want to get your thoughts on kind of an industry dynamic. I was having a conversation last night both at the Accenture event also and at the Virtuostream event with customers. I won't say their names, but they're a big customer. And I asked them how they make their decisions and they said to me one of the biggest challenges is understanding what the vendors are doing because they're running so hard at a pace of change they have to make selection of technologies. In some cases a series of point technologies. So they said their biggest challenge is twofold. One, looking at the playbook of vendors with all the stuff being sold to them and then integration to get the outcome that they want. So they kind of reverse engineer from their outcome state and then try to put together the solution. Okay, that's normal, we know that. But then they said the problem we have is what cloud and data has done is essentially broken down the silos, actually how we roll this out and how we tailor it or piece it together. So the horizontal integration, but yet enabling vertical lines of business prepackaged applications and workloads that have to be tailored. So you got some sort of process within the vertical ass but yet a horizontal DevOps integration. And I said what's the problem, that sounds awesome. And Brian Gracia, Wikibon and I have had this conversation and this is the point, this is the question. They said they look at magic quadrants from Gartner and all the magic quadrants lay out as silos. And someone who's a leader in one category might not be a leader in another category. And so they have to do is dissect and strip out pieces of platforms and stitch them together horizontally. And this is all new. Again, back to the new processes. What's your take on that because now- How much time do you have? One minute. That's- Do you see the same trend? Oh my God, that's a huge topic. It's really a huge topic. And I've seen that problem myself as a customer before I joined EMC. And so I would like to dive in there with much more time. It starts out with the right discipline within an organization, right? First of all, you have to be clear where you want to go and if it's, and how it is in alignment with your business priorities. So having some kind of architecture framework that considers business applications and business requirements, application requirements, data requirements and lastly infrastructure capabilities. And have that all come together with a roadmap that makes sense for the organization then you're much more aligned internally before you engage your vendors and whoever you listen to to get actually stuff done. So basically take a step back from the Magic Quadrants. Absolutely. You got to look at things differently. I'm a big Togaf fan, right? The open group architecture framework. I've been an enterprise architect myself. And I think it's an undervalued approach to create and discipline within an organization to be better in service of the business and have your IT infrastructure and everything that you do better aligned. So you're more powerful as an organization and you therefore are more educated and have more leverage with your vendors and over your vendors. Yeah, and also as you said with your TDI passion, you can actually reuse a lot of stuff that you have both skill set. Thank you. And technologies as well as buying new stuff. So it's not like you're not buying new stuff. You can save dough, cash to buy new stuff and also manage the risk side of it. So first off, thanks for sharing the insight. Certainly a great color on the Hadoop. Big data. Good to see you again. This is theCUBE live here on the ground. Day two coverage of Sapphire Now. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal noise. I'm John Furrier. You're watching theCUBE. There'll be millions of people in the near future that want to be involved.