 It's theCUBE, covering Sapphire Now 2017. Brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform and HANA Enterprise Cloud. Welcome, this is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, special Sapphire Now 2017 coverage here in theCUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier, and I'm with Frank Bulumbo, who's Cisco on my left, Margaret Anderson with SAP and Gary Gapa with CenturyLink. Some significant news announced in conjunction with Sapphire is the relationship between you guys around a significant cloud and cloud computing deal, Margaret, congratulations. This is significant because customers want more flexibility. They want to have the kind of cloud native. They want to have the flexibility of the data center. Frank, talk about the deal from a Cisco perspective and the relationship to the context of this. Yeah, well John, we're super excited to be part of it and especially with CenturyLink and vendor like SAP and really our role in it is to help our customers run on-prem, run in the cloud, and really our infrastructure products need to provide the simplicity to performance and the security for them to do that. Margaret, the deal, talk about the deal specifics. What does the deal entail? Well, it's kind of a unique deal because CenturyLink was already one of our partners for the HANA Enterprise Cloud business and then when the Cisco team came along and said, you know what? If we put our gear into the CenturyLink data centers and power of the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, that would be a tremendous win for everybody. And so we're very excited about that. Gary, I find this deal interesting because you have the engine of the SAP, you have the network and all the benefits that Cisco brings to the table, but you're dealing with the implementation and the managers, the customers. What's the important takeaway from this announcement? To me, I think if you take a step back, right? As you know, I was sitting down with some of the top SAP execs and the check from Cisco and our CEO, Glenn Post. We were talking about, okay, how do we leverage our joint assets together? How do we create more value for our customers? And if you look at today, every customer, the number one priority is digital transformation. The cloud obviously is part of that equation, right? And the other big priorities, okay, how do I monetize this data in this new connected world? You're looking at 1.8 trillion connected objects by year 2020, which will be generating 43 zettabytes of data. Let me quiz you out here, right? How many zeros in a zettabyte? I think I knew this answer going in since I got it wrong on our previous take. I said 12, it's 21. Maybe, all right. Right? It's a lot. All right. I'm going to say 21, too, or just a lot. It's a lot of data, a lot of devices. Yeah, I got to go with 21, you know. It sounds like a good number. All right, so they saw my cheat sheet, right? Anyway, if they had... Too many zeros, it means too many zeros. Yeah, too many zeros. That's significant. It's getting worse. The data tsunami is coming. It's already happening. It's happening, right? So you think about the amount of data which is being generated. And what we want to do is we want to provide highly secure, automated, and in this case, SAP-certified private cloud platform from Centrelink, where we can really help have the customer's laser focus on the business they do. And we help them with the deep platform, right? Which can help them monetize their data, help them drive the top line, increase the bottom line, mitigate the risk in a fast manner, and a highly secure manner as well. And I'll talk more about that. Gary, you bring up a good point. I want to get Frank involved in this next one. Double down on the data comment, because if you factor in even the IoT, Internet of Things growth, it's going to be even more significant. And then the security question pops up because as the data centers move to the cloud and the hybrid and or pure cloud, the perimeter is gone. Now, the perimeter is how we manage security in the past, but now with the perimeterless environments, security is critical. So how does this customer feel secure? And can you guys comment on the security aspect of how this relationship will roll out and the nondisruptive nature that you guys bring to the table? Is that what customers want to know? So John, from the Cisco perspective, and Gary mentioned it, we talked about this digital transformation and that's kind of the buzzword in the industry, but most customers are looking for a business outcome. And really to get that business outcome, they have to make a business decision probably based off the technology, you know, like SAP HANA. So this is mission critical, you know, information. And at Cisco, that's why we're so in tune for what the network can do, because it's going to provide security at a lot of layers, whether it's at the edge, whether it's at the aggregation point, or all the way back to the data center or into the cloud. So the security at multi-layers in multiple places and with the bad actors out there, that's the way you need to implement it so you can start to bring this stuff together and give the customers the confidence that, hey, this transaction is dated, it's going to be secure. So Gary, the outcome that we're talking about is no hacks, no breaches, you know, secure. Yeah, well, it is highly secure, but you've got to be always be prepared. And if you think about right, the central link, right, that we have 500,000 miles of fiber, right, 50,000 miles of fiber. Now, once we complete the level three acquisition, we'll add another 200,000 miles of fiber. You're talking about 750,000 miles of fiber touching 100 countries over six continents and 35% of the global internet traffic going through a network. And being, once the level three acquisition is complete, it will be the second largest network and we're critical to country's infrastructure. So there is a deep focus on cyber threats and things we do, right, to avoid the bad actors getting in and out. Having that network intelligence too is going to give you more data to fight the actors as well. Absolutely, but you know, to your earlier point, right, now we truly, right, this situation gets compounded with this connected word revolution. So when you are connecting this 1.8 trillion objects, you know, you got to ensure each of these objects is secure. And this is where the intersection of cybersecurity and IoT kicks in. And that's right in our wheelhouse. And don't forget latency, a word that, you know, is rearing its head. More importantly, as people move across with IoT and across the cloud. Margaret, talk about the role that the HANA Enterprise Cloud plays in all of this. Is it the glue? Is it the connective tissue? What's the role of the HANA Cloud platform? I mean, HANA Enterprise Cloud. Yeah, I was just going to say. So from a HANA Enterprise Cloud perspective, it's a private managed cloud. And we do an awful lot of work from an SAP perspective to make sure that the customer's environment is totally secure, but is also accessible all of the time for the customer. Because today, most businesses run 24-7 and they run all around the globe. So when some team is working and this is their prime business day, later in the U.S. business day, that's prime business time out in Asia, it's prime business time in Europe, and you need a cloud that's always available, always up and it's secured. You can guarantee that no other data is leaking into it or out of it. And that's really important for our customers because if you think about it, we have customers today that are SAP customers running in the HANA Enterprise Cloud that are competitors to each other. So you have to make sure that you can guarantee that there's not going to be any data that's going to sneak out the back door over here or someone's going to get in the back door over there and we have a fairly large security team at SAP. We have very stringent standards at SAP and every time we form a partnership with somebody, we say, here are our standards. If you can't comply to these, we can't do business with you as a partner. So from our perspective, it's very important to know that anybody that we work with takes security as serious as we do. Well, certainly these guys are big partners and they're not, they're known companies. Yep. Since this is going century link. I mean, this is big. Talk about the unified, how you guys help with the unified computing architectures that Cisco has because you guys have mastered this in the data center and you guys have a lot of experience but now at the cloud, what's your vision of how this is going to play out from a Cisco standpoint? Well, as Margaret described, multi-tenancy in the SAP environment is a pillar for them. They have to make that work for the customer and that's something we've been driving at Cisco for a long time. When it comes to the compute platform which we call UCS, we've been really the leader in converged infrastructure platforms for a long time with UCS and most recently now we're the number one platform for SAP with UCS in the converged environment. So it's those attributes that have enabled us to really get inserted there to provide the customer value. And you get the packet level of the network transformation. So victory nicely. Yeah, John, you're more of a geek than I knew. Yeah, I mean, well, we follow network, I mean, looking at 5G and network transformation you're seeing a lot of end-to-end architectures really winning out. And I think why I'm excited about this news is essentially it's a partnership that's providing an end-to-end solution. Gary, but you're in the front line, you're the manager of the service. Talk about the impact that you see this deal because now you have to turn up services and have that customer touch point. If you look at, right, how we are pulling together this solution, right? So obviously if you look at on the compute site we're using the US, the UCS, right? And on the switches is the Cisco networking switches and then you're looking at the- Nexus, Gary, Nexus. Nexus, all right, I wanted to make sure Frank is paying attention. Then you're looking at the NetApp storage and VMware for virtualization. And then another key element we're using is Vynomics, right? Which integrates with the UCS, right? And it's pretty much integrating all the APIs for all these components. And obviously, the powerful in-memory HANA engine. So all these things are being pulled together to create a platform which we are providing to the customers so that they can really focus on what they are good at, their business, and they're delivering a powerful value to the customers. And what it does is with the UCS and the Vynomics and some of the other elements, right, we can onboard customers within days, right? What used to take us 32, 33 days. Now we can do that within nine to 11 days. Which is a big, big plus when a customer approaches SAP. It's a huge shift in the business model. First of all, the client delivery on your end, managed services, significant. There's a lot of automation involved. The fact I started to adventure Cabos recently in Silicon Valley and I'm talking about network transformation, digital transformation, and they invest in infrastructure. He goes, oh no, not a lot of new companies coming out with an infrastructure of making hardware because it's a cloud. He says plumbers are turning into machinists. Kind of indicating that a lot of automation is happening at the lower end of the stack and the action is happening higher up in the stack to your point. Things are happening faster in terms of level of services. Absolutely, and I think other thing which we also bring to the table is the deep SAP expertise, right? If you look at some of the critical, mission critical applications, whether it's S4HANA, Sweet and HANA, the ECC or the entire BI Suite, Enterprise Portal, the list goes on, right? And that becomes critical. So that way we can get them up and running very quickly and give a solid ROI to the customers. Well, significant endorsement you would make a comment. Nah, I'm just saying when you're talking about the visibility of the SAP platform, this is something the customers thought about, right? It's going to get to all levels of the organization and really they're making critical business decisions off of the SAP HANA platform. It's got to be there. I mean, and that's obviously our challenge to meet that for customers. Margaret, HANA Enterprise Cloud is the engine, okay? And you guys are providing a significant phone. How do you see this collaboration playing out for customers? What should they expect from the collaboration with Cisco and CenturyLink? Well, you know, what we want the customer to have is a seamless experience. We tell them upfront that we have this partnership and that we're going to work together, but we really want to keep them focused on the value that they get from running their applications, because think about it this way. When you get in the car and you turn on the engine and you want to drive away, right? You know the engine is there. You know that the engine, depending on how much horsepower you've invested in, depending on what kind of make and model, you get different things from it, but you know it's going to always be there. It's always going to work, okay? Then if you want to enhance the engine, shall we say, you want to know that the right people have the skill set for those enhancements. So when customers come into the HANA Enterprise Cloud, sometimes they start off with the migration. So one of the things you're doing is you're kind of sunsetting all the old stuff and you're helping them move on to our HANA platforms, whether it's S4, whether it's sweet on HANA, whether it's our BI suite, you're helping the customer get started. But that's the start, because after that, there's all this other wonderful stuff that we develop at SAP, being that we're a software house, like IoT and our new Leonardo that's being announced at Sapphire, and we want customers to be ready to take advantage of that. So we tell the customers you need to move away from all the old stuff, because it's not reliable anymore. We want to move you into a different level of reliability so that you're ready to scale up your organization and so that you can do more business. And in the end, the customer says, okay, I need to know the cloud is there for me. I don't want to have to be thinking about it every day. What I want to be thinking about is how can I do new business, how can I open up offices in other parts of the world, how can I transact business globally, right? They're not really thinking about, okay, I need more stuff, right? So if they need to expand, we call up our partners and we say, okay, the customer wants five more terabytes of something, 10 more terabytes of whatever, and they just want it to happen, okay? And they don't want to have to have really long projects. They just want it to be there for them. They want to know that they can scale out and scale up. So one thing just to add, right? So I think, which I did not mention, it just becomes critical that the redundancy is there. And so this is where the Metro DR capabilities, right? Which we bring to the table. That becomes very powerful. And if you look at what we have done is we have created 10 parts, right? In the U.S., you have those in the Santa Clara, Dallas, Chicago, and the DC Stirling area, and then Singapore and the London market. And the Metro DR capabilities are available in all the three markets, which is a very critical element that the customers know that there's zero. And does that's recovery is certainly really a big deal because you can't think about after the fact. You got to think about upfront in the managed servers. You can't say, oh, by the way, I forgot that thing about DR. The thing is you get into a lot more preventive maintenance, right? Because this is where they're dedicated teams, right? Which are doing nothing right. Once the build process is done, you get them up and running, right? And how do you ensure, right? We are able to predict before anything. Well, I think this news is significant one. The size of the players involved. But two, it speaks to the transformation that's happening in the marketplace. Customers are moving to a new way to operate their business. And in the end of the day, you guys are making it easier to run some of the core software that can scale. But it comes down to how do you migrate at scale without having any kind of rip and replace or lift and shift, which, by the way, lift and shift is, I always say it's code word for rip and replace. But customers are on an evolutionary journey. There is no silver bullet in the cloud, in my opinion. So we've covered that on theCUBE. Your thoughts on this, because do you guys see it the same way? Customers aren't just going to move tomorrow. They're going to want an evolutionary approach. But they're going to want to have a scale. It's a journey. And so, you know, oftentimes customers say to us, what's the safest thing to do first? Right? What pieces of my environment can I take into the cloud? And then gradually over time, whether it's a few months, whether it's six months increments, it depends on how the customer is running their business. Can I keep moving it in there so I can keep getting value? And at some point, this is all done, goes away, and now I'm fully transformed into the cloud. And we see some customers who can do really quick projects. They're very agile and they're very nimble. And so, you know, we can migrate them in and get them going and running very quickly. We've got other customers who are more risk adverse. And so they want to proceed a little slowly. So we can do all of the flavors, depending on what they want to do. And so when we first talk to customers about the Hannah Enterprise Cloud, talk about the options. We talk about what they can do. We make recommendations from an SAP perspective as to what we think their speed could be, and then we help them get into the cloud. Because they might get left behind if they don't make that move. Well, the modernization trend is key. People want to be modern. The apps are rewritten differently. The relevance is more towards agile and speed. So I think I like this announcement. You got the reliability of the Cisco and moving packets around in the data center, rock solid, the software, core engine in Hannah Enterprise Cloud, and scale at the managed service level that can give you the flexibility to run whatever you want. And I think that's interesting. Did I get that right? John, I think the other thing is, it's like we've been working on this thing for a week. We've been working together on this solution for years now that you're going to make it right. So there's different stages along the way. So this is truly- What are some of those key stages that customers should know about? Well, I mean, we were just talking about when Hannah Enterprise Cloud is, could you run Hannah Enterprise Cloud? Now, it's fated completely. It's already done. It certainly can. And customers can make decisions now to say, hey, am I going to start on-prem? Am I going to start in the cloud? And go through that whole kind of process as to what's the best thing. So we're providing that flexibility, but this is something we've been working on for a while. And I think when you look at it, the other solutions out there and the customers making the right evaluation, you want to go with essentially and guess AP and Cisco to say, hey, there's the right muscle, the right process behind this. This is amazing. You guys are a great deal. Again, Frank Senior Vice President Cisco and Gary, who's the Chief Relationship Officer, President of the Advanced Solutions Group and Margaret Senior Vice President. All the senior executives, the principals here congratulates us on this news. We'll wait to see how it plays out. Thank you for having us today. Thank you. Cube coverage, special Cube coverage of Sapphire 2017. I'm John Furrier. Back with more live coverage after the short break.