 We're back, this is Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of events around the world. We try to extract the signal from the noise, bring you the best guests that we can find. We're here at 42 South Street in Hoppington, Massachusetts. This is SAP Week at EMC. They brought in about 200 customers and a number of partners, including SAP and also Cisco. Rajiv Thomas is here. And first of all, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much, nice being here. So we're going to take a little different perspective here. Cisco, big partner, obviously of EMC's, VCE. You guys are the new kid in the block in the platform business, obviously a dominant company in the networking space. Talk about what's going on with SAP customers. Sure. What we've found so far in the SAP world is that, you know, being a new kid in the block is not necessarily a bad thing. You know, one of the things we've actually have seen is that the world has changed pretty dramatically. I've been very guilty in the past of actually building very, very large SAP monolithic systems. And that kind of term monolithic doesn't exist anymore. People are actually moving to this whole new model, a distributed model. Matter of fact, from a hardware perspective, we've moved there. From a software perspective, SAP has also released new applications in that space that are also now becoming very distributed. And that's pretty key. From that perspective, what we're finding is that the combination of Cisco, EMC, VMware technologies put together has this seamless approach to provide the best solution for these distributed data systems out there. So, for example, SAP HANA. SAP HANA is a new generation of application. It truly shines when you have a distributed model. What does that mean? We actually take the capabilities of software, the capabilities of storage and compute all put together. Put it on a very flat infrastructure. Low latency, highly compute intensive at the same time, but also having memory drive that compute. We lived in a world where we wanted the biggest, baddest, fastest systems in the planet, right? And that worked well for 30 years. Today, it's not about that anymore. It's also about having the right ratio of power and cooling for that environment, having the right amount of compute capacity, but also driving pricing lower into the ground, right? But providing the best performance out there. So, what Cisco and EMC have done, coupled with VMware technologies for replatforming perspectives, customers who want to move away from a monolithic world into this new world where we introduce VBlock configurations. We also have other configurations for HANA-based systems where we can actually allow you to integrate new solutions that are very scalable. In effect, I mean, we're not building for today, we're building for tomorrow. We actually have a solution that allows you to start with this configuration today, but scale seamlessly. And I really do mean schemlessly. Add components as you go and you can actually scale upwards and onwards to very large density. So those configurations truly are changing what we've seen in the market today. You talk about monolithic, obviously you think about monolithic, command and control, big, complex. There's some advantages to scale up monolithic, but as you say, increasingly they're waning and we've seen the big web giants like Google and Facebook sort of innovate in this notion of scale out. It's almost, and I'd be interested in your thoughts on this, it's almost as if companies like yours are trying to bring that sort of scale out mentality to the enterprise because the enterprise doesn't have a thousand PhDs running around to architect all these, all the software to run on top of commodity hardware. So talk about that a little bit. Sure, absolutely. I mean, right now you're 100% right. I mean, if you look at all the new category killers in the market today, the ones that are driving Wall Street in general, you're seeing distributed applications from these entities like a Facebook, like a Google truly driving that. SAP's introduced new software that has truly changed the game there. Mainframes were a great story about 30 years ago. Matter of fact, mainframes aren't going away. There's still some applications that behave really well, but there are also a ton of new applications that are mission critical for enterprises that are built for distributed data systems, that are actually built for scale out based configurations. And that's what we're finding out there in the market is that there's an explosion out there. Big data needs are big driving, big compute, big memory systems out there as well. And so we're building the right solution to attack that kind of base. Well, a lot of people would say, Rajiv, that you talk about the mainframe, a lot of people would say, okay, well SAP is sort of the mainframe of the applications business, but their business is booming. But you see these SaaS competitors coming in, guys like Workday and obviously Salesforce. And SAP has made some acquisitions and made some moves. What gives you the confidence that SAP's got the right strategy, the right technologies in the right direction to continue to be able to innovate and keep up with this new scale out world? Great question. I mean, that's something that I love to answer. Here's an opportunity for SAP to really shine. You look back in the market, you see that SAP is a very large application, some considerate monolithic in some ways. That being said, what we'll call that in the legacy environment is something called an on-premise solution, right? SAP understands that market pretty well. They've been doing it for how many years now, over 30 years right now. And at the same time though, they recognize that the world is also moving to these kind of cloud-like architectures, like you just mentioned, NetSuite and Salesforce.com and other vendors out there. Those are cloud-like solutions, but SAP has also recognized that they need to be in both markets, not just in one. Customers truly do want to have a secure environment, perhaps owning their own data. Maybe they're going to open up and actually allow some of the data to the outside world. So will they have a hybrid approach? They're going to have to have an on-premise and an off-premise model. Perhaps that off-premise model includes a private cloud that is controlled by them, or maybe it's an off-premise model that's a public cloud. SAP is actually building solutions that are very cloud-friendly, but at the same time providing the same functionality that they've had for customers who require on-site security, on-site protection of the data. I've talked about systems architecture a little bit, and as I say, you guys are a new kid in the block, so you're bringing in some new innovations with things like UCS, bringing together the server and the networking component. I've likened systems architecture of the past to a military convoy, where the entire convoy has to decelerate, right, to allow the slowest vehicle to keep up, and that slowest vehicle, of course, is the spinning disk, and now you've got all this in-memory technology coming along, you've got flash entering the game. So what's Cisco's angle with regard to sort of future systems architectures? So what we've loaded in the past world is where a world where compute is driving all the innovation out there in the market. Today we're seeing that memory is driving innovation. Why is that? Everybody cares about the quality of data, the quality of data in real time, and because of that, we can no longer rely on being the slowest component of any kind of chain, right? We can't rely on the slowest truck and the military convoy anymore. Everybody has to move at the same speed. Matter of fact, everybody has to accelerate 10 times faster than ever before to keep up with all the data explosion that's going out there. Cisco treats the world with our partner, the EMC. We're building the fact that we're treating data just like we're treating compute out there. Memory, IO, compute requirements, they all have to be peers. It's not about a compute system that's driving and bringing along IO memory or storage. Everybody has to be on board at the same time, same frequency to go and attack that market because we recognize that the data requirements today are going to be really different a year from now, 10 years from now. So we need to be skilled to support that all forward going forward. So it's kind of a mundane topic but I want to pick your brain about metadata. So today we have all the infrastructure, a lot of the infrastructure is siloed and you've got all this great metadata locked away in storage devices or servers or networking components. You bring that together with something like UCS and V blocks. Talk about the metadata component. How does that change and what kind of value can people build on top of that? And who controls that? Is it the network? Is this a server? Is it the storage? Talk about that from an architectural perspective. So metadata, the notion of metadata is also evolving is my opinion as well. What we're seeing is the passion we can actually address metadata in traditional approaches. It's no harm in doing that. But as we're actually changing with new types of data sets out there, we're seeing distributed data. What we're seeing is that many corporations now are incorporating Twitter and Facebook as mission critical applications into their environment. That didn't happen five years ago. Matter of fact, probably not even a year ago but it's there today. And we have corporates asking for different types of data access out there. Cisco, EMC, VM where we have solutions out there that'll actually address both the legacy environments as well as the future requirements to support those. Talk a little bit about the nature of your relationship with EMC. You guys are, we live in this world of co-operation, you've got multiple partners but you seem to have this special relationship with EMC, certainly VCE. Talk about that a little bit. How do you see that evolving over time and what are you guys doing to differentiate in the marketplace? Well, I can't tell you what will happen in the future but I can tell you what's going on today. It's a great partnership. I mean, the partnership is bringing together the best-read approach. Look, we really don't understand the market for storage, the market for tech-source technologies out there as well. Matter of fact, I mean, EMC is also bringing a security and reliability solutions. More as say, bringing in virtualization solutions and other types of solutions from other joint ventures. Cisco understands the network, they understand the compute requirements, they understand the technology piece. We were also really requiring the partnership of EMC to bring all those passes together because business solutions out there in the market require that. We're not talking about technology anymore. We're talking about the fact that we can build components together, build them together seamlessly and that's critical. So with the highest levels down to the lowest levels, we work really closely with EMC to ensure we have a product to market. Hey, we have a joint venture partnership with a company called VCE and that product, their products actually are a result of the combination of those integration features VCE. Cisco has amazingly dominant market share in networking. It's like two thirds of the market. I mean, it's almost like a Microsoft like or EMC like share. You don't see that typically in other markets. You certainly don't see that in servers. You don't see that in storage even when the company is powerful as EMC. How was Cisco able to achieve that and what can you do to maintain that in particular with all these disruptions coming out? We talked about big data. We've talked about, you know, a hyperscale. There's all this whole, you know, software led, you know, moon that's going on. How were you able to achieve that dominance and how can Cisco maintain it? Interesting question. I mean, yes, Cisco has been a dominant leader in the routing switch market for quite some time. That being said though, Cisco has been deployed in many different areas. I mean, truly what's really changing, what's really driving this is one of these, right? iPhones, iPads. So the whole mobility story is kind of evolving this completely dramatically in a different way. You know, we're not talking about maybe a couple hundred thousand users anymore. We're probably talking billions of users that we need to scale and support for in the future. And that is critical for Cisco's success. So we're not just involved in one market. We understand that going forward, having software solutions, having partnerships with EMC to address those billion eyeballs out there is critical. Excellent. Listen, Rajiv, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate your expectations. All right, take care. Thank you very much. All right, thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with our next guest.