 Okay, we're back at EMC World Wrapping Up Day 2. It's all quiet now, because it's the end of the day. Crowd's moving out. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. Join my co-host Dave Vellante. Dave, we have a special guest inside theCUBE. Henrik Wagner is here. Henrik is very much involved in the SAP relationship. He's with EMC. Henrik, welcome back to theCUBE. It's always great to see you. My pleasure. Thank you very much for having me. Great to see you again. Thank you very much. John, I was at EMC World Wrapping Up Day 2. John, I was at EMC's EBC, the place where they bring in customers and brief them, Executive Briefing Center. Two weeks ago, Stu and I went down, and Henrik, EMC had, you guys had this SAP week, which was one of several that you've been having, but this was a big one. There were well over 200 customers there. We interviewed a bunch of them. We had EMC IT folks on. We're talking about Project Propell. We had some other folks from SAP and EMC on. Talk about that event. I mean, that's pretty amazing. 250 customers to come to your EBC all at once. Usually it's a onesie choosie type of thing. Yeah, no, it's an interesting learning experience and what we've done with SAP week concept. Couple of quick things first. What we've learned over the last couple of years is that our SAP customers, specifically the SAP customers are there and they want to learn from each other. They want to collaborate and learn from each other. The other thing we've learned in the SAP ecosystem is it's a tremendously collaborative environment. They're leveraging social media. They're talking together whether it's ASUG or the SAP mentors, Twitter and so forth. So we've always done this SAP week events, but it's been very, over the last couple of years, it was very much technology presentations, whiteboard to the customer about products and solutions. Talking to them. Yeah, talking to them, right? So the last two, three years, we've looked for innovative ways to better communicate and work with our customers. And what we realized is getting in a lot of SAP customers in the room together and rather than us presenting to them, is having them present to each other. Create kind of a user group environment where they're talking to each other, customers presenting to other customers. We have, you know, EMC project propel over there, speak in. And then also we incorporate things like joint dinners where everybody's coming and we specifically put clients together that have things in common. Maybe they're going through an x86 replatforming project. Maybe they're deploying SAP HANA on BW and so forth. So the whole concept is getting customers connected and collaborating together so they can learn from each other versus just hearing about our products and solutions. And Rick, talk about the SAP transformation. We've been there four years with the cubes. Their fourth next week is SAP Sapphire. We'll be there for our fourth season or fourth year as well as EMC world. Interesting transition. EMC is really transforming almost in parallel as fast as SAP. SAP both, you guys have huge install-based businesses. So talk about what your view is there. It's been really interesting over the last couple years. I think there's some compelling events that come together and we divide our SAP business up in the private cloud or the cloud business and then also the big data in the HANA space. In the private cloud piece, there's some interesting things that's happened around adoption around VMware and cloud and virtual cloud architectures for SAP. And I think over the last two years we're winning a lot of customers that are now deploying private cloud solutions whether it's on-premise in their data center or off-premise with their external or virtual private cloud with our service providers. But a couple years ago, that used to be anomaly. People, there were some early adopters. Today, we're winning extremely large customers that are going down this path. It's not if they should go down that path anymore. It's how do I go down that path and how quickly can I go down there? We just had a 100 billion dollar retailer that most people in the world are customers of just purchased VBlock for SAP and they're now going to deploy and go live here in August on a massive system, 100% virtual on VBlock and the private cloud. So that alignment has come really well for us around standardizing for X86, driving VMware and virtualization around SAP and then also driving automation. So things like SAP LVM, Cisco Tidal. This week we heard about Viper and the underlying framework for software-defined data centers driving that automation for SAP customers. So that's been a very interesting and now we feel like we've come to this tipping point and actually wrote a blog post about it where I said this year you better deploy private cloud for SAP, otherwise you're going to be falling behind other customers. Cloud is the future. Any other quick sound bites you want to share with the folks around? What you're seeing in the marketplace from social media to the changes in the business landscape? You know, very interesting. We've connected with a lot of customers and ecosystems and partners around social media. I think our executives, Jeremy Burton was talking about it yesterday around aligning with our strategy and our customer strategy but then aligning with the ecosystem and one of the outlets we've been able to see to do that is doing that through user groups, through social media, through Twitter, communicating because the ecosystem around SAP is communicating that way. I'll give you one example which is kind of an interesting new way of getting data or information out to our clients. At actually the SAP Week event we had the EMC project propel folks there. Mike Harding is one of the head architects. We convinced him one of the evenings to start his own Twitter account which he started tweeting about propel but the next night we came up with the idea of starting a Twitter account that's called Put It on HANA. A Twitter handle name is Put It on HANA and what Mike Harding is doing, he's documenting on Put It on HANA everything that EMC IT is doing around HANA. So when they're about to go to deploy or upgrade or deploy a patch or what's his next strategy of deploying BW for HANA, he's putting the journey real time on Twitter. I just think it's an amazing new way of communicating and getting information out to clients. I think we have an opportunity to do even more things of that nature to connect even closer with our customers and drive more value in the ecosystem. What's driving SAP's business in your opinion? I mean the company's obviously doing very well. Market cap is rising. It's making my prediction wrong that EMC and VMware would be the next $100 billion market cap company. I made that back in 2010 but SAP's going to beat you there. What's driving their business? I think Steve Lucas said it really well in one of his keynote presentations a couple weeks ago. They want their customers, they want to innovate for their customers and they want their customers to innovate so they can move faster. One of the examples that a lot of SAP executives bring up is why does it take 35 clicks to order a laptop for the company to work but when I order a pizza it's one click on my Apple device or my iPhone. So I think they want to innovate for their customer. They want their customers to innovate so they can move faster to gain convenience advantage and competitive advantage. But they also realize I think one of the only ways you're going to be able to do that is if you reduce the run rate of your existing infrastructure for SAP. Reduce the TCO of that infrastructure and that's why I think we come in very well with our private cloud strategy and leveraging EMC virtual infrastructure, VMware, driving down that cost and then helping those customers drive agility and drive innovation for those clients. What are your thoughts on just the industry in general? I mean you've got the big players that are just really solid, right? They've got momentum, they've got giant balance sheets, they're using them, even if they're not growing a lot their profits are growing and they continue to, even the biggest ones, truck along and you've got startups, they innovate and they get sucked in. Is that sort of where we're at now? I mean it's where we're at in the business. Is that it? Is that we're going to see sort of indefinitely in your opinion? Well, I think it's interesting how EMC's been able to position themselves and continue to drive, out-drive R&D and acquisitions than our competitors compared to the size of our company, right? So most executives have talked about that, the amount of money we spend on R&D and acquisition, it looks like we continuously stay ahead of that innovation curve being the size of the company we have and to me that's just so inspirational to be part of a company that are able to do that and continue to drive innovation doing things like the Pivotal Initiative doing things like the joint partnership with VCE and so forth. How are you able to do that? I mean just go back in the heritage because, you know, let's face it your customers are heads-down customers most of them are just trying to solve storage problems yet EMC is able to break out the glass and toggle and see, you know, distances. How is that? I think there's a combination of forces of CIOs not getting the budgets they need from the CFO the next year they're being forced to come up with opportunities to reduce run rate from 10 to 15 percent and then at the same time they're looking and the CIOs and IT organizations are looking for ways to bring more value and be more relevant to the boardroom and the way they can do that is making IT into competitive advantage and that's obviously where HANA comes in the customers that really get HANA they're the ones that put their data people their business people their IT people in one room they come up with an analytics use case or a business case in a use case leverage HANA that directly impacts the way they do business on gaining customers or retaining customers or creating new revenue streams for them so I think there's a combination of pull and push that we're seeing and EMC is fortunate to be very well positioned in that space. Henry Wagner thanks for coming on the queue your friend we wanted to get you in because we had a great conversation last night I'll see you next week at SAP Sapphire again but again thanks for sharing that perspective love talking social media with you last night I know you got a great vision you're on you understand what we do we love love chatting with you and again EMC's been a great success partner with SAP thanks to you guys so okay we'll be right back with our day 2 wrap up Dave and I will wrap up day 2 after this short break so stay with us if you're still watching hang on for one more segment