 Live from Madrid, Spain. It's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Good afternoon from Madrid, everybody. Good morning on the East Coast. Good really early morning on the West Coast. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here at day one at HPE Discover Madrid 2017. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host, Peter Burris. Randy Meyers here as the Vice President and General Manager of the Mission Critical Business Unit at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And he's joined by Alexander Zhuk, who is at the SAP Practice Lead at El Dorado. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us. Randy, we were just reminiscing about the number of times you've been on theCUBE, the consecutive years. It's like the Patriots winning the AFC East. It just keeps happening. Or Cal Ripken. I think it's probably BVM. Me and Tom Brady. You're the Cal Ripken of theCUBE. So, give us the update. What's happening in the Mission Critical Business Unit? What's going on here at Discover? Well, it's just lots of exciting things going on. In fact, we just finished the main general session keynote and that was the coming out party for our new Superdome Flex product, right? So we've been in the Mission Critical space for quite some time now. Driving the HANA business. We've got 2,500 customers around the world. Small, large. And with our acquisition last year of SGI, we've got this fabulous technology that not only scales up to the biggest and most baddest things that you can imagine to the point where we're talking about Stephen Hawking using that to explore the universe, but it scales down four sockets, one terabyte, for lots of customers doing various things. So I look at that part of the Mission Critical business and it's just so exciting to take technology and watch it scale both directions to the biggest problems that are out there, whether they're commercial or enterprise. And Alexander will talk about lots of things we're doing in that space or even high performance computing now. So we've kind of expanded into that arena. So that's really the kind of the big news. Superdome Flex coming out and really expanding that customer base. But... Superdome Flex, any memory in that, baby? So, well, 32 sockets, 48 terabyte, if you want to go that big and it'll get bigger and bigger and bigger over time as we get more density that's there. And we really do have customers in the commercial space using that. I've got customers that are building massive ERP systems, massive data warehouses to go address that kind of memory. All right, let's hear from the customer. Alexander, first of all, tell us about your role and tell us about Eldorado. I'm responsible for SAP Bases Infrastructure and I'm working in Eldorado, who is one of the largest consumer electronics network in Russia. We have more than 600 shops all over the country in more than 200 cities and towns and have more than 16,000 employees. We have more than 50,000 stock keeping units and proceeding over 3.5 million orders via our internet shop annually. And let's see, so SAP Practice Lead, obviously this is a HANA story. So can you take us through your HANA journey? What led to the decision for HANA? Maybe give us a before and sort of during and after. What leading up to the decision to move to HANA? What was life like and why HANA? We first moved our business warehouse system to HANA back in 2011. At that time, we got strong business requirements to have quick reporting. So retail business is a business who is in need and very rapid decision-making. So after we moved to HANA, we get the speed increasing of reports generating in 15 times. We got stock management reports nine times faster and we got 50-minute sales reports every hour instead of two hours versus repeaters. Yes. No, no, no, it makes sense. So the move to HANA was really precipitated by a need to get more data faster so in memory allows you to do that. And what about the infrastructure platform underneath? Was it always HP at the time? That was 2011. What's HP's role, HPE's role in that HANA? Initially, we run our business system in Germany, primarily on IBM solutions. But then, according to the law requirements, we intended to go to Russia. And here, we choose HP solutions as the main platform for our HANA database and traditional databases. Okay. So Data Residency forced you to move this whole solution back to Russia. Now, if I may, Dave, one of the things that we're talking about, and I want to test this with you Alexander, is businesses not only have to be able to scale, but we talk about plastic infrastructure where they have to be able to change their workflows. They have to be able to go up and down, but they also have to be able to add quickly. How did, as you went through the migration process, how were you able to use the technology to introduce new capabilities into the systems to help your business grow even faster? At that time, before migration, we had strong business requirements for our business growing and have some forecasts how our HANA will grow. So we represented to our possible partners our needs. For example, our main requirement was possibility to scale up our CRM on HANA system up to nine terabytes memory. So at that time, there was only HPE who could provide that kind of solution. And you see, you migrated from a traditional RDBMS environment, your data warehouse previously was a traditional database. And then, is that right? And then you moved to HANA? Not all systems, but the most critical, most speed critical system. It's our business warehouse and CRM system. How hard was that? Okay, so the EDW and the CRM, how difficult was that migration? Did you have to freeze code? Was it a painful migration? Yes, from the application point of view, it was very painful because we had to change anything. Some of our reports had to be completely changed, reviewed, we had to adopt some ABAP code for the new database. So also, we got some HANA level troubles because it was very, very early date. Early days of HANA, I mean, I think it was announced in 2011, right? Yes. Maybe 2012. I think that's one of the things for most customers that we talk to you, it's a journey, right? You're moving from kind of a tried and true environment that you run for years, but you want the benefits of in memory, of speed, of massive data that you can use to change your business. But you have to plan that, right? And it was a great point. You have to plan, it's going to scale up. Some things might have to scale out. And at the same time, you have to think about the application migration, the data migration, the data residency rules, different companies or different countries have different rules on what has to be there. And I think that's one of the things we try to take into account as HPE when we're designing systems. I want to let you partition them. I want to let you scale them up or down depending on the workload that's there because you don't just have one. You have BW and CRM. You have development environments, test environments, staging environments. The more we can help that look similar and give you flexibility, the easier that is for customers. And then I think it's incumbent on us also to make sure we support our customers with knowledge, service, expertise. Because it really is a journey. And but you're right, 2011 it was the Wild West. So give us the HPE HANA commercial. Everybody always says, ah, we're great at HANA, we're best at HANA. What makes HPE best at HANA different with HANA? What makes us best at HANA? One, we're all in on this. We have a partnership with SAP. We're designing for the large scale, as you said, that nobody else was building up into this space. Lots of people are building one terabyte things, okay. But when you really want to get real, when you want to get to 12 terabytes, when you want to get to 24 to 48, we're not only building systems capable of that, we're doing co-engineering and co-innovation work with SAP to make that work, to test that. I put systems onsite in Waldorf, Germany to allow them to go do that. We'll go diagnose software issues in the HANA code jointly and say, here's where you're stressing that and how can we go leverage that. You couple that with our services capability and our move towards, you'll consume HANA in a lot of different ways. There will be some of it that you want on-premise, in-house, there'll be some things that you say that part of it might want to be in the cloud. Yes, my answer to all of those things is yes, how do I make it easy to fit your business model, your business requirements and the way you want to consume things economically? How do I allow you to say yes to that? 2,500 customers, more than half of the installed base of all HANA systems worldwide reside on Hewlett Packard Enterprise. I think we're doing a pretty good job of enabling customers to say, that's a real choice that we can go forward with not just today but tomorrow. Alexander, are you doing things in the cloud? I'm sure you are, but what are you doing in the cloud? Are you doing HANA in the cloud? We have not a traditional cloud, as it's used to say now. We have a private cloud. We have, during some seclusion sense, we got all the hardware into our property and now it is operating by our partner, our community company. They're responsible for all the layers, from hardware layer, service contracts, hardware maintenance, and up to the basic operation system support and the CP support. So if you had to do it all over again, what might you do differently? What advice would you give to other customers going down this journey? My advice is to, at first, choose the right team and the right service provider because when you got solution, some technical overview, architectural review, you should get some confirmation from vendor. At first, it should be confirmed by HPE. It should be confirmed by SAP. Also, there is a financial question how to sponsor all this thing. And we got all the things from HPE and our service partner at the interior. Great. Give me the last word. So, one, it's an exciting time. We're watching this explosion of data happening and I believe we've only just scratched the surface. Today we're looking at tens of thousands of SKUs for a customer and looking at the velocity of that going through a retail chain. But every device we have is going to have a sensor in it. It's going to be connected all the time. It's going to be generating data to the point where you say, I'm going to keep it and I'm going to use it because it's going to let me take real-time action. Someday they'll be able to know that the mobile phone they care about is in their store and pop up an offer to a customer that's exactly meaningful to do that. That confluence of sensor data, location data, all the things that we will generate over time, the ability to take action on that in real-time, whether it's fix a part before it fails, create a marketing offer to the person that's already in the store that allows them to buy more. That allows us to search the universe and search for, you know, how did we all get here? That's what's happening with data. It is exploding. We're at the very front edge of what I think is going to be transformative for businesses and organizations everywhere. It is cool. I think the advent of in-memory data analytics, real-time, it's going to change how we work. It's going to change how we play. Frankly, it's going to change humankind when we watch some of these researchers doing things at a massive level. It's pretty cool. Yeah, and the key is being able to do that wherever the data lives. Absolutely. Gentlemen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having us. You're welcome. Great to see you guys again. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Peter and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is theCUBE. We're live from HPE Discover, Madrid, 2017. We'll be right back.