 We just had Reggie Jackson on the Cube, famous baseball star, and I'm here with my co-host Dave Vellante. And we've talked about moneyball in the past, Danny, and it's going to get a little baseball theme back. But our next guest, we talked about moneyball with his CEO. Yeah, so Thomas Stanley, you were a former baseball player, right? Yeah, former baseball player. Oh, never as good as Reggie, but I love to present. I mean, he obviously is a great athlete, and he said, you know, Fleta, I could have been actually a pretty accomplished professional football player. I don't have any doubt in my mind, you know, having watched that guy play his body type. He looks great. He was a running back. Yeah, he was a phenomenal baseball player. No. Are Yankees your socks? Not too bad? Oh, you're a Yankees fan? Yes, I am. Oh, you didn't mention that to me. Well, it wasn't appropriate at the time. Did you grow up in New York? No, I actually had the unfortunate happen to divorce parents, so I grew up in North Carolina, and I spent my summers in New York. They didn't have a baseball team down there. There had been a lot of college teams. That's right, a lot of college teams. That's why I grew up. I came up with the Jeter days. So I saw him coming out. Yeah, he hit a couple balls against him. But he got the job. What did you play with position? I played center field. All right. So you got wheels? I got a little wheels. And you could hit? I could hit. I had wheels. That's right. I could cover. I love baseball. John's kid's a great baseball player. He's a baseball guy, too. Thomas about tech. He's with NetApp. He basically runs the global alliance programs. He's focused a lot on SAP. We're here at Sapphire. Thank you for the opportunity. Yeah, it's great to meet you. So you said you were here last year, too. Yeah. It's a nice, good show, isn't it? It is excellent. It's all about business. You're really seeing the message evolve. A lot about cloud, a lot about mobility. What's your take on the whole vibe here? Well, I think when I compared this year to last year, last year was all about, I think, what was to come. I think this year you actually see customers that can talk about what they've done, right? And I think if you're SAP, if you're part of the ecosystem with SAP like NetApp is, you're excited about the opportunity to be connected with what customers are actually doing now in the area of mobility, in the area of HANA. So it's exciting for us. You know, you think about historically, anyway, you talk about to customers about SAP, obviously tremendously functional. Absolutely. But complex, big. You know, we want to roll it out to 100 companies, so we've budgeted, you know, a few hundred million. But now the messaging is changing. It's all about speed, simplicity, personalization, mobility. Different messaging. Different messaging, different vibe. I mean, I think now it's all about how do you get the right information to the right people as secure as possible at the time that they need it, right? And a mobile workforce that we all live in, right? And allow people they need to make decisions to make the right decisions at that time, right? Or at least have the data such that they can make a good decision. So, you know, marketing always leads reality. So help us squint through that. I mean, where are we in the adoption of all this cool tech? I mean, I feel like customers are starved for it. But the tip of the iceberg, what inning is it? You know, these are baseball halologies. It's sort of first inning, are we middle of the game, and where are we? Oh, no, we've definitely done this, you know, six, seven inning stretch. So we've done the stretch. We've put the products out in the marketplace. Right now, I think it's all about how does the ecosystem come together? When you look at companies like SAP or NetApp, we don't survive on our own, right? It's about what the other eco partners bring to that relationship to help customers solve problems. In terms of the technology, it's like anything else. The technology has always been there, right? But we've got to see what the workloads are and the customer requirements and be able to fulfill them. And our budgets aren't unlimited, right? So I think the person who wins are the companies who can get there first and get an economical offering that's efficient and drives value for the clients, right? And I think some of that's happening, and that's the buzz I think we're seeing on the floor. Yeah, so you're known for making products that are simple. I mean, you guys have a great heritage, Silicon Valley icon. So what's your... Thank you for that, by the way. Oh, it's true, right? I mean, we've had Dave Hitz on theCUBE, we've had Tom Georgins, I mean, you know, a fantastic company with a great Silicon Valley heritage. What's your whole go-to market in SAP? I'll go to market with SAP is around a couple of things. First, it starts with innovation, right? Our belief is that we are in the solutions business from an innovation perspective. We're going to be the best in data management and storage from an innovation perspective. It's about the customer and what the customer requirements are. And with SAP, we get to meet that demand. So in the case of SAP, we look at them from a 360 perspective, right? The whole relationship, how they use our technology and the enterprise to bring differentiation out in their organization, how we use their technology from a go-to-market perspective. So in our software, we create hooks around SAP. So we believe because we do integration not only in front of the client, but behind the scenes as SAP rolls out technology and rolls out innovation, light-handed mobility, we can be best in class, right? So that is one of the most strategic relationships for NetApp. So I want to talk about FlexPod. And it's done very well. It goes back to the whole converged infrastructure thing. There's debate about how it all started, but I've always said, well, you know, VCE kind of started it off and then NetApp was right there, fast follower, but you had a different strategy. Now you saw EMC announced and IBM announced there. EMC announced VSPEX, IBM announced its pure systems with very FlexPod-like value proposition, openness, choice, etc. Which kind of affirmed what you guys are doing. And I know you do sell single skew as well through Avnet and others. So it's an interesting tit for tat, but I call it a big land grab going on out there. So give us an update on FlexPod, you know, how that's going and what the whole strategy is there with regard to SAP. Well, again, I think it comes back to the client innovation, right? And if you look at what clients want, so the work that was done by NetApp specific to FlexPod was looking at what are the best agreed offerings in Cisco UCS and the work we've done with VMware and our storage, and customers view that as a strong value proposition. We have half phenomenal growth in the FlexPod architecture. I won't say we're surprised, but we're certainly delighted by the growth we're seeing. We're amazed by the momentum, but it speaks to the fact that us and our competitors, what we would both agree on is that customers don't just want a stack from one company, which is what they manufacture or what they assemble. They want things that have great innovation and great R&D that have gone into it, and that's what you get with FlexPod. And it's winning in the market and we believe it will continue winning. Yeah, we quantified the market and we came to the conclusion two things very quickly, three things. One, this market's huge. Absolutely. I think that's legitimate because it comprises all servers, all storage, all networking. The second piece of that is that most of the market in the next five years is going to be some kind of converge, whether it's a single skew or some kind of reference architecture, plus whatever it is, more than well over half is going to be converged. And then the third piece that we found is that choice, you know, the open architectures, if you will, are the ones that are going to be largest. And so that that sort of plays well for you guys. And I presume you're seeing that in the marketplace. We are. And the other thing we're saying is because of our whole strategy of allowing the customer to consume NetApp technology the way they want to consume and by that what I mean is whether you're buying it through an outsource or a service provider or a reseller or distributor or you're buying direct from NetApp, we don't care, we're interested in adding value in the way customers want to consume technology. And the number one thing they want is to increase my time in the market to reduce my cost, not, you know, carry any risk of assuming that and be able to deploy simply and easily, right? And we're providing that with this infrastructure we call FlexBot and we think it's a phenomenal opportunity for us and a great opportunity for ridership for you all. We love it. Do people they want to pay a premium for that integration? I mean, you guys are doing a lot of testing, a lot of integration, a lot of work up front to make customers' lives easier. Should they be paying a premium for that? Actually, no, we haven't found that customers feel they have to pay a premium. One of the things we've done is we've looked at, you know, pricing, the market will determine the price, right? And the price is determined by the value that you bring and the value we're bringing is suggesting that there's no premium attached to that architecture of FlexBot. What's attached to it is value and a good return on a customer's investment. So why wouldn't somebody go for that type of converged solution? Not well informed, biased towards other particular architecture or being recommended architecture that's different from FlexBot at this time. Or our reach, which we're working on every day, get broader and broader in terms of our leverage to our partnerships in the market. So either those reasons. Well, and you guys have made a big brand push in the last three or four years that's presumably paid off. You've certainly seen it in the top line. Well, how about the lock-in issue? I mean, you hear that a lot. Maybe probably less so with FlexBot, right? Because you can pretty much use any server. The only thing you can't do with the more open solutions, there's a spectrum, right? There's any color you want as long as it's black. And then there's, you know, really sort of loose reference architectures, right? And then you guys are very much on that open side of the spectrum. You know, really, you can't use anybody's storage. That's where it's sort of, you guys all draw the line. Maybe you could pop a V-Series in. And we've done that before. But really what we've looked at is, you know, how do we create an environment where we're best to read around the storage and we can connect. I mean, if you think about it, we've connected to other people's networks and servers for many years. This is about us working with the best three partners, this one being where to create a differentiated architecture. We've seen that we can't connect to other architectures in the market. And we'll continue to do that. Yeah, and one of the things NetApp's always done well, I noticed when I first started following NetApp, or re-following NetApp after I left and came back into the business, you've always had a good, you know, tight application affinity, whether it's Microsoft or SAP, you always sort of put a big emphasis, we were talking about we had Patrick Rogers on last year. That was sort of his whole thing, you know, early on in his career, earlier in his career and as for SAP environments, particularly from the standpoint of where your investments are going to go. For us, the key imperative is to continue to not only be great at storage and data management, but to understand the workloads in the business applications. And SAP is a big driver, a significant workloads, and as long as we can continue the integration with them, we believe we can bring significant value to the marketplace. So for us, it's not just what our people do with the NetApp software, because we're in the software businesses, what do we do with our software connected to the applications that SAP is bringing to market? And our job is to be number one at that, and we're going to continue to do that. We think SAP is a phenomenal relationship for our company and for the market. I think the market is excited about seeing the two companies work well together. Good. Alright, Thomas Stanley, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for following Reggie, you know. The worst pleasure is for me, absolutely. Thank you so much. So stay with us folks for watching. This is theCUBE, our flagship telecast. We go out to the top tech events and talk to the fog leaders, executives, people in the trenches making things happen. We go to where the stories are at the events and we bring that to you. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. So stay right tuned. We'll be right back with our next guest and we'll talk more tech. And we're going to have the founder of SAP who invented all this and on next talk about developers and the future of software and cloud, mobile, social. So we'll be right back. Thank you.