 So I see Wandawek from Ross McMillan. Thank you Ross and Joe from Jeffries. You just talk about the scale of people's soft installs within the SEP base, and when you're knocking on that opportunity to potentially replace that yourself, for a SEP customer, is it employee-centered, if you agree with, or could it be on-prem? I think... These factors are a topic to all the financial analysts. SiliconANGLE has been on the ground all week. We've got another full day today and tomorrow. We've had the co-CEO's on. We're going to have Michelle Sica and House of Plotiners, the founder of SAP on. It's an amazing opportunity, and all the action is happening right here in the Global Communications Center, here in Orlando for a live for Sapphire. This is theCUBE, and our next guest is Bill Reed. Hey, Bill from EMC IT, talking about SAP. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. There's a lot of action going on right now. There's definitely a lot of action, especially right now with the briefings going on and customers everywhere. It's great. My first question is, obviously, we were at EMC World, and we had the new IT guy that took over for Sanjay Murton-Don, who's been on theCUBE multiple times. SAP is a big part of your strategy. We've heard from EMC and SAP Innovation Centers, a lot of co-innovation as they talk about. Talk about what you guys are doing with SAP because the virtualizing SAP is something that we were talking about yesterday with David Floyer, and it's big for your customers. And you guys always drink your own champagne, drink your own beer since it's a German company who's used the beer reference in this one. What's happening with you guys right now? Where is it to SAP? Can I just rephrase that slightly? I'd like to ask you what you're doing about consolidating and virtualizing the SAP within the organization. Absolutely. We just went live in July of last year on a 27-month journey, basically, the completion of a 27-month journey to our SAP platform. That was a journey of virtualization, consolidation of legacy systems and legacy tool sets to enable EMC's business for the next decade. So what we did is we took a kind of a green-field approach to our SAP roadmap and as we were looking around the data center for opportunities for consolidation and ultimately retirement of a lot of assets, SAP became the target for that. From a technology standpoint where I come in, we wanted to make sure that that was as flexible and scalable and easy to manage and maintain for the future. So we went with a 100% virtualized stack on the VCEV block and virtualized everything from the dialogues to the central instances including database tiers. Okay. What were your findings? First of all, what were the business reasons that you were doing this? Was it led by IT? Was it led by the business? Yeah. The tasks were very focused on the technology but in reality this one was a business transformation. At its heart, we recognized that where EMC was a decade ago wasn't where we wanted to be in the next decade. So we wanted to focus first and foremost on the business capabilities that SAP was going to deliver for us. That meant from a technology standpoint we needed to stay out of their way and make sure that everything that we were deploying and configuring and building on the infrastructure was ahead of them, staying ahead of their challenges, staying ahead of their needs and being able to anticipate as many of those capabilities within the technology stack itself. Right. So I've done some research as well on other companies who are going down a similar road and the primary one seems to be the business benefit of a consolidation of all the different SAPs that are around having a one common instance or landscape SAP landscape and the business value of that being sort of a small end of it's easier to do the financial analysis. For example, if you have one set of analysis you can then centralize that and reduce cost in different countries or different parts of the organization and then to the bigger one you can just have more people to do business. You can facilitate the increase of business with the same hit. Yeah, exactly the same analysis that we've concluded in our space. We did ask the question as every enterprise customer should as a single global instance versus a multi-region strategy work for you. And in our case, for exactly the reasons that you've highlighted in there, single global instance for us from a financial controls, from an integration controls, from an ease of management and single global processes across the business units, across the globe. It makes sense for us to say single global instance consolidation of strategy and complexity to the front door though. And the businesses have to understand that by region you can't operate as an independent entity. You've got to understand why it affects and how it affects the global cost of ownership. We spent a lot of time really transforming the business up front and ensuring that the technology of course could support that. And you did that in 27 months. We did that in 27 months. That's a record. We've talked to a lot of providers around the size and the scope and the timelines that we did it in. We're just above that in the y-axis. So a lot of power went into that and a lot of nights and weekends in fact to support that. So let's talk about the technology for a bit. You chose to go with VCE and that's a virtualized platform. What were some of the reasons for that and what were the savings that you dropped from doing it that way? Yeah, we've had a lot of experience within EMCs in particular around virtualization. It wasn't starting with SAP. Many years ago. In fact, we started in about the 2003-2004 timeline. So all of the benefits that we had been reaping from consolidation of idle capacity and the density management that you can get from server consolidation was applied to what we were going to do in the SAP space. About a year before we started the program the VCE initiative was started up with VMware and EMC and Cisco to create this consolidated converged infrastructure capability called the Vblock. We were in the data centers and started to see the same benefits of even further consolidation and further convergence of those tool sets. So we said it's a no-brainer for us. We're jumping right in and we're going to go SAP virtualization on that Vblock. What were the major savings by doing that? A lot of back of the napkin ideas right now but we really feel that anywhere from 35-40% of the hardware costs disappeared from what we would have had to do in a more traditional model about nine years ago where we would have had large traditional bare metal systems being deployed on very complex infrastructure versus that which we would have had. Some of that of course is the hardware some of that is the licensing some of that is the resource cost of managing that and overall the sprawl of infrastructure that you're maintaining year after year in the cost of ownership. So what we've seen is that that converged infrastructure helps us from all aspects of operations the major benefits not so much some on the hardware but the licensing cost is one particularly at the Oracle side of things has been an area where you can make significant savings. One of the questions we're asked most is about how did you virtualize Oracle and how did you virtualize any database tier for that matter and from an approach perspective we essentially went out to Vblock and dedicated a few blades within the infrastructure creating a cluster around our database licensing those in the virtualization stack avoiding cost saving cost of preventing the sprawl of the licensing across the entire arrays that you have in the blades within the infrastructure. And the sort of relative cost was that sort of 40% in terms of total cost? From a hardware cost perspective specifically we really feel that it was in that neighborhood, yes. I'm going back to the business as a whole I think you were talking today in one of the presentations about the savings there From a pure environmental standpoint we were starting with about 160 applications in the legacy ERP tool sets that had interfaces in the complexity of 450 to 500 point to point intus and out of the old environment by converging that and consolidating that into the new SAP stack we're really looking at only around 60 applications now left over so through retirement through convergence through ultimately end of life and effectiveness for the business we've seen tremendous gains in just a sheer cost of ownership but most importantly we measure it in business SLA how fast we can take an order how fast we can ship that order out the door to a customer that's really where we're seeing the big benefits in the business space. So Bill I want to ask you about complexity and infrastructure in flexibility that's a theme we're hearing here inside the cube at SAP and one of the things we were talking about an SAP customer on earlier yesterday talking about some of the things they've done and they're looking for more integration but yeah SAP doesn't want to be like Oracle in the sense of being fully integrated so what experience have you guys had there and what are you seeing from customers as you guys do it internally at EMC and then go out on the road what are those integration points and how tightly coupled do you get? There's probably two aspects you can think about when it comes to integration there's more private cloud infrastructure that you might have in your data center and the introduction into the marketplace of this cloud capabilities cloud's been around for a while and SaaS providers and such but as the bandwidth is improving as the SLA's are getting better and the hosting capabilities within the cloud are emerging there's more and more opportunity to start decoupling capabilities from what used to be traditionally in your data center only opportunities and what are the roles we took an approach within EMC created this concept that we called our application integration cloud where we wanted an encapsulation of SAP, a gatekeeper for anybody that wanted to talk to SAP or if SAP wanted to send data out we wanted to go through this data fabric that we created that we coined our AIC, our application integration cloud that leverages components from now the pivotal company called Spring Source and GemFire and those as it's being communicated in and out of our data centers. Much like the other customers we're referring to this morning, integrations will be the linchpin that if it falls apart, so goes your business. The touch points within and out of the SAP environment or any environment are the integrations. And that was an approach that we took differently and seen some tremendous success with that. So one of the, again, to pivot on some of the themes here at SAP, Bill McDermott was just on stage during the press conference from the CEO, co-CEO's, and he kind of used the example. He's always full of analogies. He used the example of the old days you hire a general contractor and you have to deal with all the subs and the different subs will come in. They're essentially doing a lot of more prefabrication was the word. And I didn't really like the analogy because prefab house is not as nice as, you know, a well-built craftsman's house. But in a way, that's kind of a trend, kind of prefabricate, test things, get things tightly coupled with what you're referring to. At the same time, we, speed's key, right? You mentioned months that you guys deployed. We heard the customer yesterday that literally had a gun to his head saying, I have data center issues. I got sprawl and I have huge issues on my data center, just not just size, there's a space constraint, servers, licenses, and he only had six months to move. So what is the speed thing? Take me through the speed. How, why is it so fast to move? We're hearing six months, what you mentioned, what, 27 months? That's pretty amazing in IT. That's like, you know, a decade in IT years. So why is the speed so important and why you guys being able to pull it off? I think there's two aspects. I think the more important one is the business aspects. The system that we had, much like many other enterprise IT shops, they're probably not up to date with what their business is today. And in our case, we had deployed our ERP systems 10 years ago. And in the 10 year time period, we have through acquisition and through growth, we had invested $30 billion in M&A and R&D. So we were much different of a company than we looked when we first deployed the ERP system. So we needed to get to a system that could be enabling the business for the next 10 years. What did it need to look like? I couldn't look backwards, I needed to continue to look forward. In that end, speed was key. If I delivered something for where we were when we started the program, the business was already two and a half years ahead of that. So we needed to stay with them as fast as possible. Secondly, on top of that, we realized it was just a foundational release. And therefore, the foundation was going to be enabled for agile releases on top of that and bellowed out for additional capabilities. Speed was everything for the business. It was five years ago that they needed this, two years from now was too late. Let's get the capabilities out the door so that they could manage this in the future. Also on the press release, they were talking about HANA a lot. HANA being a replacement of the big data analytics. You've got an implementation of HANA, which you've virtualized as well. Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing with HANA? Absolutely. We went live with SAP in July of 2012 and our HANA Go Live was essentially in September about two months later. We've implemented it in a side-by-side or a side-car implementation, as it's being referred to by many customers, where we had a need within our business operations for near real-time reporting, our real-time operational analytics to give us the information we needed to make decisions about end-of-quarter manufacturing processes, logistics, et cetera. And rather than introducing several new users into the environment, what we wanted to do was give them a location that they could get their analytics and their operational data from SAP. HANA gave us that opportunity. So what we're doing is we're replicating several ECC tables via system landscape transfer in SAP and building our models on top of the HANA target. We're then giving our users the opportunity to consume that data and make the decisions that they need to do that. There's a great roadmap ahead, I think, with HANA. The capabilities that we're looking at are really surrounding the SAP environment and what it can do to help embellish what we're doing in both ERP and as the roadmap expands out to other business units within EMC. It's almost an operationalized analytic component. That's exactly how we would describe it, yes, definitely. So are you still using other tools within your organization for the big data that HANA is not the only solution? That's a great point. Within SAP, sorry, within EMC's data centers, SAP is a very large footprint, of course, but it's not my entire data center. I've got other SAS solutions, I've got other HR tool sets, I've got other CRM tools that I'm still running in within my four walls. And the analytics that we need to do on all of the data, not just SAP data, says, how do I aggregate that into a single repository? And in our case, we've got our Green Plum appliance that we're aggregating and creating a business analytics as a service destination, where we can take these solutions and create a semantic layer, create a data model that can be consumed, self-service consumption is really our ultimate goal, where we can let users come in and service their own needs rather than going and putting in a request into IT, waiting a month or two, and then getting something that may or may not have exactly met their needs. We've got this Green Plum appliance as a business analytics target for us. Right, so it's Hadoop-based and a normal big data. All of the capabilities, you can aggregate, multi-tenancy, all these great capabilities that come in with that, bigger than just SAP for us. And you might use Hannah on the back end of that as an analytic tool or maybe other tools. What we're finding is some great opportunities in the SAP BW landscape as a future roadmap to say, well, can I give the analytics in the BW space faster? Because there's one thing to look at something post-end of quarter or post-the-monthly close, but it's another thing to say, what happened yesterday? What happened last week, where it's a little bit closer to the source? Not the need for the real-time analytics that we have in our sidecar approach, but something between the two worlds, and that's where we're looking at that. Business planning and consolidation, BPC, is another great topic that we're thinking about as a roadmap for our roadmap. What are you guys seeing for business value that's come out of the efficiencies that you guys have done? Because that's a big conversation at SAP here. I mean, bold, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a conversation here about business value. And all the conversations pivot quickly. We were commenting after the keynote, David and I, about Hannah goes right to business value. So there's real emphasis on the business value. So you're getting the time to value on the deployments and the pre-integrated stuff. Integrated approach seems to work well. It's resonating well from what we're hearing. What's the business value that you guys have realized that you could share with folks? I think there's two, right in particular, that jump out at me. One of them was in the Hannah target. I'll go back to Hannah for a moment. We had a backlog report that essentially, at the end of the day, it's a production orders created that hasn't yet shipped. Simple definition of backlog. Far more complicated when you're looking at regions and products and inventories based around the globe. And that report would take us in an ECC, ABAP deployment anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes to process in a global space. We spent the time and we've invested the time and the resources to understand what a Hannah model could look like in building analytics on top of that same report. We're now able to run that same report in about two minutes in the Hannah target. Took effort, it took time, it took understanding of the data to get us there. But that value is instant to the business. And when that report's not available, we're going to hear about it quickly from our business. So at the end of the show yesterday, we had a chance to bump into the hallways and get some reporting from some Hannah labs guys. It was serendipitous because they don't like to talk and press is kind of like. So I had a corner and I said, what is the most amazing thing you've ever seen with Hannah? Give me just the most amazing thing. And they're like, smile, because they have to think about it. What is the most amazing thing? So I'll give you some time to think about it as I tell the story, because I'm going to ask you the same question. He said, we ran a report and he goes, I saw it with my own eyes. He's direct quote, I saw it with my own eyes. We had a report that took 25 days, now it runs 25 seconds. So okay, that's huge, right? You can go on vacation if that's the competition. Get a cup of coffee, it's done. Another one's a month. What have you seen the most amazing thing that you've seen with what you guys have done with SAP and the virtualization component? I think it's, I've already talked about some of the reporting, the integration layer that we were talking about a few minutes ago. We're seeing 20 times the performance out of the new system that we had in the old system. The most amazing thing. The most amazing thing. Back to the virtualization that I lived and breathed. I would say the ability to spin up a production sized landscape and a timeframe that we did it to support an unplanned environment need during the program. We were in one of our final cutover tests and we had a major problem that we weren't going to meet our business SLA for cutover. And frankly, I probably wouldn't be here today if we weren't able to do what we did in that timeframe. We created a new environment, gave it to the business, retested everything and validated that we were good for cutover at the 11th hour. Unplanned environment, unplanned everything. Couldn't have done that before with physical infrastructure. Could not have done that without the capabilities of conversion. That's amazing. That's amazing. And the consequence was to update the LinkedIn profile. Exactly. IT guys, don't update your LinkedIn, get the EMC solution. Okay, cool, that's cool. David, what do you think about this? I mean, come on. I mean, that's pretty amazing. Have you seen anything? I've been talking to the people that have done this consolidation. I think I'm a slightly different viewer. It's amazing, but not in quite the same way. It's amazing the reduction in complexity that they're managing to achieve by, as you said, cutting out all of the interactions between all the other different sort of applications that have been going on and really stitching things together behind the scenes with all these little bits of band aid and everything else like that that has grown like topsy over a 10 year period, 20 year period. So, consolidation of that into, as you say, a global instance or a single instance, forcing the business discussion with the subsidiaries that we are unique, we have to do it this way, we can't change, but forcing that on them, basically. It's a long process. You've done it in 27 months. I think most other organizations take a lot longer, so five year journey to achieve that. But the end result is a much, much simpler environment of an order of magnitude. It's just amazing to me. I mentioned the integration number before that we started with nearly 500 after we did this transformation. We were down to about 125 point-to-point some of those 60 applications and they were reusable, common data models and scaling for the future, being used and leveraged by multiple. We used to do a lot of work when we had a CIO business and we looked at all of the applications and how they were interrelated to each other and the value they were generating. And most of the applications were talking to other applications. Yes, yes. Which said, oh, why are they all there? So you really stripped those out together. We have, and that goes right into cost of ownership, ease of management and deployment strategies for upgrades. Makes it far simpler to manage that in the future. And presumably, as a result of that, if you want to make change or if you want to have this kind of application, you really wouldn't be able to do that before because the data itself would not be in a place to have it within those two minutes. So it would have taken several days. Yeah, things in the past that took weeks and months to deploy were now doing in days and minutes. That's really the key to the business success. Right, excellent. Bill, my final question before we break with another guest, we've got the press conference going on live here in global communications. This is SiliconANGLE Wikibon's coverage of Sapphire Now. My final question for you is, share with the folks out there to your peers out there because you've been through great projects, done some amazing things, and you've also probably had some stumbles along the way where you've learned from. And just, you know, there's a lot of practitioners out there who are looking to folks like you guys who are rolling up your sleeves and on the bleeding edge and making stuff work, right? And breaking things and making them work and fixing them. You know, I mean, that's what you got to do. You guys are innovating. So share with them some of the things that you've learned and advice for them. I think the first thing that comes to mind is don't shy away from the new capabilities. We've learned a lot and we've given a lot back into the EMC, VMware industries about lessons learned. Definitely stumbled, definitely had some bruises along the way of understanding what SAP is in a virtual environment. It's nothing different, but at the same time, there's some unique things that you want to think about from a best practice standpoint. The second thing is back to business complexity, the integrations, integrations, data conversion. At the end of the day, it's about the application. It's about the data. It's not about the application vendor that you're dealing with. It's enabling the business to do their job and the technology to enable them and step out of their way is what it comes down to. So don't shy away from virtualization. The benefits are obvious. We've got them and we've documented them and talked about that to many people. And then think about the future. Think about how you're enabling an IT as a service capability, SAP as a service capability, where it's really not about the application, but it's about the business experience. Okay, Bill Reed here at EMC talking about SAP virtualization. Big success with SAP, a lot of co-innovation. That's the theme of SAP. You can't hear that word all the time. They had a tag cloud at this conference of the word co-innovation, Bill McDermott and Jim Schnabe. We'd hear it all the time. That's their core strategy, open ecosystem, multi-vendor. Congratulations on your success. We'll be right back here inside theCUBE after this short break live from Orlando. Sapphire now 2013, this is theCUBE.