 why we're doing what we're doing. Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering IBM Edge 2015, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to theCUBE at IBM Edge 2015, here in Las Vegas. Had two days talking about lots of executives, talking to service riders, talking to customers, excited to have with me first time guest on theCUBE, Jouder Ho, VP of cloud services with NTT data. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. All right, so Jouder, first of all, I think most people in IT are familiar with NTT. I mean, one of the largest telcos in the world. But can you tell us a little bit about your role there? You've got cloud in your title, and what's the NTT data division? Okay, so NTT data is the system integration arm for NTT Group. It is the sixth largest system integrator in the world. You know, if I think about 75,000 individuals working worldwide in 40 different countries across about 25 different industry verticals. So as you know, NTT itself is a much bigger company with about 230,000 employees, but obviously NTT data is a big significant arm of NTT, of the NTT Group, so to speak. Yeah, 230,000, not quite as big as IBM, but pretty darn big when we talk about NTT. It's starting to get close, right? And I think the key metric from the NTT Group's side of things is I think last year, we became the number one in terms of data center space with over 220 data centers worldwide. So that's kind of the key metric that we've achieved in 2014. All right, great, let's get into it. Tell us a little bit about what brings you to this show and in your partnership with IBM. So this year, the major announcement that we have is around Hanon Power, and NTT data has been strongly involved in the collaborative effort with SAP and IBM to test out and validate the performance of Hanon Power and we've seen some very significant results based on the initial testing that we've done. You know, SAP owns the governance of this initiative, but NTT's been very involved in the testing development and optimization along with the support of IBM. All right, so yeah, I mean SAP had their big conference last week with Sapphire. Hanon has been one of the main discussions I've heard about SAP, the last couple works out. Where are we? Are the solutions really starting to come together and are we at the inflection point for kind of massive adoption? I think so. I think really it is starting to, it's been talked about for a number of years now, but we're really starting to see get traction around different customers being interested in Hanon. They've invested possibly in the appliance and now they're starting to bump up against some limits. So we're starting to look at other options to do Hanon on different technologies and power being a great platform to build off of just from course specifications has really been this big differentiator for us in terms of testing out that the type of performance we've been looking at. So one of the metrics that have been quoted as is we're looking at anywhere from 40 to 100 times speed up just by deploying Hanon power as opposed to a traditional appliance type model or an X86 on Oracle. So it's a big performance bump and that's only at the beginning of things. We're still going through the efforts of optimizing further. Yeah, so obviously as a systems integrator, you've got to choose your projects wisely. There's so many different things going on out there. What about Hanon plus power plus your solution makes it a winner? Really, I think SAP is a key practice for us. I think we have something like 2,700 customers worldwide are running on SAP. And so for us, it's a key investment for us that we want to be able to help customers run quicker, better, faster, stronger across the board. And it is truly out of belief that Hanon power would be that key differentiator both on-prem and in-cloud. So I think that's kind of the major thing that we're looking at doing in the near future. All right, so I've heard a lot about performance when it comes to power, so maybe we can skip over that piece. Talk to me a little bit about management, flexibility, agility, how does this solution compare to what's in the market? Well, I think you just took all the points, the talking points out for me, right? I think those actually do cover pretty much all the different pieces. One of the other data points we've been sort of stating is that it gives us a lot more flexibility to bring things up quickly. We were able to bring up power on HANA and literally in a week, right? And we're now able to start deploying things a lot faster, literally out the box for customers. So the investment in time is very minimal compared to having to do your role your own and be able to have to take additional time to go deploy this. Yeah, so I wonder if we could dig a little down if you look at kind of cloud. One of the things as an analyst always joke is, security and management are the two things that we can bang on forever because it seems we haven't solved that problem. We talk about management maybe specifically and happy to hear about security if that's a piece, but how is this solution helping to really solve that management problem because that's a huge challenge for customers. Well, I think the management of HANA is going to be an evolving process. I think as people get more experience of it and gain additional capabilities, that's going to be evolving exercise and we're heavily engaged with SAP and IBM to go down that path. However, from a security standpoint, given shared infrastructure, I think it's a key point to make that we do segregate customers' information individually from other customers so that we have that proper segregation. As you said, security is absolutely key and paramount to a lot of these exercises and different providers have different interpretations of what that level of security is. For us, I think it is absolutely kind of forefront for us that the operation of an application remain and have the same music experience as it is on-prem as well as it in the cloud. So there's no need to do a lot of adaptation to move your application into the cloud, so to speak. Yeah, so what are the plans for the future? How are you looking at this really as a cloud service? So we started off with BW, right? And with the announcement S4 on HANA, that's kind of the next step in roadmaps and space and discussions over the last few days, we're going to continue to engage with IBM as SAP to deploy these things out to different customers. We've now got a targeted list of customers we're going after, we're starting to accept. And we're actually seeing quite a fair bit of interest in that area to start testing this out. Customers have had investments in power over the last couple of years, investments and appliances. They're coming back to us and saying, we've seen the limits, we want to do more. How can we do more? How can we do it more quickly? All right, can you talk a little bit about the partnerships? I mean, you're taking SAP, you're taking IBM, you're taking the rest of it. How's it been to work through that? Any kind of advice that you'd look to kind of give the ecosystem as to how they can help you do your job better or things you want to look for from a white space standpoint? I think, it ultimately, it's kind of a three-way collaborative effort, right? And this is not something we started off three months ago, it is. It's one of my colleagues has stated it's been a two-year journey to kind of go through and put this whole effort together. So it's been a very close collaboration between IBM SAP and SAP being, SAP hasn't really revealed much of their roadmap, so we try to keep as much of the lockstep as possible as SAP announces new capabilities. All right, so Jeter, have you been to the show before? I was here last year. All right, so what brings you back to IBM Edge? What's kind of the value that you see in coming here, talking to your peers, talking to IBM? Well, IBM is a key partner for NTT data. I actually sit on the Software Devine Environment Tech Advisory Board, so that's part of the exercise that brings me here for the last couple of years. All right, so you're based in the valley, I believe, so I'm curious, we throw out terms like cloud and we all argue over definitions and what's going on. You guys, I mean, totally fit cloud services that I would say. How do you see what you're doing as opposed to kind of the general discussion of what's going on in the valley? Well, a large part of the valley proposition for NTT's data cloud is that we're able to pick up enterprise apps pretty much as is and move it over to our cloud without having to adapt to other cloud providers. There's certainly nothing wrong with that approach, it's just a different approach to things. And for us, it typically to customer base that we deal with, our customer that has the desire to move a large part of the operations into our cloud, so we actually spend a lot of time helping them pick up and migrate it into our cloud operations. So that's kind of the key differentiator, not just around that, but also the fact that we support not just x86, but power in the cloud. Yeah, it's interesting, one of the things we look at is in IT, we always just add stuff and we never get rid of anything. We've been trying to help users understand what they do and what they can get rid of, obviously going to service providers or certain things that, it's kind of the modern outsourcing if you will, but it's taking care of that stuff. We said, friends don't let friends build data centers anymore because there's companies that are really good at doing that and most companies, other than kind of the real estate people, aren't good at that things. Curious, how do you help companies kind of move up the stack and I think that's kind of one of your key value props. Actually that was, that's an interesting point I made. I was at a Seattle advisory dinner several months ago and that's one of the things I brought up is the fact that NTT is one of the few companies that actually engages in that activity. We have 220 data centers worldwide and one of the other differentiators is one of the few companies in the world that actually owns ships that lay cable across the Atlantic and the Pacific. So as part of the exercise of helping customers move up the stack, we are able to take a lot of pain out of the normal IT operations so that they can go back to focusing on their key business proposition and their business operations. A lot of the traditional IT operations will provide capabilities around and can help manage as a partnership. Wow, I didn't realize you had the transatlantic type cables across the ocean. That's amazing. So once you see Google always has kind of the map of what they do, the cables that sharks can't bite through and things like that. Right, so the metric that's been thrown out pretty frequently is NTT carries about 40% of the world's background. Wow. So it's a very significant part. Wait, wait, is that Netflix? Not just Netflix. Yeah, no, no, no, absolutely, it's fascinating. Yeah, I guess I want to give you the final word. We often talk about some of these seismic changes, what's going on in cloud. Where does NTT position itself in this world of kind of the, you know, it's Amazon's and Google's and of course IBM's the soft layer. Where does NTT sit? So what we're interested in is we're not interested in a race to zero. Right, and as you think about the bigger cloud providers, they're getting cheaper doing more with less. Part of the valid proposition we have is absolutely what I was saying earlier at the fact that we act as a partnership. We're able to provide additional hand-holding, provide creative bespoke service, if you will, to help customers ease their journey into the cloud. All right, well, Jader Ho, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Fascinating case study with what you're doing with the cloud. Hannah, you know, really cool application to do that high performance and everything. So we'll be right back, okay, you know, wrapping up day two pretty soon here at IBM Edge 2015. So theCUBE is starting to do their own events now and it's really like the next step, the next evolution.