 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018, brought to you by NetApp. Hey, welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend on the ground at SAP Sapphire Now 2018. We're in the NetApp booth and we are joined by a CUBE alumni, Brian Ferrer, marketing manager for SAP at Cisco, welcome. Thank you, thank you, it's great to be here. So you are a veteran, you've been at Cisco for at least at about four years. But you have been in the SAP community for a long time. This is, I think I was reading the 25th time that they've done an event like this, now obviously an event with north of 20,000 people, a million people, Bill McDermott said, engaging online. Wow, we're in the NetApp booth. Tell us, Brian, about this trifacta NetApp Cisco SAP. Well, sure, thank you very much for so. We've appreciate the invitation to be here. We've been working with Cisco, with Cisco's been working with NetApp and SAP on solutions for our customers together for about 10 years. And in that time, our joint solution for SAP, which we call the FlexPod, which combines Cisco UCS servers with NetApp storage. And of course then there's Cisco networking. That's become one of the most preferred platforms to run SAP on and on. And there was a recent IDC survey in fact, in the last year, in which they went out, without any consultation with us vendors, and did an independent true market research survey with over 300 end users of HANA. And they asked, what was the best platform? What was the most preferred platform to run on? And by far, it was FlexPod with Cisco and NetApp. And the favorite storage platform, by far NetApp. So we think we're doing a really good job for our customers, but there's always room for improvement. So we're ever innovating, and that I think is the secret to our success. Constant, repetitive innovation, making it better and better and better. So if we look at these digital transformation platforms of the future, SAP HANA, Leonardo, and we think about the Cisco NetApp value prop, how does those individual components play in that equation? Well, a couple of ways I think, it's a great question. First of all, you got to start with the very core of what you're concerned about. This is a risky situation. You're running your company's most valuable asset, your supply chain on this stuff. And so you want to make sure that the platform you're using is rigorously tested, and even more rigorously secured. So one of the things we're known for, and we do this with NetApp on the FlexPod platform, is our CVD, Cisco Validated Designs, in which we pre-test and pre-certify everything that you would have to do to implement your SAP solution on a FlexPod, and that's all documented. So if you follow the instructions, you're going to get a full proof installation. Then the second way is we need to make operation and management of these environments simpler and easier. Everybody's looking to reduce costs, reduce resources, improve performance. So one of the ways we've really distinguished ourselves in this market, especially with NetApp, is something we call policy-based infrastructure. We have a product called ACI, application, ACI, I always say ACI. It's application-centric infrastructure, and it allows us to automate the deployment and management of HANA on these solutions. Fact one SAP executive saw this and coined the term one-click deployment, and I won't say it's just one-click deployment. There's some tweaking, but that speaks to the simplicity of deploying it on a FlexPod, but more than that, then we apply that automation to the management and the ongoing orchestration of that environment. And so, for example, if you want to keep security threats out of your environment, you can automate our tetration solution on top of that platform that looks at incoming code, looks for patterns, and detects inappropriate activity before it has time to harm your system. Another way we do that was with a product we're unveiling here at Sapphire, which is AppDynamics for SAP. AppDynamics is a fairly famous company around monitoring applications, and Cisco acquired them about a year ago, and we're unveiling their solution for SAP in our booth with number 550, in fact. And that allows you to look all the way down to the code level and see what's happening. Let's take apart that apart a little bit. That's pretty amazing. I'm familiar with AppDynamics. It was a born-in-the-cloud solution. So when you think about SAP, you think about traditional kind of applications built on SAP, you don't think about AppDynamics. You know, AppDynamics was this thing that could allow you to monitor and troubleshoot code across cloud. What's the play with SAP? Well, it's hard to say anymore that anybody's running SAP just on-premise or just in cloud. We live in a hybrid world. A lot of people call it the multi-cloud world, and you have to have these management and monitoring tools work both on-prem and in the cloud. Basically, they got to follow your data, and that's the beauty of AppDynamics is it works across all those multi-cloud environments, and I think that's the big play for us with them. We're very concerned about security. Coming from a network background, we're very aware of intrusion capabilities, the size of your attack surface, how cloud actually increases the size of your attack surface. So you need a tool like AppDynamics and other tools that Cisco has, as I mentioned, our Tetration tool to really watch that code and that data going across your infrastructure and also to keep an eye out for bad actors. It's unfortunately a dangerous world now, and just read the news to see all the companies that have had their brand essentially held hostage with ransomware, for example. So let's talk about support. I love the idea of being able to take the infrastructure, outsource the engineering of that to Cisco, FlexPod, Tetration, these validated designs that make deployment simple, but support. When there's a problem with a query that's supporting a digital transformation initiative, who do I call? Like, is this what I call? That's what I call, SAP, do I call? It's a great question. It's a great question, because nobody here, not just Cisco, but no vendor here at the show today implements a solution just on their own, and every environment has multiple pieces in the solution. Cisco takes ownership of the support of all the components, even our partner components, of any solution we deploy. So it's one stop shopping for your support calls. Now, if we find it escalates to a higher and higher level, we have direct connections to our partners through level support escalation teams, and we bring them in and we solve the problem, but we never let go of it. We don't hand it off, we maintain that incident. No finger pointing. And if you've ever had any personal issues at home on your laptop, and tried to get somebody to help, and you call one person, and they point you to another, and- Well, faithfully, I better have this always blanked on the network. So, I'm not a network guy anymore, so it's like I'm on the network. Not even on the network. But speaking of needing to delight customers, one of the things that, thematically, was talked about this morning in Phil McDermott's keynote is enabling the intelligent enterprise and really being able to embed AI into the technologies to unite the humans with the machines. I loved how he talked about augmenting humanity. You bet. And what he talked about there was really- The brave new world, huh? Right, and kind of not calling out their competitors by name, but we all know who they are, and really saying that what SAP is now doing is connecting, synchronizing the demand chain with the supply chain. So enabling the customers who don't care what's under the hood, right? To focus on their customers to get this comprehensive customer view. I actually really liked that part of the keynote because that description characterizes Cisco ourselves as SAP's customer. So we eat our own dog food to use the cliche, but you talk about artificial intelligence and machine learning. Last year at Sapphire, we won the HANA Innovation Award for the innovation that we did on HANA with AI and machine learning. And we implement that internally, not just for our customers, but internally for ourselves, we do all our sales forecasting and supply chain management with HANA using AI and machine learning for better insights. And it has made a world of difference to our internal supply chain and IT teams. I mean, it's funny because 20 years ago we would have called it magic. And it's not, it's innovation. In fact, that's the theme of our booth here at Sapphire this week is it's not magic, it's innovation. And we actually have a magician in the booth sawing people in half. You're welcome to come by. If you fit in the booth, you can be sawed in half. You have to be rather, you have to be rather small, but we'll show you how the trick is even done. And that's the thing with innovation, differentiating it from, you know, magical claims that other vendors might make. We show you under the covers how it's done and we share everything and document everything. That's actually going back to those DVDs are so valuable to our customers. So let's talk about one of the pillars of Cisco which is security. Yes. As we look at where data is at. We're talking about itch, the data center and somewhere in between. Mm-hmm. And. And everywhere between. Everywhere between, security has to follow the data. You bet. How does Cisco with NetApp and ministry has followed the data? Oh, that's another good question. We, I was in a presentation from an analyst recently and said the world's data is now increasing. It's doubling every two years. The entire world's data is doubling every two years. So how do you keep track of that and how do you manage it? One of the ways we do it, and we do this with NetApp as well on the FlexPod is we have some security embedded in every aspect. So we talk about computing at the edge with IoT devices. Smart cars is an example everyone understands. But there's supply chain IoT out there on the edge as well. Tracking shipments and pallets and widgets and units. And we talk about computing at the fog and trying to get computing as close to the transaction as possible for low latency, high performance. But then for deep analytics, you're bringing that data back to the core. So you've got a lot of places where you could be attacked. As I mentioned earlier, that attack surface has now grown dramatically. It's no longer isolated within the four walls of your data center. So we embed security at every space along that chain. Coming from a network heritage, we have intelligent routers often ruggedized that we can put out there in the edge with security to catch inappropriate activity happening coming in from an IoT source, for example, from a sensor that is not what we were expecting and could potentially be an attack. And then we can analyze it before it ever gets into your valuable data center. And so we're putting that security at the edge, in the fog, on the servers, in the data center, on the routers, on the network, you name it. And that, we think there's no one solution. You have to have an all-encompassing Indian solution that literally surrounds you with that security bubble. And that's what we're doing. In fact, we, by the way, we released, put a plug in for Cisco. We just came out with our annual cybersecurity report, which is one of the most popular supports on cybersecurity trends every year in the industry. So Cisco puts that together and obviously takes very seriously. So you mentioned app dynamics before monitoring SAP apps. You just mentioned security. Put that in the context of this next generation data center. What does a customer, what can they expect working with Cisco, NetApp, and SAP to evolve to a next-gen data center? It's an interesting, it's an interesting question because the very nature of the data center is changing now. I mean, you know, if I'm on the road and I'm processing, you know, financial trend, end of year financial closes or end of quarter financial closes, am I a data center? If I'm processing IoT data on the edge and because it's so critical, for example, take oil and gas, they can measure that remote oil well in dollars per second or tens of thousands of dollars per second of downtime. And so you want the data coming in from that well, pressure, temperature, potential downtime coming in in time to fix it before it breaks. Is that now a data center? So we're talking about what does it mean? The definitions of compute, of data capture have all changed. The idea is you've got to follow that data. And that's what we're looking at for the future, I think, is the data center is no longer a whole, an internal monolithic controlled environment that you can be very certain of. Now you've got to follow that data and adapt your security to the type of processing you're doing, whether it's in the data center core or out there on the edge. And I think that's what we're evolving to. Someday we'll all be data centers. So let's talk about that all on the data center. Developers are now developing applications, containers, they're practically have data centers on their laptop. Connect the docs for us. Sure. Where Cisco plays in. This is actually one of the latest developments I think in the industry is the emergence of something called containers. And we're the first vendor to work with SAP to implement our Cisco container platform to provide their SAP data hub with containerized access. So now that SAP data hub can become the nucleus of all incoming data and processing all big data for new insights, regardless of the source of that data or the application that data is running on. And that's what the beauty of containers is, is it encapsulates that application. So those rules come with that data. And so now you can literally connect everything to that central SAP data hub and have complete, what do Bill McDermott call, 360 degree visibility. And that's made possible by the ability to tap into not just new big data solutions that you have out there, but legacy big data solutions. And I'm old enough to remember when there was such a thing called the data warehouse. And they were all proprietary and there were a whole bunch of them. And there are still our customers out there running not only the new stuff, but the legacy stuff because it works, they figured it out and they don't want to change it. It gives them good insights. So how do you take that legacy stuff now and link it and combine it with all the new stuff coming out of, for example, your SAP supply chain? And the answer is the containers on top of that SAP data hub will do that for you. And that's really where we're taking it. There was a language Esperanza years and years ago that was created in the 60s and I think they're 50s I think the idea was it was going to be a universal language that anybody could speak. So I don't speak Spanish if they don't speak English, but we both speak Esperanza. And of course it never took off because it was yet another language to learn. But the idea, the concept of having this in-between piece that makes anything connect to anything is still a very intriguing idea for the human mind. And you can apply that to this data sphere, this global data sphere. And now with something like a data hub tool and containers that serve that encapsulation purpose, you can actually have a nucleus of big data and analytics in your company. It doesn't care where the data was originated from or what application it's running. It's still available to plug into your analysis, your planning troubleshooting. Well who knew SAP, we heard Kubernetes and AppDynamics in one interview at SAP SAP, that's amazing. Mind blown. I get paid by the buzzword. Wow. Yeah, you know, I'm in marketing. How do you, so am I, I got to, I got to tap into your expertise now. Brian, thank you so much for stopping by theCube and talking with Keith and me about what's new with Cisco, your partnership with SAP and NetApp, and happy birthday. Thank you very much, I appreciate it. Come to the party, I'm actually having Justin Timberlake perform this year. That's very nice of you. You're all invited. Well thank you, wow. Thank you very much. I'm glad I could make it to your birthday party. You guys have a great day. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We are at SAP Sapphire, 2018. I'm Lisa Martin for Keith Townsend. Thanks for watching.