 The Cube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC. Redefine VCE. Innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing. Brocade. Say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. Welcome back, we are here at EMC World 2014, day three of wall to wall coverage on the Cube. I'm Jeff Frick. As you know, the Cube goes out. The events extract signal from the noise. We get the smartest people in the room. We get them on the Cube. We ask them lots of great questions. This is our fifth year at EMC World. It's a very special show for us because it's actually where we launched the Cube in 2010. So we're going to jump right into it. I'm joined in my next segment with Ganesh Radh Krishnan. Did I get it wrong? Did I get it right? You did well. You did well. Pretty close, I'm sorry. CEO of Worfdale Technology Group. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you. Thank you for having me here, Jeff. Pleasure. So big announcement. You guys are all about SAP virtualized HANA. There's some announcements going on. Tell us what's going on. Oh, there are a lot of great stuff going on. And we are very excited to have the announcement coming yesterday from Pat or VMware CEO on announcing SAP to production HANA to run on VMware vSphere 5.5. Also great announcement with David and other players at EMC announcing Viper 2.0 and Elastic Cloud. These are all very good for us because it's going to help our customers greatly. And that is a very interesting thing which is happening. So these are the big announcements by the big execs at the big show. You're out in the field working with real customers on the ground getting this stuff implemented. So tell us a little bit about what's happening in the field within your customer base on some of the move to virtualization and what you're seeing. As you know, Jeff, we had been in the space and we have been pioneered in doing SAP both on virtualization space for the last eight years and the cloud space for the last three years being the first certified cloud services partner for Americas by SAP. We had been engaged with a lot of customers. We have pretty close to 170 plus enterprise customers. We work on the Fortune 500 companies. What we have largely seen initially, SAP was customers were having the struggle to move their big irons into a virtual machines. Now we have trespassed at a phase which the last two, three years, now SAP customers are very welcoming to move on. Still there is a lot more to go even though all these new things are coming in. But there is a very big change in the market where when we started Cloud three years back, the interest shown by SAP customers, we thought it was going to be more mid-range customers. But to our surprise, it was so encouraging that enterprise customers wanted to initially run those project systems, test and development systems, or sandboxes we call it. And it so happened now. We had been telling at theCUBE three years back also the hybrid cloud, which is the most interesting part, which a lot of customers are quite interested, enterprise customers are quite interested to lower their cost on their IT space. So not only the first thing virtualization helped them to lower the cost, but doing a hybrid cloud is going to help for the more. Right, right. So you're saying you expected the mid-range customers to be more aggressive in their migration to the cloud, but that you're happy to see the enterprise guys are going there as well. But I would imagine as part of their kind of larger virtualization strategy, was it just because it was so difficult to migrate? SAP stuff, what did you think was holding them back? It's basically because as we all understand SAP being a 40 years old product, and it has come through a long way, still there are certain components within SAP because it is a business driver, it is not just one simple product, it has more modules to it. There are certain challenges when it comes to legacy applications which are trying to communicate back to SAP, even though SAP has come a long way, but a business cannot function just with SAP, but what has happened drastically is in this last two, three years, with the infrastructure side of it, the automation, we call it because we had been working with customers on the new technology which is software defined data center, and software defined particularly from an SAP standpoint, basically VMware has done a wonderful job. We are working very closely as a strategic partner through EMC, VMware, and SAP. We had been putting all these things together like VCAC, VCloud Automation Center, with SAP LVM. These are two areas which we are helping assisting customers to show them how much value it can bring in. Right, well clearly the SAP EMC relationship is very strong, Bill McDermott joined live during the keynote yesterday. We had some guests on yesterday as well talking about the Alliance. So what do they need to do next? What are some of the things that you would like to see being out in the field that the customers are asking for as we continue down this journey? Actually EMC with all these federated companies and the federated model what they have been doing is a fabulous thing, but there is a lot of confusion too because EMC, VMware, Pivotal, RSA, and SAP, all these things coming together, the basic thing what we had been doing in the market or we have to continue to do in the market is to educate the customers. There are a lot of moving parts. Customers are a bit confused with so many things happening at the same time. That is something which I felt educating the customer what value these things can drive them because on a surface level talking about hybrid clouds, surface level talking about software defined is all great, but how a customer can seamlessly migrate into these platforms is something which we need to educate them. Right, so there's some particular best practices that you can share with the audience that you guys have seen doing a number of these with a lot of customers in terms of how they start that journey and kind of what are the steps along the path that most of them will go down? You hit on the right point. It is basically not a migration, it is more a journey. And specifically when we talk about private clouds for SAP it is a journey and that journey has already started three years back. The journey started at the compute level. Now what is happening more and more with our customers it is happening at the storage layer. Because as we all understand the networking layer like NSX being introduced by VMware very recently still it is going to take some time but what is happening within our customer as a journey the next journey happening is on the storage level and that is where I say EMC is playing a great role in that spot. They understood what is happening, they understood and they have brought in very strategic products. And do you see the primary drivers in your customer base being simply they know they've got to get to virtual environment, it's pressure on budgets in terms of higher resource utilization, what are some of the main factors or is it just this kind of continual march to the inevitable in terms of the virtualized environments? Basically as you rightly said always that budget is going to be there. Whatever the reductions happen within the IT space the constant struggle between SCFO and SCIO is going to be there within all these enterprises but that being said that is not the key driver in the last, I can say last six months to eight months what I'm seeing is customers from SAP customers are more looking into automation. They're more looking into productivity. So with all these automations with these new softwares that is the biggest driver for customers looking at all these new technology. Basically when it comes to new projects they're always been scrambling for getting new hardware and other things with all this VCHS type of announcement this is going to help them a lot. And what about the other big trend of a BYOD and mobile? How is that impacting your customers and what you guys are doing? Is that a driver at all or are the applications being responsive enough to that or is this more kind of upstream ERP stuff that's not really touching that trend? Basically as we both understand mobility and social media is going to make a major play as we go along there's nothing no companies can say I'm going to completely avoid and move on. Within SAP customers this is something very interesting because that's where HANA comes into play. We are doing a lot of HANA based work. HANA with the announcement as we said yesterday it's going to help the customers to optimally I call it implement HANA for making their analytics driver going on basically all this analytics driver goes back into mobility which is like you looking at all those dashboards onto your iPads or other smart devices this is really happening but what happens within SAP customers their infrastructure is still struggling. So even though on one end these things developments keeps on happening the other side in terms of infrastructure readiness that is where we come in as a strategic players to help our customers how we can consolidate how we can make these things happen how we can make it agile for these mobility and other platforms to go on. And then how much services do you wrap around around your solutions in terms of really educating and not just basically dropping in turning it on setting it up and leaving. Do you have a lot of ongoing services that you have with the customers as they continue to move down the journey? This is a great question and that is where we make as a Warfutile technologies we call it at WFT cloud makes a very big difference in the market for SAP. We do SAP and SAP only on our clouds so what we are making is a lot of customers having the fear if from their primary data center if they move on to a cloud where they don't know where the data is they don't know what is happening the support that is where we come as a strategic players not only making them understand what these technologies are helping them migrate and to manage them on a 24 by seven. This helps customers to reduce anywhere between 28 to 35% cost reduction in terms of overall 28 to 35% cost reduction. 28 to 35% cost reduction. And that is what the main message to all the customers we give and customers are very excited because we are not only hand holding them but also some customers want to get trained over a period of time. And to get the transition done seamlessly. And that is where we act differently than any other companies. We don't provide infrastructure. We provide infrastructure from the major player like VCHS or the main cloud providers but we provide our services, manage services and we are located in all over the world like in Canada, in Spain, in Dubai, in India so we can strategically manage our customer 24 by seven. It's been a lot of time on airplanes. Oh. So I'll give you the last word before we go out. So this is 2014, you've been doing this for a while. What do you think we're going to be talking about in 2015 that we're going to see in this next 12 months? Basically the next 12 months is going to be very interesting and very challenging. What we are looking from our end, it's going to be SAP HANA. SAP HANA going in production on a virtual stack. This is going to help customers not only drive all those VMware software capabilities like their high availability, their disaster recovery software, all these things can be combined and as well as like new areas when it comes to EMCY for 2.0 type of products it's going to make it more software defined with SAP LBM type of product going to be tightly integrated. It is going to be an interesting journey the next 12 months because customers we have to go back to our customers, educate them on these technologies and also to help them get it done because one announcing good products but the other thing is making it happen in the market. That is what we do. Right. No that's exactly right. It's where the rubber meets the road you know it's where this stuff gets implemented we've been fortunate to have a number of customers on the show as well over these last couple of days which is why we love to get them on because it's great to talk about but at the end of the day you got to put it in play you got to see business value and it's got to work for you. So goodness thanks for coming on the Cube appreciate you stopping by. So again this is Jeff Frick we're on the Cube VMworld excuse me ETHMC World I've been doing that all week part of the Federation so that's all good. At the EMC World 2014 day three wall to wall coverage two cubes, six hosts more crew than we can count we're having a good time we'll be back with our next guest after this short break. Thank you.