 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018, brought to you by NetApp. Welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we are in Orlando at SAP Sapphire Now 2018. We're very proud to be in the NetApp booth. NetApp has a very long-standing partnership with SAP and we're joined by Roland Wartenberg, the Senior Director of Global Strategic Alliances at NetApp. Roland, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me. So NetApp and SAP have been partners for 17 years, very strategic. What is, let's talk about the role of NetApp in the SAP ecosystem. Oh yeah, happy to do that. So as you said, it goes back to I think 2001 when the official partner contract was signed. Actually my role is, I would say a little special because I used to work for SAP and the first time I worked with NetApp was in 1999, so it goes actually back then when the whole thing started. It's been more than 21 years now, good time is flying. In NetApp was always a NISTL and global technology partner. So when you look back at that time or the last 15 years, was really about running SAP solutions on top of our technology. Started with R3, went over to SAP Enterprise 3 because NetLiever. But now these days, when you look at the whole SAP portfolio, there's so many new things. Not only SAP HANA, there is the whole SAP Cloud momentum with the Cloud software service solutions with Hybris, Arriva, Conker, you name it, Field Class. So there's so many solutions out there which are run now either operated by SAP or done by SAP with one of the partners in the public cloud space like Google, Microsoft, AWS for example. In addition, you have the new areas with Leonardo covering IoT, blockchain, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and the nice thing is here, us here on NetApp is really moving forward from the traditional role as a pure storage provider into so many new ways covering this with enter and data management so that we can offer our joint customers these solutions to cover actually, or let's say offer solutions to solve the customer's problems in these areas. And IoT is for example a really interesting part because you have so many devices in the IoT space. Everyone is talking about edge computing or fog computing. And when you see how important it is to have data really transferred in the secure way. For example, in healthcare, no question about it. Then it's clear to visible that a partner like NetApp offering services in this area for enter and data management is no better partner than us to do this as SAP. So can we talk about some of the larger ecosystem? NetApp, big partner with SAP, NetApp, big partner with Microsoft. You guys have your NFS service running in Microsoft. Can you talk about how NetApp has moved into a data-driven company now. You're in all the major clouds. How important is that to the SAP relationship? Oh, that's actually my daily business to not only cover these so-called multi-partner strategies but also to drive forward because when you look at the SAP NetApp strategy in general, what we do in the clouds, what we do with hyper-cloud scenarios. For example, driven by topics like GDPR when just live a couple of days ago, data privacy protection really, really important. So when you look now at SAP customers where still the big majority run systems on-premises, no question about it. We saw the numbers, Bill McDermott showed in the keynote how many S for HANA customers they have now. So you see that there's a movement from on-premises to the cloud but not completely, I would say it's also hyper-cloud scenarios. Specifically what I've just said, the whole GDPR topic for example, that customers really want to make sure they still have their own data under control either in the cloud or on-premises. And this makes not only the challenge for us as a partner but it's also a very interesting part for us as a partner to work now with more and more partners which were, before that, when you look back at the last five, 10, 15 years, we were not part of the SAP ecosystem at all. And that is really, for me an alliance manager that's my daily business, to extend this ecosystem in a way that we can offer customers then almost like a matrix. You know, we have all these partners in the COK. For this specific use case, we work together with partner A and SAP, here we have partner B and whatever you name, put in there, Microsoft, Google, et cetera, and then have this portfolio offered to the customer in a very comprehensive way. SAP has such a wide range of customers from Coca-Cola to McLaren Formula One to NetApp as a customer. And Bill McDermott said during his keynote, 390,000 customers and 25 plus industries. They have this lofty goal of becoming one of the top 10 most valuable brands globally with an Apple, a Google. They are now 17 on that list. And one of the things that struck me, yesterday, outside of the convention center, was seeing a bus that said, ERP that you can talk to and hear from. And as they have this ambition to be up there with the Apples that have products and technologies that we interact with, and now they're wanting ERP to become something that you can talk to, how does that help kind of lift NetApp? Does it open doors for you guys in new industries where SAP has this almost household brand name? What's the influence there on NetApp? Oh, definitely. I would say when you look at the role of SAP in this industry, it's growing, growing. From a branding point of view, from how important you are, not only for enterprise customers, also for normal end-users like you and me. And the interesting part is that SAP being the backbone of all these enterprise business processes, sometimes they're not so very known for the normal end-users. So if I would ask my daughter, of course she knows SAP, no question about it. But do you know any application SAP users or offers? You probably said no, not really. If I ask you, do you know any applications? Apple is offering Microsoft, you would say yes, of course. Because these big partners with their solutions are actually more at the end user of the consumer user. But when you look now what SAP is doing, you just have to look here at the show floor in which areas SAP is getting active in multimedia analytics, et cetera. You see a lot more branding awareness all over the place. And as Bill McBurne said that they really want to increase that. And that's the great opportunity for us because when you link this now from the solution, business process level to the area where we are actually the leader in the space of data management, data is everywhere, everyone knows that. So, and data is created in such enormous speeds that you have to have customers and end users have to have solutions on place either on an enterprise environment, maybe even on a desktop, on a tablet, or the normal end user on a mobile device to have the opportunity to manage this data. When I look, take my daughter as an example again, of course she is on Instagram, et cetera, all this thing. And whenever you make a picture of this data created, it's stored somewhere and it has to be handled. And of course you can talk about security and the different verticals. I think there is really big need for a partner like NetApp to work together with SAP to offer these enter and data management solutions. No question about it. So I'd like to hear your thoughts on as we look at all these challenges where there is data privacy, smart contracts, the ability to enable supply chain, tracking, you know, the formulation of a medicine from the formulation to the manufacturing to getting on the shelf to being injected. One of the big parts of that conversation has become blockchain. SAP announced today they're part of a blockchain initiative. How do you view a technology like blockchain in the relationship of NetApp which is a data driven company with data storage products, data management products, security concerns, and enabling these types of technologies or capabilities to something like blockchain in your relationship with SAP? Oh yeah, no, blockchain is a really interesting topic personally also for me because when you look at the history of blockchain go back 20 years ago, it was actually developed for data management in a way. Then someone figured out all this can be used for financial services and the Bitcoin thingy started and well everyone when you talk about people what is blockchain, everyone will think this is financial services for banking, et cetera. But now SAP actually invited us last October and November last year to join the SAP Blockchain Co-innovation Program because you mentioned that when you use blockchain now in supply chain management, specifically for smart contracts in manufacturing, automotive, shipment, wherever you have different partners working together in such a chain, and there's the word already, you have different blocks you put together because imagine we three would create a blockchain probably wouldn't be that secure because three pieces you can access right far away but in the moment if you have a really more complex longer chain of ecosystem partners working together like for example, vendor producing some products having suppliers shipping that up to the end user and you want to put this in a smart contract environment so that you as an end user would say oh today I want to have this part of the product they enabled, tomorrow I want to have this part but not this anymore, so it goes back to the original vendor to enable this functionality almost like with cell phone technology. You can imagine that the data flow in such blockchain environment is really, really essential because you as an end user you want to have this secure because at the end of the day you pay for it and you want to pay only for that feature function you ordered so data management blockchain goes hand in hand here so that's why we actually decided okay we want to work here together with SAP. It's a fairly new topic for many, many customers so I see this coming for the next years more and more and more that customers really see where this can be helped them to advance from a business point of view but yeah we are part of that ecosystem. So as customers keep their eye on futuristic technology such as blockchain, they need these types of capabilities today, like they still need to be able to do supply, great supply chain management they still need to do data management. What are some of the highlights from a customer's perspective between the relationship between NetApp technology and SAP capability as it pertains to digital transformation. We had the NetApp CIO on theCUBE yesterday where he talked about the ability to have empowered George the CEO of NetApp with data driven decisions through that relationship. Are there relationships that you're seeing specifically between this and the alliances you work with that you're like you know what no other company could do this other than NetApp and SAP? Of course, we are really, as I said, we're the perfect partner for this new world because when you look at the history of NetApp there's a lot of going on in terms of digital transformation, we're working now much more with the cloud service providers, we have a cloud strategy, so we have this and now comes the word, the end to end data management strategy. And that's really important for SAP and customers because the customers, when you look at SAP customers who've been with SAP for many, many, many years, they went through this history, R3, Enterprise Read, now to the cloud, they still have to manage all the systems and you have to make sure that the data is consistent wherever it sits has to be secure, it has to be manageable, it has to be archived, so all these functionality, these features with data, you have different plays. And for us, it's really important to offer this data management really from the back end, on-premise, over-hybrid cloud scenarios to the cloud, up to the device, the edge device, up to your mobile devices so that we have really this whole, and here comes the word again, the chain enabled and that's, I think that is really our competitive advantage here with the partnership with NetApp, with SAP for NetApp to offer with its complete end-to-end data management. I think the NetApp marketing team likes to call that the data fabric, the ability to create whether it's on-tap or hybrid cloud solutions, cloud values, et cetera, having that underlying technology. Exactly, and that's my response with Alliance Manager, to look at the complete NetApp portfolio, every product, and to make a decision together with other partners, with product management, with marketing, where it fits in the SAP product portfolio because I don't know if you ever had a chance to look at the complete SAP portfolio, it's quite large, isn't it? Ex-NASA. There are just really a number, there are 330 solutions, 2300 plus on product, and of course in Alliance Manager, we can't do all the thing, that would be crazy, so we go, so as an Alliance Manager, you really have to make a clear decision where are the best opportunities to create business with SAP, what are your customers asking for, so looking at our complete product portfolio with on-tap, on-tap select, the all-flash technology, HCI, the whole cloud services, cloud volumes, to make a decision where this fits in this SAP world, and that's actually the nice thing that, over the time, as I explained, that SAP portfolio increase so much from a portfolio functionality point of view that there is almost everywhere a place where the net-up product will fit, but again, we have to make a decision where is the space to start, because you don't want to boil the ocean, but that's what we're working on, is to create this whole portfolio for the data-frapping and internet management. One of the things Hasso Plotner talked about in his keynote this morning is that they were hearing, you mentioned that the sheer volume of products that SAP alone has, you can imagine customers going, where do I start? And he was talking about, you know, hearing from customers who are sort of confused. If you look at the SAP Cloud Platform, all the different integrations, they talked about kind of working to sort of simplify, even naming conventions, so the customers can understand better. How does that help net-up be able to, as you said, kind of make the right decisions on you can do so many different things with SAP, where do you focus the business and also make sure the customer really can clearly understand the different choices that they have from net-up to work in SAP environments? Oh, great question, because a short story, when I look back, as I told you, I was working long time for SAP, and when you're an employee of a company, you always look at your portfolio. Right. And the moment when you leave, and I did this in 2010, I was then six years with Citrix, the first, I remember the first Monday when I was sitting with Citrix, that the first time ever, I looked at the complete SAP portfolio, and I said, wow, okay, this will be a lot of work. And Hustle was totally right, because there's so many solutions for different industries, and then they have also different solutions for large enterprises for the SAP, down to, for example, with SAP Business One, down to the small shop around the corner, maybe with 10 employees, and when you look at this whole solution package, you're wondering, okay, how we fit in there, and this whole run simple, make it simpler, this really helps us a lot, because at the end of the day, we have to make sure that we can tell the customer where the NetApp product fits through the over SAP solution. If that piece from SAP is already difficult to understand, it won't be easy if we fit through that, more or less in a mesh environment, so the easier the SAP colleagues from SAP marketing and product management, the easier they make it to customers to understand how this whole solution could be forward, the easier it is for us to explain how our products fit in the same picture, no questions. So we are at a massive location, there's the size of this convention center's 16 American football fans, huge, tons of partners, tons of customers, as this conference comes to a close in the next day, what are some of the things that you're most energized about that you've heard from SAP with some of the big announcements in terms of the NetApp-SAP relationship continuing? What are some of the things that you just went, yeah? I would say I come now to SAP Fire since 2003, time is flying, but this one here is really special, just the enormous, as you mentioned, enormous space of this show floor and a number of customers being here, the number of partners, if you come to SAP Fire for a long time, you go to show floor and see right away, ah, that's a large one, we have more partners, this year it's unbelievable, it's really large and the nice thing is for us here to be part of this ecosystem is that SAP bring all these customers to SAP Fire and inviting us to be part of this ecosystem really enables us also to win more customers, no question about it, and this is what we really want to do together with SAP here, go into new business areas, go and win new customers for new environment, especially in the new world of the whole IoT space, hyper clouds and other, we're in the past, when you look at new ways like automotive, IoT space, edge divided, when you look at what we did in the past, and NetApp was not yet active in this area with SAP yet, so that's a great opportunity for us when you look at whatever SAP announced here at SAP Fire, it really, everything fits in this strategy, so really excited to be here with you. Well Roland, we thank you so much for being part of enabling theCUBE to be in the NetApp booth here at SAP Fire, and we thank you for stopping by and sharing some of the things that you're working on. You. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAP SAP Fire now 2018, thanks for watching.