 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018, brought to you by NetApp. Welcome to theCUBE, we are on the ground in the NetApp booth at Sapphire, SAP Sapphire 2018. I'm Lisa Martin, I'm hanging out with Keith Townsend. Today we are joined by RJ Bibby, who is the SAP Global Alliance Chief of Staff at NetApp. RJ, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, we're so glad you guys are here. So this is a huge event. There are, I heard over 20,000 attendees live, but they were saying in the keynote this morning, Bill McDermot was, over a million people are expected to engage with the SAP experience, both in person and online. That's enormous, enormous. SAP and NetApp have been partners for 17 plus years now. You've got thousands of customers that run SAP on NetApp. What's current with the partnership? What's going on there from your perspective? Thanks Lisa, thanks Keith. Well first off, I want to thank you all for being here. We're ecstatic for having theCUBE in our booth. We haven't been back here as a sponsor in a couple of years. So being a Platinum sponsor, 40 people here on the ground from all over the world, like you said, we're about 26,000 people this week. So really busy, we're in our 18th year this year as a partnership with SAP. And to answer that question, it's really exciting. We have a very unique partnership with SAP. It's a true 360 partnership. And what I mean by that, one, we co-innovate together. So we're doing co-innovation where NetApp on SAP on NetApp. So what that means is basically a lot of the SAP products, like Hybris, like Arriva's success factors are built on NetApp. We're doing co-innovation on Blockchain, on HANA, IoT. So we're really looking at that next phase of automation and data management. And we'll get into data management in a bit. We're both customers to each other. We just had our CIO met with the customer success office this morning to talk about some of the integrations of products that we're doing. Second year in a row, SAP has been our largest customer. So the growth on that end is great. And then lastly, the go to market. And that's really what I do from the alliance side. So heavily around HANA acceleration, how we constantly are helping our customers move to HANA with our NetApp data fabric and on tap, our core signature products that deploy SAP. And we're very focused on industry, very focused on a global to local partner for life. We both have really long loyal customers. And then there's a kind of a G100 strategic approach too. So that's the partnership. It's been a lot of fun. And we're going to see where it goes in 2018. So RJ, talk to us a little bit more, add some color on this relationship between NetApp and SAP in the market. NetApp data driven company. Yes. SAP probably the premier data analysis analytics. We saw on stage from customer experience all the way to back in. You can't do that without a solid, robust infrastructure that's focused on SAP. What are some of the key technologies and strategy that NetApp and SAP have teamed together to bring together success? No, great question, Keith. Really it goes down to the core of data. So NetApp has done a transformation the last two years. Well, we're going to be now the data management company for hybrid cloud. So in that core, customers are looking to do a bunch of different things with NetApp. We want to manage, transport, analyze and protect data. A lot of data on SAP. So they're modernizing their data centers. How do we move to the hybrid cloud? So with our on tap product, which is really a software capability, really turning it into a software company in the cloud as is SAP. So their core products of HANA, SuccessFactors, Ariba, Fieldglass, Concur, all the things from an operation standpoint that's being automated for their business is kind of built on NetApp, is built on NetApp a lot of them. So our approach to the customer is how do we help the experience? And we're doing that transformation internally. So we're going through it with SAP. There's lessons learned there. SAP did this and moved to a kind of cloud company a couple of years ago on NetApp. So those are some of the core instances, but there's a modernizing a data center approach. There's the hybrid cloud, but it still just comes down to, oh my God, data runs my business. I'm really scared about it from protection. There's too much of it. How do I monetize? What are the analytics behind it? And that's what NetApp is really on the forefront of doing. Our CIO talked about this this week. He's going to talk about it this week about choice. What we're hearing for customers is, I need choice. I need to move my data around on-prem into whatever hybrid, hyperscaler environment you want. Fast, efficient with analytics readouts. So that's kind of the approach that we're starting to take to market. And I find it to be a very consultative approach where it's Mr. Customer, SAP NetApp, whoever your hybrid cloud choice is, who your SI is, the other technology partners are, we're all together collectively, almost like an innovation program for a customer approach. And that's kind of not my secret, but one of my secrets of how we're trying to go to market with the sales teams. I'm curious that NetApp is 26 years old, 26 years young maybe. I worked there, I was telling you for a few years as well in marketing, which was awesome. A lot of evolution from a storage perspective. You say NetApp runs on SAP, SAP runs on NetApp as well. Talk to us about this maybe SAP as an influencer of the evolution of NetApp from a storage company to now, as you said, this data authority for hybrid cloud. No, great question. I think it started where we saw that software was kind of taking over the automation, right? So it's almost like storage is a service. In my four years at NetApp, we never approached SAP as a partner or the customer talking about storage or infrastructure per se. Kind of around this data management methodology a while back. I think SAP has been an influencer internally for us in a couple of regards. One, they have the state of the art, a lot of the software operations, things that we needed to run the business. There's been some kinks. There's some things that we probably need to customize that fit our business. You know, NetApp's really unique. We're about $6 billion, we're 10,000 employees, we're three business units. And we're a very unique company. The culture is awesome, we're empowered. Sales people on the ground are empowered. Me, helping run the alliance, we can be very strategic on how and what we want to do. Hey, we want to have Cube at Sapphire, absolutely do it. As an example. So with that empowerment, we've been able to look at the best of breed in tools. And I think the tools are helping us from looking at the business and really how the customer experience. So I'll give you one example on that. So we're listening to our customers and how they want to transform their data and their data on SAP. Well, I need to also be able to look at the analytics internally on, okay, does my customer need a technical refresh? What are they doing on SAP? Is it SAP on Oracle? What products do they have of NetApp? Do our sales people properly are enabled on selling SAP on cloud? Are they talking to their counterparts at the account from SAP, from a Cisco or Fujitsu, AWS, and then whatever SI? So there's a lot of complexity. There's an art and a science to it. And it's in our transformation and SAP from the tools perspectives at the core of that. So Arjun, let's talk about the Alliance. Beyond just the SAP to NetApp, this is really complex. I mean, even with the tools, on tap for the cloud, on tap in your data center, on tap kind of in the fog later, wherever you are saying that. That normalizes the data complainant. It kind of validates the NetApp as a data driven company. However, when you go to an enterprise and you say that, you know what, this thing that used to live in my data center is now spread across these three different environments. It's really hard to figure out, how do SIs play a role into shaping the strategy in this Alliance? Yeah, that's a whole nother layer, right, of the complexity, because I find, and I came from the SI side of the house, I worked at Accenture for a really long time prior to my career in the partnership side. I think they're very good from a consultative approach of, hey, how do we want to design this thing? How do we want to implement it? How do we want to run it? And where does everybody's silo of stuff or technologies fall into that? I think the art part of it is, hey, as NetApp or with Mr. SI, hey man, how do we help design with you? How do we consult the end-to-end approach here? I think we're the expert from an end-to-end data management approach. So there's some budding of heads at times, depending on which SI, because they do. They have these long-standing executive partnerships. There's a lot of investment from SIs at the account. I find I was just at a leadership conference with Accenture, and they're spending $3 billion on three different things around automation. One, training. They can't get people, it's still about people and process. How do we get the process and tools in place? Where do we need to do merger and acquisition on the latest products, and how do we implement with that ecosystem? So I always think it's a work in progress. It's gone well. I think that's something I like to see us improve on. I think the SAP to NetApp partnership is advanced in a lot of regards to that. It's like anything. It's also like when you look at salespeople internally to NetApp with our transformation. How do you get people out of the comfort zone talking to their infrastructure lead, their line of business lead, and elevate to the cloud conversation, going to the CXO. I think the chief security offer is the key executive now in our sales process because of data protection. And that's something we do well, and that's something they own. And I'm always trying to be creative. Like there might be lots of dollars to protect data. How do we turn that into a whole strategy conversation with all the partners? So let's go a little deeper on NetApp value propositions. You know what? Infrastructure is infrastructure. Why should it matter? How do you guys differentiate between your competitors and running S4 HANA, the cloud strategy, you know what, in-memory databases, storage is no longer needed. That's not true, but what's the story? Yeah, the story for us is the on-tap product that we have, the software. Because what we can do is deploy SAP really fast, really fast, just some stats. Like you can get 45% project timeline savings with our deployment of SAP. The secret sauce in that is the tools of the replication and the snapshots. So when you're doing constant development or ongoing maintenance, we can do snapshots in real time. And that is the key thing that keeps the production going live faster. You know, because CICD is not something that we do, I've managed SAP for a long time. And CICD wasn't exactly a concept in SAP. So we rely on the infrastructure a lot to do. So snapshots is an amazing example of how you bring this CICD approach to something that has stayed at SAP. You can't just shut down SAP for the weekend to apply it up the five times a year. Correct, so it's hours and hours of downtime and you can do it in three hours. A lot of times it's real time. So I was just at a HANA conference in Vegas and we got to get a lot of one-on-one time with customers. It was awesome. And that was the biggest thing they said that they need more of of NetApp and the differentiator is. We're continue to expand our approach to managing the data. And I need the replication and the cloning specifically to run the production value end to end. So that's the other part of it. It's really just doing that end to end landscape management of SAP and non-SAP workloads. And the one thing that's great about the cloud part of this is you do need a lot of storage and it's software-based storage. So I think the approach in NetApp is going the right direction. I've been working with SAP as a partner now for 12 years. I think that this is probably the best momentum I've had with SAP ever. And one of the reasons why is I think one date is the story, right? What does Bill McDermott always say? Date is now the currency. Well today he was saying now trust is the currency which is completely true too. But from the data being the currency perspective it's now the end game for both of us. So we've kind of both in all companies have gone into the middle that that's kind of not only the messaging but kind of the central thing we're trying to deliver value on. And the choice, I want to keep saying the fact that customers now want choice on where they put their data. And that's the thing that we're really promoting here at Sapphire this week. Last question RJ. Yes. Speaking of choice, I know, I know, right? Speaking of choice, you mentioned customers want choice, they do want choice. You talked about value, delivering value from a competitive perspective. Customers have choice, they've got other storage vendors that they can work with. Give us your best elevator pitch. What makes NetApp and SAP different and better than say some of those maybe orange colored competitors? Sure, no, no, it's a great question. The biggest differentiator is just the fact that we are the one company out there that can provide data management in any hybrid environment. AWS, a hyperscaler, Microsoft, Google, we're doing cloud volumes just announced with Google Cloud Platform. We're one of the premier technology for HANA in Azure. So I think number one, it's that. Secondly, we can deploy SAP really quickly which consumes licenses. So one, the customer really likes that too. SAP sales loves it because then they give them a chance to go back to the customer. And then just the end-to-end data management that we can provide our customers value. I would say choice one. Awesome, well I said a few minutes ago to Keith that Bill McDermott is probably the most energetic C level that I've ever seen. Your energy RJ right after what it is. You know why? Because it's go time, it's Sapphire day one. The things might have exploded, we haven't had them both. I know, can you imagine? That would have been fun. Hiro Technics on day one. Well RJ, thank you so much. Not only for visiting with Keith and me this morning, but also having theCUBE in another booth at Sapphire. We love it, we can't wait. Thanks everybody. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend at theCUBE on the ground at Sapphire now day one. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest.