 Hi, this is Dave Vellante, we're back. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's production, where we bring you the best guests that we can find. We're here at EMC's 42 South Street EBC headquarters where EMC is having SAP Week. They brought in 200 customers, a bunch of partners, and a number of folks from EMC. Chris Ritter is here, and he's a systems engineer with EMC, and we're going to talk a little bit about SAP and EMC and virtualization. Let's get into it, welcome. Thank you. So, first talk about your role here. You must spend a lot of time with customers, systems engineer, what's your main focus? My main focus is talking about virtualization, talking about how we integrate with all of our partners, people like Cisco, VCE, VMware, and how to leverage those technologies for people to get the best at from an application perspective. If they're looking for cost of ownership, if they're looking at performance, disaster recovery, some type of SLA that they're looking to meet, we're going to make sure that we get the best out of their investment in those technologies. As I remember, it must've been now about four years ago, I had the opportunity to listen in and speak to Paul Moretz when he laid out his vision. It was at an EMC analyst conference, I think, a financial analyst conference. He said, we want to make VMware such that it can run any application, anytime, no degradation in performance, no degradation in SLA. Are we at that point? Absolutely. If you think about the capabilities of VMware today, it's grown up considerably over the last three or four years. So if you look at what we do with Intel, from a VCE perspective and how we package these things together, leverage the technologies like VMotion, simple things like fault tolerance and HA that a customer can apply to an object, the virtual machine, it's service level delivery at that point. So I can be anywhere at any time and have an application up. Regular maintenance windows, disaster recovery, business continuity scenarios, all the above. So let me push a little bit on that because, so virtualization brings this abstraction layer in. People talk about the virtualization tax. Is that so minimal that it's just compared to what's installed in existing systems? It's a no-brainer because of the system performance, microprocessor performance escalating so much, or is that tax still there? Is it just negligible? Talk about that a little bit. Well, the tax from a virtualization perspective is so small now because they've optimized the code and done a lot of engineering around those things that it can be engineered into the solution. The virtualization benefits are far outweigh what you pay for something like a virtualization tax. So if you start thinking about what EMC does with VMware specifically about integrating APIs into frameworks and how you have awareness from the application layer down all the way to the storage layer into the network layer, those kinds of things can really enable features and functionality like business continuity, for example. And I could spread technologies everywhere, quality of service, parallel work streams, all of these things are enabled through VMware. Yeah, so I remember Marichi used the term marketing people that like this because he's called it the software mainframe. Of course, mainframe's been virtualized for years. Nobody's complaining about mainframe performance. So the fact that we're there, it's negligible. Plus when you compare it to previous generations, you're talking about substantial benefits, not only in performance, but also flexibility and agility. So I want to move the conversation a little bit and talk about what customers are doing to transform their environment and then technically what's involved in that transformation. So I think the biggest, if you look at the stack ranking, some of the things you need to think about is where you're starting from and then going to. If you're a green field, it's very, very simple to look at what your target's going to be because you end up with an objective, for example, physical to virtual. I want to migrate there. So how do I lay out my VMware environment? What are the objectives I have for business continuity, for disaster recovery, day-to-day operations? If I'm transitioning from an existing environment, right? You look at the risk-based architecture versus x86, different planning cycle. And result may be the same, but it's a completely different set of criteria in terms of your cost of investment of what you currently have. How do you deploy the new processes and things like that? So what we want to do is help educate them on the technologies and how they work, but also understand that the processes and people, the impact. What changes there from how they work with their people day-to-day and what they can deliver from a service to the business? So people redesigning, dramatically redesigning their business process and giving VMware, essentially the flexibility aspects of VMware, allowing them to do that. Are they trying to keep their business process relatively similar? Can you talk about that a little bit? I think that in many cases it's similar, but we want to enhance them and make them better, automate them, right? And elevate some of those quality skill sets that you have and elevate them up in the business to actually drive value and take out those mundane tasks and things like that. VMware does that very, very well for a lot of people. Some virtualization technologies that we have now enable them to do new things that they weren't capable of doing before, so we're developing new processes and giving them new ways to drive simple routines like maintenance into just a day-to-day push button process. They weren't capable of doing that in a physical environment. What about the skills transitions? Because a lot of the skills and legacy environments are designed to do non-differentiated heavy lifting, I often call it. What's happening there? Are organizations retraining people? Are they able to repurpose those folks? Are they having to lose them and bring in new people? A lot of times IT people get very sensitive about this topic, but talk about how best practice there, how are the best companies dealing with that challenge? Well, I think as a ecosystem, SAP, EMC, VMware, and so forth, Cisco, that our job is to educate those operation staff and the directors and the folks that own the business to say these are the things that you need to be thinking about and help them retrain their folks. Because they have invested a lot of time and money in training. They have a quality skillset when we wanna make sure that they understand how those things change, how they become process engineers or cloud engineers or cloud architects and give them different skillsets. So they can go execute those things, right? Instead of ripping out a workforce and putting a new workforce in, that doesn't make much sense, right? Let's take the existing skillsets. So let's talk about cloud a little bit. So Amazon's attacking the enterprise and going after you guys really hard. Lawyer customers are going, you know, putting test and dev instances up on Amazon. Where does Amazon fit in your customer's environment? Is it another arrow in the quiver? Is it a viable option to bring all your applications to? Is it something that you're embracing? Are you competing with Amazon in different ways? Talk about that whole Amazon effect in the cloud and what EMC strategy is there? I think from looking at specifically around SAP, I think a lot of people who deploy SAP and they need services at scale, Amazon has a, it's a little bit more difficult for them to deliver things at scale and guarantee service levels and things like that. VMware gives these companies the ability to build their own private clouds and meet those cost measures or actually be below as an overall solution and run that long term at a lower operating expense. So we try to look at that and evaluate and guide our customers and give them options that them decide for themselves of what capabilities Amazon has, what's gonna come down the road. If you look at different technologies and things like HANA, it's certainly a consumable resource from an Amazon web service perspective, but it's in a small consumable format. And if you look at the growth of the size of the data sets that HANA is designed to start running, that's far beyond what Amazon's capabilities are today. And so we wanna help educate them and understand the things that could be very simple about operations like disaster tolerance and disaster recovery versus performance versus availability, right? Yeah, so I mean, I don't wanna make this a trash Amazon session, but Amazon has, they created the model, they created the cloud model. But if I'm hearing you correctly, you're saying that you can actually deliver applications, mission critical, core applications cheaper than you can on, let's again, use Amazon as the poster child because they invented all this stuff, cheaper than Amazon, is that true? I think it's possible in many cases, maybe not in every case, but if you start thinking about taking advantage of use cases at scale, Amazon and other providers that are similar to that may not have that function or that particular service catalog to offer, and therefore a use case is not consumable by a normal business, right? So it's apples to apples. So if you had to do it apples to apples, if you had to put in that level of SLA, that level of service, you're saying that layer, putting in that layer on top of Amazon would create an expense that would exceed what you guys can do, or you're really saying that Amazon and public clouds like that can't deliver that level of SLA. I think it requires the proper skill sets underneath, the structure that you've created processes and what you can deliver on a guaranteed basis. So if you look at other service providers that we have as partners, they certainly can do that, and they also provide it at scale, right? So if you look at somebody who can outsource, you know, a CSC, for example, right? They have a complete suite of services, they're able to run an entire large scale SAP format on a VBlock, right? I don't see the capability from large processing requirements being run in the cloud through an Amazon delivery. So you're basically replicating a lot of those benefits, bringing it either in the private cloud or potentially even going forward to Hibercrime. All right, we're getting the hook. Listen, Chris, thanks very much for coming by. Appreciate it. All right, this is Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest.