 I'm Dave Vellante of wikibon.org and we're here with Bob Hill of Sun Guard, the availability company, you know, a really great brand. Bob, welcome to theCUBE. We're here at Sapphire. We're hearing a lot about cloud this year. Not, I don't know if you hear last year, but not a lot about cloud last year. Yeah, it's interesting. It's really become mainstream almost. It's good news. In terms of the conversation. Oh, yeah. And we're seeing just the adoption rate that customers are getting much more comfortable. You have to get past that initial concern of what is cloud, how do you define it? What's it all about? But once you get past that and they look at how you've implemented it, it's obviously going to vary by provider, but look at how you put it together. You can really put together a very good value proposition. Bob, welcome to theCUBE. We know each other. We worked at HP together back in the day. And you know, Dave and I always talk on theCUBE here about how things have kind of looked like the past and client server. You know, going back in the day, client server, SAP made a ton of money on these deployments. They completely helped the customer. Hardware vendor's best friend. Hardware vendor's best friend. Channel partners, you know. The service providers best friend. Making five X on the dollars, millions of dollars, year deployment. So what's the take with cloud? How do you view, okay, now we're in the cloud environment where, you know, that's open. We talked about that last year. Like, hey, those deployment times are changing. They're faster accelerating. What's the mix of business now relative to the customer base with cloud? Is it, how much is it really changing relative to one? How fast deployment solutions are being deployed? And then the dollar's involved. It changes the whole deployment approach around completely. You're talking about green field deployments or even point solution deployments. It changes the model in that. You used to have to determine how much you need it up front. You're guessing at that. And so the customer had to make a lot of decisions up front. But what do I build? How do I build it? And you didn't always get it right. So with cloud, you have a lot more flexibility and that you can implement resources on demand. What you need, only what you need and when you need it. And as you get further into a project and your end state requirements become much more obvious, then you can go ahead and build out that correct end state environment. And that can be on cloud or can be on discreet hardware, whatever makes the most sense. With everything virtualized on cloud, you have a lot of flexibility in terms of how you can deploy. So what specifically are you got going at SAFAR? I mean, what's your taking in the event and what do you guys got going here? Well, again, great event is just for me, just great to meet the people that I worked with all during the year. And what we're trying to do here is to really work with the partners to talk to them about how we can help them to provide better implementations around SAP and customers as well in terms of how we can better manage these environments. We bring a unique, I think, unique approach to cloud in that our background is disaster recovery. In fact, I'm glad you said we're an availability company versus disaster recovery because that's really been what's changed with Sun Guard. I mean, customers think of us as the disaster recovery company, but it's really that availability culture. We're bringing that to how we develop and develop products and deliver solutions around cloud. And the market's changing too, if you look at that. It's like disaster recovery has kind of looked at it. Oh yeah, they do a lot of tape and offsite stuff. When you got SSD and flash stuff going on around the storage paradigms, the applications are changing. So availability becomes the number one and with real time, that's... And the problem with disaster recovery from a mental model is a lot of people are like, oh, disaster recovery, that's... I never use it, it's just there until I need it, it's insurance policy. And I think your mindset has changed and clearly is about, hey, how do we get value out of those assets and leverage that for the operational aspects of the business? Correct, in fact, we've reinvented ourselves around that. We're a huge investment in Vblock. So our cloud strategy deploys multiple Vblocks, different locations, different countries. So we're providing multi-site capabilities so the availability is baked in now. So we're building in resilient infrastructure at multiple locations, but also part of that availability approaches, even things like data security and effective change control discipline. All of those things tie into providing an overall availability approach that's holistic in terms of how we look at it versus something that you deploy the infrastructure and then you worry about DR as a bolt-on. It's all together, that's how you have to do it. How did that decision come about to sort of... I mean, we talk a lot in theCUBE about converged infrastructure and everybody's sort of going after it. It's a big langrab. How did you guys decide to do that? You probably had some of your own reference architectures internally doing your own systems integration. And I would imagine there had to be some people in the organization that had it not invented here. Absolutely. So how did that change come about? Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, it was a pretty significant departure for us where we normally do all the infrastructure design and have our hand in every aspect of it. But really where it's helped us, and we've seen this play out, we deployed Vblock in 2010. So an early adopter on the platform and just the fact that you have a scalability at a massive level within a single frame. So you can grow that and not have to worry about interoperability, that type of thing. And from an operations perspective and management perspective, we can be much more productive. We can develop tools. It just gives us a better way of extracting the most value from that platform versus having skill sets in 100 different areas. We can really focus on one single thing and then convert that to better value for the customer. How has virtualization changed your business model? It's turned it on its head. Absolutely, because... How so? Well, just the fact that it abstracts the hardware layer. Historically, we've invested a lot of time, effort, energy, skill in developing programs that took the complexity out for the customer. We have to recover these environments, but there were so many moving parts to get that up and running. And that's what we've done for many, many years. But with virtualization, the fact that you're abstracting that hardware layer, it takes a lot of that complexity out for the customer. And it gives us the ability now to be able to recover in much shorter periods of time in terms of data recovery point. And the cost point has gone way, way down. I mean, it's to the point where things that were only reserved for the financial companies that were willing to invest tens of millions of dollars in replication strategies, so that's our DF in replicated production environments. It's come down to the, even the business one users would, 10 users can have replicated data. Doesn't that necessitate a complete change in mindset and business strategy for you guys? Because you lived in that world of the tip of the pyramids, super expensive, and you were sort of geared towards servicing that world, and you see virtualization come about. There must have been an aha moment, or maybe it was an uh-oh moment, or maybe it was a hey, let's go a little bit. A little of each, I think. Yeah, that said, okay, now that's going to force us to change the economics of our business, but the opportunity, of course, is a much larger basis. It's something we just had to do. You can't just ignore the fact that virtualization was going to change everything. So yeah, you're taking this revenue stream, if you don't reinvent that approach, someone else is going to do it for you. So again, it's changing things completely, but again, we're trying, we're not abandoning that. We take that, what's really ingrained in our culture, in terms of how we manage availability for customers, and keeping their businesses running, and that's what we bring into the application space, specifically around SAP, as an example, in terms of how we deliver SLAs, how we take care of the customers, how we, again, looked at that from soup to nuts, how we keep availability in line for customers, because obviously, this is not a backroom application anymore. I mean, you've seen today with the mobility products, the IT is right there at the customer level, so you can't afford downtime. It's just not an option. So availability is part of how we have the design solutions, that's what customers demand now. So I have a couple of questions around SAP. First of all, what's unique about the SAP customer base? Maybe you can make some observations there. Well, we've seen in terms of cloud, they're pretty conservative a lot. I mean, they're used to building pretty extensive infrastructures to support SAP. So we have to make them very comfortable with the fact that we have a solid approach. That's where VBlock has really helped us as well in terms of our approach, and that once you look under the covers in terms of how it's built, it's very traditional in many ways. So it's not a case where you've got cloud solution where data is everywhere and customers aren't comfortable with that. You can still meet all of the requirements in terms of how the data is managed, where it resides, how it's backed up, how it's recovered, and how it's data day management. So as long as we, in terms of that customer, we've got to make sure we cover all the bases. This is a critical business application that we've got everything covered and they focus on the details. Once we get past that, then we talk about really day-to-day operations, how we help them to be more productive. So for example, with cloud, another great benefit is they can expand on demand. So we see dedicated infrastructures where customers aren't deploying updates. They're not running pilot projects because they don't have the capacity. They don't have enough disk. They don't have enough servers. There's too much planning involved, too. Or they don't have the budget. Or they just can't get it on that server. A budget, time, people planning, and all the above. So things just don't happen. And this is a case, companies need to operate in the real world, or the real-time, really, in that you can't afford to delay those kinds of projects. So they can purchase on-demand capacity in cloud and then, again, do things that they never could do before. So it's an enabler for customers. Awesome. How about hybrid cloud? Are you seeing, I mean, I was saying earlier with another guest, we did a survey last year and very few people were doing hybrid cloud. A lot of people were saying that's a buzzword. It was early last year, maybe even late the year before. But that's starting to change in the broad base. Do you see that? And do you also see that in SAP base, or is that further behind? We see it in a broader base, SAP not as much yet. I think we will. We delivered our strategy in terms of the cloud architecture was to include hybrid and that kind of capacity right from day one. We can cross-connect discrete systems with cloud-based systems, multi-tenant, private cloud, whatever that customer wants. We can develop an approach that accommodates all those things because you're going to have downstream applications that need to be connected, that need to be dealt with, not only for the production side but for even the recovery side. So on both sides of that equation, we need to be able to connect to all of the systems within the enterprise. I want to switch topics a little bit and talk about SunGuard. Can you talk a little bit about the anatomy of your business in terms of what you sell? A lot of customers engage with you. What are they buying? Take us through the sort of life-cycle of an engagement. Well, to your sort of discussion earlier, we're often seen as a disaster recovery availability customer. It's often the entry point. There's a lot of respect for what we do. That allows us to really get into talk to customers as far as we do. But it's kind of a neutral party in a way. So there's no real strong vendor's affiliation. We can work with vendor agnostic in that way in terms of working with different platforms. So we can come in and be objective about what needs to be done, how we can support these environments. That's really how we start a conversation. Not, this is our product list. This is what we can do for you. But what are the challenges that you're facing? What are you struggling with? How can we help solve some of these problems? And we don't always have the right fit but we can guide a customer. And in most cases we can provide some of the value. So that's a consultant engagement? Or is it a loss leader? It's a consultative approach in terms of how you sell, frankly. Okay, so that's a pre-sales sort of giveaway, if you will. Or do customers actually engage? It's part of the conversation. You know, you still fall into a situation oftentimes where it becomes a product sale. But when you're talking about applications at least, it really has to become more than that. You've really got to capture what the customer needs so you're putting together the right approach. So that's the way we look at it. And again, that's across the board whether it's specifically a recovery type of requirement, standard managed services co-location or application. We have a very broad set of products and services and the real value, I think, for Sun Guard is the ability to integrate all of those. So that's either on customer premise or in your cloud? Is that right? We can host, again, discrete systems within our infrastructure. We have 30-some odd production facilities within our framework. Or it can be on our cloud. Customer prem, typically not as much. Generally it's, we're a hosted services provider so we can brought more value around it if it's on our prem. So you don't do anything on customer site? We do some of it, but very little, frankly. So specialized cases where? Yeah, we do some remote management, but we're primarily on site because we build SLAs around that. We have the best, as far as I know, best SLA around app availability for SAP 99.9% at the application level. So that's something that we've got on our cover. That's an important distinction. You're not talking about the light on the server. Correct. You're talking about what the user sees. Exactly. If that system's not available to the end user, that's considered downtime. If in fact you have a scheduled period of maintenance and it goes 10 minutes beyond the scheduled period, that's downtime. That's downtime, right, right. That's how you have to look at production availability. Not like Google's SLA. Not quite, no. A little bit different. Or Amazon's. That's, all right, good. Well, John, I mean, you know, we're seeing a lot of messaging around cloud, but I'm still hearing that the SAP-based Bob is somewhat slower than the broader market to adopt. But maybe this new thrust and the success factor acquisitions can change that mindset. What do you think? I think so. In fact, we're so committed to that. Any new customer we bring on for SAP is strictly on our cloud. We're not even offering it as a standalone server option because of all the benefits. And we're willing to walk from that business to customer as a difference of opinion on that, but we try to show them the value. And in most cases, they absolutely do see it. So we're committed to that. All right. Bob, well, listen, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Bob Hill with SunGuard, the availability company. We've seen the transformation, driving virtualization, working with partners like EMC, doing converged infrastructure with things like the block. And appreciate your insights. Thank you very much. Great to meet you. Great to meet you as well. We'll be right back with our next segment, right after this break. So stay tuned from Orlando, Florida. SAP Sapphire now.