 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018, brought to you by NetApp. Hey, welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we are live in the NetApp booth at SAP Sapphire 2018. We're joined by Robert Stumpf, Senior Director of IT Enterprise Solution Delivery. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So we're here in the NetApp booth at Sapphire Now. As they said in the keynote this morning, they're expecting a million people to engage with SAP Sapphire this week. I think I've heard rumblings, there's about 20 plus thousand people here in attendance. Huge event, huge show, lots of announcements. Let's talk about NetApp and SAP as partners, specifically in the context of the NextGen Data Center. Bringing cloud-ready solutions to business applications. What are you guys doing there with SAP? Sure, can talk a little bit about that. The NetApp solutions fit into the NextGen Data Center in a variety of different ways. We have the Alphas Flash that really is the core of our product base and is really the workhorse of all of the hardcore applications. It gives you really strong performance in the storage area. Then we have the cloud volumes, when you want to scale out to a hyperscaler and you can use the cloud volumes abilities there. Then when you look at our HDI components, it is capable of giving you a lot more of the container-based compute power. So we fit into a variety of different components there. So Robert, we're at SAP, and SAP hasn't been traditionally known as a cloud-aware application. Tell us, from the NetApp perspective, what's changed with SAP over the years that now you can constantly talk about SAP as a cloud-aware application? So SAP is moving a long way in that direction. You saw this morning in the keynote that they were talking about the C4, their customer-focused applications. That's really kind of putting a framework on top of all of the customer engagements and making the customer the center of everything. So they're moving a lot in that direction. We at NetApp have implemented their hybrid platform, their cloud-for-customer application. We just went live with that last year. So we're on that journey with SAP as well. So as we talk about that, what makes the application, or what make applications in general, cloud-aware? Okay, when you look at making something cloud-aware, you want to really look at the architecture that you have underneath it. So you'll build something that has a lot more automation in it, a lot more scalable, where you don't have to, the scalability is built into the framework that you're leveraging. In the case of our NetApp support site, which we just completely re-architected and went live last month, we have built that on what's called a mean stack. So that's with the Mongo database on the back end. It's a non-SQL database. And then on top of Angular and Node.js, which gives you a much more robust framework for you to be able to scale out your application. So with it being a website, your volume can go up and down. So you want to be able to scale the application without needing people to get involved in that scaling. So they will just fire up new containers that are needed as the volume increases. And it's a lot more robust in architecture. So as we look at hybrid, as we look at NetApp products and solutions, that framework and architecture, can you paint a picture for us what NetApp solutions and products are cloud-aware? Sure, cloud-aware applications really, you need to look at the complete stack of the next generation of data center, which is really embodying the on-prem data center, your hyperscaler cloud data centers, and then a private cloud if you so wish to build one. So the next generation data center takes advantage of the all-files flash on your on-prem solution. So you've got your performance, high performance, scalability. Then your cloud volumes allows you to move your data between your on-prem to the hyperscaler as you need to. And the HCI component gives you that container-based computer array that allows the applications to scale. Also, you can leverage storage grid, which is much more of an object-based database, which is something that you'll use extensively on cloud-aware applications. So thanks, Gabe. So one of the things that was announced this morning, you mentioned C for HANA, where Bill McDermott was sort of expected to announce what SAP was going to be doing that's going to help differentiate them. They want more share from Salesforce and Oracle. He made kind of some aloof references to that. But one of the things that he talked about was companies need, in this day and age, speed, obviously, but to move away from a 360-degree view of sales automation to an actual 360-degree view of the customer. I'd love to get your insight on NetApp and SAP as partners together. Are you seeing any particular industries leading here? We think of like manufacturing, maybe automotive, oil and gas, but I'm just wondering from NetApp's perspective, are you seeing any industries that are really leading inch here in evolving to a next-gen data center that enables this 360-degree view? There's a variety of different industries that are doing that. If you take a look at applications like Netflix and Amazon Prime, those applications are architecture to be scalable and to be much more robust. And they're much more focused on the customer and because you don't have outages, right? They don't take the system offline when they're doing an upgrade to their capabilities. When was the last time you heard of Netflix going offline for 12 hours to do an upgrade? So these applications are built much more robustly around that. And that's one thing that we're looking to do at NetApp with the hybrid implementation that we did with SAP. And we're also upgrading our back-office CRM system to their CRM on HANA, on-prem, and we're going to be taking advantage of the hybrid capabilities there to give that full picture of the customer. We'll be heavily engaged with SAP on their C4 journey and making sure that we are part of that as well. So it's great that you brought up Netflix as an example of a continuously operating environment that has this huge back-end automated with technology. SAP traditionally hasn't been considered a technology that you could upgrade on the fly. You know, I managed SAP environment where we can only take 12 hours of downtime a year because mission-critical, it's very difficult to get that time. How has the NetApp data fabric story played into making that a possibility in your own environment and customer's environment? Okay, we leverage a lot of the NetApp storage on our on-prem system. I'm in exactly the same situation as you were talking about. We have a lot of mission-critical customers that are on our support application. I have to give 90 days' notice to take the system down for any longer than four hours at a time. So I'm in that very similar situation. So we leverage a lot of the NetApp technologies to make sure that the applications are available when I'm doing the upgrades and we can do rapid copies of the data that's in there, make sure it's all robust. Our database failover systems are set up that way so that they take advantage of the snapshots that we got from the application. And we're working with SAP, the SAP hybrid application is actually built on top of NetApp storage. And we're working very closely with SAP to re-architect their application to take advantage of the capabilities that NetApp storage brings to the equation. So NetApp is coming into its own in this hybrid cloud model. It's been around 26 years, right? Long time. But now it's everything is speed, right? You mentioned Netflix and I don't know anybody on the planet that would survive if Netflix went down for an hour, a little on 12. So speed, access to data. But this evolution of NetApp, I'm interested in. Now, again, in this hybrid cloud model, you guys made your name from building network-attached storage on-prem data centers, the announcement with what? Google platform, cloud platform just last week. Talk to us about some of the evolution from NetApp, from your perspective, from a storage perspective into really facilitating this hybrid cloud model. Sure, we're really at the forefront of that because at the end of the day, it's all about the data, right? Your application can run wherever you want, but wherever your data is, it's really the key. And that's the framework that we're putting in place is to make your data a lot more mobile. So if you want to keep the data on-premise, then you can keep it on-premise. If you want to move it out to that, and next to the hyperscaler, you can burst it out. You can use the cloud volumes and migrate the data. So the NetApp picture, the story is really in making your data much more mobile and moving it to the location of choice for any particular workload that you're looking for. So we can't have a discussion in 2018 about data without talking about privacy and security. What's the relationship in ensuring that NetApp and SAP is one, meeting requirements, GDPR, we have to talk about GDPR, and we have to talk about security. How is NetApp securing data and ensuring that end users and organizations' data stay private? It's a very good question, right? It's definitely a challenge that a lot of companies are struggling with. And the tools that NetApp provides with our storage systems, security is paramount. And that's something that we're very much focused on and making sure that your data is your data and the specific components of the data that you want to keep on-premise, which you want to keep much more secure, then you can keep that on the NetApp alphas flash, storage systems, and then you protect it as if it's in your own kingdom. But then the data that's a little bit more lacks on the security side, then you can push that out into the hyperscalers and use the NetApp cloud volumes to have it outside of your on-premise, outside of your own firewall. So one of the basic things as a on-tap customer that on-tap customers depend on and the private data centers the disability to encrypt data on the fly. Now that we look at, you know, we see on-tap in the cloud, do we get that same basic capability to encrypt data on the fly or encrypt data while it's in transit? How do I know my data is protected from an encryption perspective? You get the same capabilities when you're using the on-cloud tools that we provide, so there's no real difference in that, and that's the beauty behind it. You're using the same storage management tools for your cloud volumes as you would be for your on-premise systems. I want to ask a question on competition. There's a lot of co-opetition that's going on, just at Sapphire alone. With what you talked about, about how NetApp is leveraging hybris you mentioned to really kind of get towards that model of connecting supply chain with demand, getting that full view of customers, SAP partners with probably all of your competitors, so how is what NetApp is doing internally to digitally transform? How do you see it as giving NetApp that competitive edge against the other guys? Okay, the way that we look at our competitive edge at NetApp from an application standpoint is really focusing on keeping our core capabilities very, very vanilla. So in the implementation with hybris, we were very much focused on not customizing the application, but because at the end of the day, you sell stuff, you build stuff, you manufacture it, and you support it. So those are the core capabilities, and we kept that very vanilla as much as possible within the implementation. Where we differentiate, that's where we customize. So our application landscape is much more focused on customizing for the differentiating capabilities, and that's the component that's specific to NetApp and how we do business, and that's the way that we'll go about differentiating ourselves from our competitors. So we use the core capabilities of all of the enterprise applications that we have that we purchase, such as hybris, and then we go build our custom solutions that are the differentiator that really, such as our ASAP auto support system that gets, you know, was embedded right from day one, that's a custom built application, very proprietary. It's really the keys to the kingdom for our organization, and that's something that's very, very integral as part of the NetApp culture. So let's talk about some lessons learned from that. One of the pain points for many SAP customers as they look at capability like ECC on HANA, really want it, but they've customized their environment too much. So making that switch is extremely difficult for them. What have you learned as a team that says, you know what, the best way to stay in line with SAP and follow that roadmap for mission critical applications that are both stable and differentiating, you should follow these basic policies from a hygiene perspective. Sure, we actually went through that last year with our project where we replaced our Salesforce automation system, and we implemented C4C Hybris. So the key to that is really getting the executive sponsorship bought in to making sure that you're adhering to the vanilla applications, not customizing it. So we were very fortunate where we had Henri Richard and Bill Miller, our CIO, they were the executive sponsors of the project, and they were adamant that we would not customize the application. And we went through, we took us six months to replace our CRM system, front office CRM system, very proud of that project. It was an incredibly painful journey to go through, but the benefits that we got out of the end of it are phenomenal because we were in that situation where we had an overly custom SaaS application that was running our sales organization that really wasn't meeting the needs of the business. Now we have a much more agile implementation that's on top of SAP's Hybris platform and we're taking advantage of the new capabilities they introduce rather than focusing on our own customizations. That's a great summary. I think you articulated very well what one of the themes was from Bill McDermott's keynote this morning is making things simple, it's not an easy thing to do, but it's critical and there's so many business outcomes that can matter that, right? Not just streamlining processes, improving sales and marketing and connecting them together, but really effecting revenue, profit, share, et cetera. So Robert, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and chatting with Keith and me today about what you guys are doing with SAP. Great, thank you, thank you for your time. We want to thank you. You're watching theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAP Sapphire 2018. Thanks for watching.