 I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. I'm joined by my co-host. Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org, and SAP is an area that we focused on. Since we started theCUBE, really it was our second ever CUBE event, was SAP Sapphire. We've been watching the innovations and the transformation of SAP. Michael Leeper is here. He's the director of global technical infrastructure at Columbia. He's the director of the SAP Saffire. He's the director of the SAP Saffire. He's the director of the SAP Saffire. Infrastructure at Columbia Sportswear, a great apparel company. Michael, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. It's fun to be here. It's, you know, EMC World's a great time just to explore the technology and really connect with peers that are doing some really cool things in this industry. Yeah, a lot of innovation here, a lot of new messaging that we're hearing from the Federation, if you will. So, you know, early on EMC and VMware specifically talked about virtualizing any application. I think Paul Moritz, at one point, used the term software mainframe and then the marketing guy's got to hold that so he can't say that anymore. But he said, our intent is to be able to virtualize any application, any workload. SAP is obviously one that you'd point at and go, that's probably not where you'd start. No, I'd be certain. If you guys have successfully virtualized SAP, talk about that a little bit. Absolutely, so yes, to start with, we are 100% live on SAP, 100% virtualized, really on top of VMware technology and ultimately a pair of VBlock 700s where we run our SAP platform. But our story starts really almost three years ago now. When we set out as an IT organization and try to figure out how we could make ourselves better, how we could provide a better service to the company and really provide a platform that we could scale and meet the needs of the business today and going forward. And so we set out on a process to really start virtualizing our world. We went in about an eight month period from 25% virtual to 90% virtual. And we completely worked that process to really totally modernize our platform. Get it on top of Cisco Compute, on top of EMC Storage and VMware Hypervisors and got to our point that the app was virtual. There was no debate, was it physical or not? It was gonna be a virtual app. And when we got done with that is when my CEO gave me a call one December afternoon and said, hey, by the way, I just bought SAP. Said, it's time for us to move off our legacy ERP system that ran on IBM Power. He said, look, this is going to be our crown jewels for the company going forward. How do we properly build and support a platform that really takes us as a company forward? On SAP it provides a world-class infrastructure to move forward. And I sat down with my teams and we spent a couple of days really debating what was the right way to do this? Was it IBM Big Iron? Was it x86? Was it physical? Was it virtual? And we came to the same conclusion. We needed to run this virtual. That's what we were good at. That's where we were trained and skilled on. We believed there was not a risk here. It was a greenfield implementation. We knew how to run enterprise-class workloads on VMware. We were going to set out and do that. So early conversations with our friends at EMC, with our friends at VMware, and ultimately our friends at SAP, said, hey, can we do this? Is this really how we get full in, all in support? And all three of those guys came to the table with, they had our back. They said, absolutely. The way of the future is to virtualize SAP. You guys know what you're doing. We will help you through that process. And in less than three or four months, we had built out a full production class workload on SAP, on VMware, and really we've never looked back. Michael, we had a chance to start to cube here four years ago at EMC World 2010. And then what was interesting was, Dave and I were instantly tapped to fly to Sapphire. And we'll be there next week as well. And you'll be there. And we've interviewed you guys in the past. But let's just kind of look at what EMC's doing here today. And we kind of got a feel for what's happening with SAP. And SAP's had amazing messaging. So EMC and SAP, for the past four years, I can attest, personally, I've been on the ground on all events, has been right on a trajectory to where they're doing today. So not a lot of, not a lot of diseconomies of scale. They've said all the right things. But go back four years ago. There was really, really hard problem to virtualize SAP. And to make that happen, had a lot of business benefits. Can you just take us through just the past four years? Because a lot's changed. And talk about some of the specific things you had to overcome and the advancements that you are now gaining from that. Absolutely. So really, in any virtualized landscape and that maturity that you have to build up as a company to really get yourself virtual, you have to work through a lot of things. The early days is we started virtualizing just kind of core SQL databases. Not tier one stuff, but that kind of tier two, tier three work. We had to start working into that. We believe from an infrastructure perspective that we knew we could support that, we could provide the performance we needed. But you know what, my DBA teams, my app teams, they weren't quite sure about it. We had to prove to them that this technology was the right way to do it and how we could provide them features and capabilities that they could not get on a physical-based platform. So we had to really work through some situations there, earn some trust with the business, earn some trust with our vendors to really provide a platform that was unquestionably the best one we could put to the business. And as we started working through some of those things, you start finding more and more advantages to the platform. You start getting more and more wins. So to your point earlier, you're not going to start your virtualized journey by virtualizing SAP, but it's definitely where you need to go because you're not going to really see these benefits of this ultimately flexible, highly scalable architecture until you start really virtualizing those tier one applications, those big boy applications that you run your business on and you're classically spending time and resource on things that really are no longer providing value to the company. So we get to sit down now and look at our platform and say, look, we're not spending time racking and stacking physical servers. We're not spending time trying to figure out how to ratchet performance up because we hit a performance issue. We have two or three dials we turn and we can add capacity and add performance instantaneously back to our business without having to spend time rearchitecting our environment. So your application heads, you said they weren't sure. You're probably understating that. There's probably a little bit more friction. And so talk about how you got through that. Was it top down? Was it your CEO? Was it Erika Joling? Well, so I'm not a small man. So there might have been situations where I stood up and looked down at them and said, we're going to do this and that's worked with my mother. It's worked with my kids. It kind of worked with my peers a little bit. But at the end of the day, we had to come to an honest conversation about how we could make these things work for them. And so we started to do things like have a conversation around how much capacity and how much performance were they using in a physical world today. So take a mid tiered SQL database architecture. They were running four procs, maybe 128 gigs of RAM in a physical world. For us to virtualize them, we guaranteed them that same configuration. We knew really going into it. We were going to over provision the heck out of it. But the way I made them feel comfortable was telling them, look, I will give you everything you need. And so we over provisioned early on, a lot of capacity into our platform. You stuck your neck out and said, you know. I was okay with that because I knew what the end game was. I couldn't force them into that position to start with, but I needed to get them to start taking some steps along the way. So we started over provisioning things. Knowing in the background that once we got things virtualized, I had way more tools and way more data in my fingertips to look back at them and say over the last year, your app has never consumed more than X. I'm going to take back, not all of it, a good chunk of it that you've never touched. And not just this quarter, not just this week, but this year in some of these scenarios, we can start pairing back some of that overallocation and truly start leveraging our investments in technology into other parts of the business. So we had to not only use some intimidation, which, you know, we laugh about, but it does happen. There's some back room deals that you had to pull with, with my DBA teams or my development teams, they trust me on this one. We're going to make it better for you. Trust me that if something does go bump, we got your back and we will fix this for you. And then ultimately give them what they were asking for. So eliminate the concern, is VMware going to hurt me? Guess what? I will give you 10% more than you're using today. And just sit back and let's watch it. And that gave you great operating leverage as you were able to free up that asset. Absolutely. And you start getting wins, right? You start building credibility. I get a win here. I get a win here. I get this team liking it. I get this team seeing the advantages. We get this team, this team able to do things they never could do before. And all of a sudden the whole company's moving in that direction. So I'm interested in the migration. If I understand it was a migration from Unix. So my SAP deployment was a green field deployment. We were coming off of a legacy JD-Edwards system that we've been running as a company for about 15 years. We put JD-Edwards in when we were still a private company, about 200 million in sales and had grown to almost a $2 billion global company. That ERP system, not a knock on JD-Edwards, it just was time to be replaced. And when we sat down and tried to figure out what our new platform was going to be, SAP and specifically the Imperial Footwear Solution for SAP ECC was the way of the future for us. So we didn't have to worry about some of the legacy data or legacy configurations moving forward. We got the advantage of building green field. But what I didn't have was any sort of requirements, right? And we've talked a lot at times around SAP and SAP project requirements. My project teams, and I'm now almost three years into this thing, I still don't have performance requirements for what I need my systems to run. We went through some basic quick-sizer tools, did some overall engineering with SAP, but we didn't know what we needed. We really needed to get into this environment with a platform that we could start with and then grow with the company so that we never held the company back. So did you get some kind of solution from EMC or a solution architecture? What did they do? What did EMC do to sort of reduce your risk moments? EMC really had our back. We sat down with them and said, look, we're going to virtualize SAP. No debate. This is what we're doing. We're on EMC technology. What EMC was able to do was bring some of their solution experts into the table, guys that were really pushing the envelope on technology, pushing the envelope on configurations and sitting down with my guys and craft not only the environment that was perfect for us, but leveraging the history and the other scale that EMC has as a global company that's pushing technology with other customers to really put together for us the right fit and the right platform for Columbia. And that was a services engagement? There were some services for sure. There was a lot of it, some of our overall relationship and partnership ability with them. There's some freebies in there? Nothing's free, absolutely. But they became good friends of ours. We really worked through these processes together so that we could have a joint development and a joint platform that not only EMC, but SAP was also very proud of and we could leverage going forward. I mean, I always find SAP's conversations like this are interesting with the EMC because these are real business deployments that not like proof of concept. You guys did as SAP said in theCUBE a couple of years ago, changing the airplane out during mid-flight at 30,000 feet, kudos to that. But I really want to ask you something more specifically around EMC and SAP and EMC in particular. We're hearing a lot at this conference around transformation and a lot of the conversations are about business value and it's about services. A new breed of services. We had Accenturon, we had CloudTP.com on yesterday. You're seeing acceleration, faster time to value. You guys did some stuff early, some real pioneering work with EMC. Take us through what EMC did. I mean, obviously EMC had some chops and they're beefing up their presence on the services side from being just a storage vendor to actually doing this. So take us through what EMC delivered. So in the early days, we were first crafting this concept and crafting these platforms. EMC brought to the table not only their classic storage and configuration-based engineering staff, but also honestly some very talented SAP staff including EMC-badged SAP technology guys as well as SAP technology guys. As SAP and EMC were really building out their center of excellence and putting together their platforms, we were able to leverage that entire community of engineers, that entire community of knowledge and experience to really build a world-class environment before this was done kind of by the book. We kind of wrote the book in a lot of this and it was a lot of trust and a lot of belief that we were doing the right thing and that we would be able to look back and say, in a couple of years we built a platform that we are ultimately proud of and that truly was changing the game when we did this. So it's a long partnership, strong partnership between SAP and EMC to truly move the ball forward. Michael here with Columbia Sportswear, I'll see you guys deploying real business value in midstream, you guys done a few years paying off big dividends with EMC, congratulations. Thanks for coming on the queue. We'll see you next week at Sapphire. The queue will be at Sapphire for a quick programming note and plug for us. We'll be in Orlando next week for SAP Sapphire for the fourth consecutive year and looking forward to it. It will be in Vegas too. It will be in Vegas. Keep an eye out for the queue, we'll have semi-casts going on next week. We'll be right back with our next guest here. Exclusive coverage from EMC World SiliconANGLE. We'll be right back. Great, thanks guys.