 The Cube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC. Redefine VCE, innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing. Brocade, say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. Welcome back, we are here, EMC World 2014 in lovely Las Vegas, the Sahara Convention Center at the back of the Palacio. We're here with our next guest. We're excited, we're going to jump right into it. I got two guests. I lost my co-host, Hendrick Wagner, America's Theater Lead SAP, EMC, and Phil Luven from Fritz and Mazel. Did I get that right? Yeah. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you. So let's jump in. So we're going to get going. We have a little special announcement, a new program. So we've had people introduce books on the Cube. We've had people introduce companies on the Cube. We've had people introduce all kinds of things on the Cube, but today we've got a new program. So what do we got here? We want to talk a little bit about EMC Elect program and the SAP Mentor program. So if you're an EMC Elect to get this cool business card and actually want a few more of them, but this is what I got. But EMC Elect was established last year in 2013 and I was very fortunate to be an EMC Elect in 2014. There's about 100 EMC Elect members and there are about three attributes or three common themes from the Elect is around social engagement, leadership, and social media. We're out evangelizing the EMC brand. Some of us are EMC employees, some of them are partners and customers and we like to have a lot of fun around social media around that. And so again, how many people have this? I want to say it's about 100, but then I saw some of our executives were tweeting and saying that they had one as well. So I need a couple more to give them out of this business card. This is way cool. It's all laser cut with holes in it. So that's good. So it's basically all about being the evangelist. You're out there carrying the flag, getting it out there. Creating, you know, everybody says their signals are noise and obviously we want to put out more signals around it, what we're doing and how we're helping innovate for our customers and solve problems. So what's interesting is it really shows a value that you guys are putting on social and tying that back to thought leadership and leadership. Talk a little bit about how that's worked out because I'm sure there's still a few naysayers out there that just don't get it. You know, what is Twitter? What is the social thing that's going on and why is it important in my business? Well, I think a perfect example is what we're trying to do here with the EMC Elect and SAP Mentor community and the collaboration between the two. So maybe Phil, take some time to explain the SAP Mentor program and how we're collaborating between the EMC Elect and SAP Mentors. Well, basically the SAP Mentor program got established in order to have the community leaders, the people who are influencers in the SAP ecosystem and the SAP community to kind of act as a channel of communication between SAP themselves, between freelancers, partners, customers and relay messages and be able to communicate whatever new advances there are, whatever opportunities that are out there and by being able to leverage that between EMC and SAP, I think we're opening up a new channel that we can actually do a bilateral communication platform with a hardware vendor and the SAP as a software vendor as a cloud company and the customer and partner ecosystem. So, you know, Bill McDermott joined the keynote live, so clearly, you know, the guys at the top have a good relationship, the companies have a good relationship but that doesn't always necessarily trickle down down into the trenches for the people that are responsible for getting stuff done and we see a lot in the open source community, a lot of meetups and a real passion amongst the practitioners. So talk a little bit about how this program percolates down to the people in the trenches that are actually getting the work done and how they can take advantage of this. I mean, to become an SAP mentor, you actually have to be a community member that is very active, that is being seen, that is very visible in the community and that can also be looked upon as being someone that I can easily approach with questions, with comments, with any kind of feedback that I would like to give or that I would also like to receive in regards to certain products and by being able to channel down towards the individual but then having a communication layer like the mentors that are also able to have direct communication with product management, with executive board level and being able to give feedback back to those levels, I think that's a pretty good combination in order to facilitate all areas. And how many mentors are there? Right now, there's roughly around 150 mentors worldwide. Okay. And then what is the community? I'm sorry, I keep interrupting you. No worries. So a couple of years ago, we met actually in social media and started collaborating, getting to know each other and we found by getting to know EMT-elect members and SAP mentors, that's a huge benefit for the ecosystem. In the end of the day, it's a benefit for the customer. We're learning what's going on, what's changing in SAP, what's changing at EMC in the ecosystem. We're helping solve problems, we're helping to remove barriers from our customers, ultimately helping them innovate faster and opening up lines of communications and what I like to call real-time communication, which is play on SAP HANA and real-time capabilities. Right. And what are the various channels of communication within this kind of mentoring and connecting, if you will? I mean, if you take, for instance, an announcement that we had today about VMware and HANA being able to go productive on VMware, I mean, that's a huge step for anything that has to do with that memory. So by being able to facilitate then also the voice of the EMC community together with the voice of the SAP community and being able to interact with each other on a very open and broad level, I think that's gonna help advance the product and bring the product a lot more visible also out to the individual and if he or she has questions, she directly has a channel that she can go back to and get direct feedback and get direct communication. Yeah, and then I was gonna say, and how receptive are the product managers at SAP and EMC to the feedback that's coming through this channel? I mean, SAP has various conferences throughout the year, be it SAP Decode, as it's called now, not TechEd anymore, be it Sapphire, where the mentors actually get together are very visible at those events and then also have a set of meetings with executive board members or with different product managers or different people out of strategy. So therefore there's a direct challenge communication. So they're listening, yeah. For us, the virtual HANA announcement this morning was just massive. I mean, it's just so exciting for customers to start leveraging the virtual infrastructure they build for their SAP environment to also run HANA on and not having to buy separate or operate separate infrastructure for that. Every client and partner we're talking about is that saying that that's the direction they want to go. And now when we leveraging our social communication vehicles whether it's Twitter or LinkedIn and our blogs, our ability to communicate the benefits of that out to a larger audience is just massive. Yeah, but you said they've been asking for it though, right? You know, non-prod for virtual HANA has been there for two, two and a half years and you know, there's been a long road but finally this morning it was announced. We're very active in the virtual HANA messaging and evangelizing partly because EMC IT has been live on virtual HANA in productive mode since they run BPC on HANA since November. And it's just a great thing for the customers on adopting HANA in the right pace and the right type of infrastructure, you know, being the same type of infrastructure in the same SLAs, the same TCO that they're building for their ERP structures. Right, right. And when is that GA? Well, so it's GA this morning. Yeah, yeah. So there's initial production support. Okay. You know, there's many clients like EMC IT that's already running. I was just saying there's gotta be, there's gotta be some instances out there running, right? They are, but now the floodgates are open. It's very exciting. It's one of the biggest topics we're going to be talking about and something that's exciting between SAP Mentors and EMC Elect that we can help communicate in the behalf of our partners and customers. Oh, that's great. That's great. So they're ready. And I mean, not only looking at the VMware part but also looking at the announcement that came yesterday in regards to DSSD. Having bought the company and having a lookout and trying to place a new era of how storage computing is gonna be going forward and developing something new that has not been there yet, developing this entity SAP in memory or in general in-memory computing into a whole new level, that's very exciting. Yeah, I mean, the announcement yesterday and the fact that Bill McDermott was there on video and talking about it and exciting about the partnership is just fantastic. We got an opportunity to meet with John Rhodes as a result of his EMC Elect and SAP Mentor just a second ago and he talked about the fact that they're placing bets about building architecture around in-memory computing that they believe in the future is going to be more prevalent. I truly believe if you push the limit of that innovation will help the ecosystem to innovate faster and get that faster. And we'll be one of the leaders in that ecosystem of getting there. So it's just really fantastically exciting for us. Yeah, you get on the virtuous cycle, right? The more people use it, the more you build, the more you build the cheaper it goes, the more proliferation. The more you put yourself out there in order to develop something new that hasn't been there yet, the more you open the door for innovation that other people can produce because they cannot produce something that doesn't have a platform. So by leveraging to build a platform that hasn't been there yet and advancing yourself and putting yourself on the line to make that happen, you actually give others the opportunity to grow. And are they ready? How receptive are they? They are. They're ready to go? Of course. That's the whole part of it. That's the fun part about it. Where do you think some of the early application stacks, early victories are going to be, verticals, who's going to be the early adopters to take advantage of this thing and have the fortitude to run with it? I mean, if we look at DSSD, isn't that the point where we can say, okay, we have a product that we can already look at and feel and touch on everything. But if we take, for instance, innovation that EMC is doing with Project Jupiter, or how do you call it? EMC's big data platform. That's something where innovation truly is going to be a showcase. I mean, if you could- You're going to dive in a little bit more to Jupiter. Something we're pretty excited about. SAP has this strategy around their HANA data platform or their big data strategy. Very simply says, I put hot data in HANA, I put warm data in IQ and cold data in Hadoop. And we looked at it and said, it's interesting if we, in the past, just provide infrastructure for pieces of that, but why don't we build an EMC big data platform for all of that that can start very small and can scale very large and leverage concepts of data temperature, an enterprise SAP data lake, right? And then provide some intelligence around that of ingesting data, moving data, looking at data in a federated, query environment. And what the reception we're getting from the customer is, you know what, we wanted to go tackle a big project like that around SAP, but we couldn't do it because it was too complex and building all the parts and how do I manage it? How do I back it up? How do I replicate it? What's the security? You've thought about this. So Project Jupiter is that platform. We thought about all the things you need to think about if you have a big, big data analytics environment that scales to petabytes. And we're getting a great reception from SAP customers from the ecosystem, from the integrators, and it's pretty exciting. So talk a little bit about that temperature grade, because the Hadoop guys would probably say, we will link all data, hot data, that's why we want to stick it in Hadoop, and you may not know if you need it today or need it tomorrow, but we'll figure that out later. You know, it'd be interesting to hear SAP's perspective on that. I can't talk for SAP, but I can talk all my own. I mean, at the moment, the way that we're leveraging all this big data topic, and I mean, there's such a plethora of information out there that you're trying to somehow digest and get your feel for and trying to actually filter that in order to be able to make something useful out of it and trying to access that through methods like Hadoop and other variances, that's actually the big thing that we need to tackle. And if we can find a sort of way to structure that methodology of being able to pull data from all the different spots where we think we might get structured data from, then we have a method of really going forward and not just taking all the data, dumping it somewhere, and then trying to build a showcase for it afterwards. Right. For us, what we're seeing when we have the conversation with the clients, it's kind of the art of the possible. You know, SAP data, there's data about customers' data, there's data about products, and there's transactional data. Then there's all these unstructured data, right? That could be media data, social data, all kinds of various unstructured forms and so forth. And the big, powerful use cases in certain verticals come when you combine those two data sources and do some kind of query on some time as search, right? So that's kind of what the Jupyter platform enables somebody to do much simpler, write TCO, and it's aligned with SAP strategy, which is pretty exciting. And then there's the big sources of structured data that are public sources of data, right? Like the FAA flight data, right, which people use in all kinds of interesting applications. I mean, we had an interesting session, I think it was like 2010, 2011, called the Innovation Weekend with SAP. It was an event prior to SAP TechEd, and we actually had British Airways come in with all their flight data that they had from when they were servicing airplanes. And they said, we would like to find a way in order to structure that data so we can do predictive analytics on what part is going to go bad in what plane next. And getting companies to come out with those kind of business cases and actually trying to think, okay, what can we do now with this and how can we leverage this? That's actually fun. So that's an interesting one that was led really by the customer. From SAP's point of view, not that you can speak for them, you know, opinions by them like Twitter. But that wasn't where SAP traditionally played, right? It was an ERP, it was closed, they controlled things. Is that changing in terms of pulling some of that out of SAP? It's a part where SAP plays. It's just the customer had a brilliant idea, and of course there was communication with SAP, otherwise it wouldn't have known about the event. But they said, hey, this might be a sort of channel where you can bring in something to get an idea out of it and see if there's even a possibility to run with that kind of an idea, or if it's completely obstruous to even keep further thinking into that direction. Right, but am I incorrect in thinking that it's really kind of a not core SAP dataset that they want to pull in to try to find some of that insight and is that something that we'll see more and more of that from SAP down the road or maybe I'm completely up base? Depending on how you look at the IT strategy, when a company decides on IT strategy, there's so many layers that you're looking at now. You're not looking at total cost of ownership anymore. You're looking at total cost of installation. You're looking at your components from a hardware, software, services, and technology perspective. So you're trying to get a 360 degree perspective and insight into that area, and then suddenly you have, from a business perspective, especially if you go into HANA, you don't sell HANA because it's an IT solution. You sell HANA because there's a business case for it, there's a business challenge for it, and there's a need for it that's been proven and evaluated. So suddenly you have business perspectives from an operational, legislative, financial, and operational perspective. So people are actually starting to think about, okay, how do I bring KPEX OPEX into this discussion with it? How do I leverage on those areas? So the IT component has gotten a lot more complex and to the point is it's not just anymore, business comes in, says I need something and IT goes out and builds something. Right. But it's gone far, far beyond that. So that's why it's essential to have a clear and sound IT strategy that is looking forward. Awesome. So we're getting towards the end of our show here, but I want to go ahead, can you tell people how they can find more information about the SAP Mentor Program and the EMC ELECT Program? Where should they go? Sure, EMC ELECT, I mean you can Google us and there's a lot of information on the EMC Community Network. You can follow me on Twitter. I think my Twitter name is up there. I have a personal blog. I'm very passionate about the collaboration, the social aspect, user groups, getting customers together. You've probably heard of the SAP Week events that we do and getting clients together and collaborating. We're going to continue this collaboration with SAP Mentor, Sapphire's right around the corner and we think it's going to be a great thing for SAP and for EMC, the partner ecosystem and the end of the day, a great thing for the customers. Yeah, for the SAP Mentors, you find them at sapmentors.sap.com. At every conference from SAP, we usually run around in these jerseys so you can see us all. Just come up to us, talk to us, tell us what you think, what your concerns are and yeah, Twitter handle should be up there so just try it, excellent. Well, Henry, Phil, thanks for stopping by. As always, the Cube Twitter handle, we always follow Cube guests. So anytime there's a Cube guest that you want to quickly find their Twitter handle, Google works pretty well but you can also go on who the Cube Twitter handle's following. So we are again at EMC World 2014. We'll be back with our next segment after this short break. You're watching the Cube.