 It's theCUBE, covering Sapphire Now 2017. Brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform and HANA Enterprise Cloud. Okay, welcome to theCUBE, everyone. We're here for the special exclusive Sapphire Now 2017 coverage from Palo Alto Studio. I'm John Furrier, three days of Sapphire coverage. Our next guest is Jessica Stoffus, who's with Senior Director Database Solutions at EMC. Who came in from here in Palo Alto. You guys have some news down there. Full team down there, I know. Not only we cover SAP, it's our first year we're doing it from our studio, but EMC's always been on theCUBE. You guys had a great relationship with SAP. I think our first year we've done theCUBE in 2010. That's right, yes. We were at SAP Sapphire. You guys were, you were on theCUBE. You've been with us for a while, but the relationship within SAP and EMC, now Dell EMC is pretty significant. What's the big news you guys have going on? Yeah, I mean, it's a huge relationship for us. We've been, even before we were merged with Dell, one of our top partnerships. Now it's even bigger. We've been amazed at how much Dell had been doing with SAP and we're bringing the best of the two companies together right now. So yeah, we have a huge presence at Sapphire, as you mentioned. We saw Michael Dell do a brief speech at the show and I thought that really helped set the stage for not just Dell and EMC with SAP, but even some of the words he said were a good microcosm of Dell and EMC talking about the importance of bringing together people and processes. And we're going through that right now and we're going through how we're going to merge the portfolio to go after cloud, to go after HANA, internet of things, data center transformation, all of those major things. Well certainly SAP, the theme is cloud. Multi-cloud is a big message. SAP Cloud Platform, we had Dan Law on theCUBE. We also interviewed the HANA Enterprise Cloud Group. They're also got a huge alliance with Amazon Web Service Terry Wise there. We also saw CenturyLink. So you start to see the industry formation going on. The fog is lifting, you start to get some clear visibility on swim lanes, tactics, how people are settling in, whatever metaphor you want to use, people are finding it. Dell EMC is just absolutely just a monster now. I mean, I mean that in a good way, I don't mean a bad way, but it's so big. EMC was already very powerful in winning in the storage business. Great enterprise jobs, obviously sales force, the culture, really well, great culture as you know we know them. Dell has been lean and mean like the speedboat. Great with channels, great with operations, very lean and efficient. EMC, the direct selling, you bring them together. Now the supplier relationships have changed. I was talking with your team. Dell brings to the table deep Microsoft Intel relationships. Not that you guys didn't have them, but they have deep relationships. You guys bring deep relationships. How has that new culture, Dell EMC, changed your relationship? And specifically, what's the impact to SAP? Sure, I know, great question. First of all, it's been very complimentary and we felt that going into the merger. I've been at EMC for 21 years, right? So I had worked with Dell 10, 15 years ago and very, very complimentary and you nailed it. They're very good at one segment of the market. Historically, we're very good at another and for the most part, I think it's been a really, really good matching, made sense from a merger perspective. If we think about SAP for a second, one of the first things that we've been bringing together is we have two very complimentary HANA portfolios. So HANA is obviously a huge focus for SAP customers. I was just at Dell EMC World last week and every single customer that I talked to, whether they were running Oracle or Microsoft, they're all asking about HANA. And we had a great focus at EMC with our enterprise HANA systems and at Dell they have very good packaged appliances and scale up bundles and right now we feel like we can address the whole breadth of what people may want to do with HANA, whether it's TDI, scale up, scale out. Very, very strong and HANA fits in because I want you to just take a minute to explain this because it used to be a blanket word, even when they were kind of getting it out early, it was great marketing from the beginning. It has a legacy to it, but as the market changed, HANA changed. And as EMC or SAP changed, they changed some of their positioning, specifically they used to call it HANA Cloud Platform and they have HANA Enterprise Cloud. Now they renamed it to SAP Cloud Platform which is the platform as a service, the cloud native stuff. And then HANA Enterprise Cloud which is really the managed service. Right. So from your perspective, how do you define what HANA is today and where is it settling in? Is it just the core engine of SAP, but how does it relate to all these new things? Yeah, for us it's really a platform. So if we think about where HANA began when we started working with SAP, it was all about analytics, collecting data, analyzing data, making better business decisions. Now with S4 on the horizon and the inevitable cut over to that from all the other enterprise applications of SAP, we really view it as a platform. And it's going to have big implications if we look at our own SAP install base at EMC, there's a lot of customers that run Oracle underneath their SAP apps. So as part of the HANA transformation, we're going to be getting them hopefully on the road to not just take advantage of HANA today but as they go forward, how are they going to get ready for S4 and have hopefully a smooth migration path to that? Obviously their cloud platform, I mean their cloud strategy or cloud direction, I don't know if you can have a cloud strategy as Michael Dell said, clouds like the internet, it's everything. So there's no real strategy, it's just the way life is. They're going to be on-premise and off-premise. And they're clearly targeting multiple clouds unlike SAP Oracle for instance. But neither here nor there. The point is is that on-premise is still going to be a 10 year plus journey, nothing's going to be disappearing overnight. So the on-prem cloud at Dynamic is interesting because they use the word mission critical. That was a big buzzword with when I talked to Michael Dell, he banged home mission critical. A lot of the themes that Dell EMC world last week was around mission critical workloads and choice. Yes. So you guys have that same mojo going on with SAP. How is that translating for you guys? Sure. For their new business and new opportunity. Yeah, great question. So one of the big things that we've acquired and focused on in the SAP space is VirtuaStream. So they've been a really big off-premise cloud provider for us but at the same time, when you look at what we've been building for ADMC and before that, we had our own enterprise hybrid cloud offering. One of the things that we're talking about this week at Sapphire is actually bringing those two together so we can have people have an off-premise and an on-premise experience, a single view of their data, a uniform way to manage SAP in the cloud. And to the point of mission critical, like you said, as much as we've seen people moving to the cloud, there are still people that want to have for certain production systems, they want to control that. They don't want to give it off to the cloud yet. They may not want to control the hardware but they certainly want to control the data. And with this new relationship that we're blending in, the EHC and VirtuaStream, we can actually allow them to have that choice to your point. What's the EHC? The EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. So that's our own self-service automation software framework that we put around the cloud. Which cloud, your cloud or other people's cloud? It's right now, it's our cloud offering. So you have a public cloud? We have a cloud offering that's a hybrid cloud offering. Yeah, that you can deploy on-premise or off-premise and VirtuaStream has been historically used off-premise. So you use VirtuaStream as your off-premise component of that piece? Correct, and we had to bring the two together and that's been a big new step for us. So in that regard, we think it's very, very complimentary for SAP, that's one option we provide, right? We also work through SAP's own offerings to make sure we give them the right and the best infrastructure behind what they're trying to do with their own cloud. I was at a large partner of ours recently, OpenText, and we were talking about content archiving and all the things that they do there. And they're very deep in the SAP cloud, so we're working with them to start to potentially build the right archiving and capabilities behind that. So what's the big news for SAP this year? Obviously we saw the coverage, we had some folks calling in and we had some folks down on the floor giving us some input. But from an SAP EMC, now Dell EMC relationship, what's the big news? What's the big story for you guys? What are you leading with? What's the announcements can be specific? Yeah, the big news is they're all around the cloud. They're bringing together of the On-Premise and Off-Premise EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Virtual Stream, giving them that uniform way to consume SAP in a cloud-based model, whether it be On-Premise or Off-Premise, that is absolutely our biggest new highlight. Did you guys release, was it news, hard news that went out for you guys? Or what was the story? Yeah, it was part of an EHC evolution story that we brought out. The other things that we have that are not necessarily formally announced, but are more things that help the day-to-day administration of SAP applications. We often forget about that. We're pushing people to the cloud and we're all talking about the cloud. So there's no big splash in the pool. Hey, we're releasing a new VX rail version of whatever. Correct, yeah, there's no news. Momentum specific. Correct. Okay, what are the big momentum to your point? I mean, you can look back now. You've seen a lot of the evolution we've seen, the relationship with SAP Grow, we've seen the converged infrastructure movement now going to a whole other level. Hybrid cloud and converged infrastructure is happening. Yeah. What's the new wave that you guys are riding with SAP together besides the cloud? It's generically the cloud. What specifically? Yeah, I think. The customer pain point that you guys are selling. I think you just touched upon it. It's the whole build versus buy model. So historically, if you look at where the SAP customers spend the most of their money, it's the OPEX. It's the operational expense of administering and maintaining the SAP landscapes. And through down. You mean like total cost of ownership stuff? I mean like. Using some of the pain between deployment and cost. Workflow automation, copy clone refresh, backup recovery, performance automation, disaster recovery. All the things that you got to do to keep the SAP applications generating value to the business is heavy operational cost to them. That holds them back from doing innovation and investments. Yeah, those are the details you won't got to get down and dirty on. Yeah, we've done some great studies with you guys on this. And one of the things that there's different ways to go about tackling that. One of the ways that we believe is good is to simplify what you can. And so one way to do that is, well, from an infrastructure perspective, you should have the ability to basically buy the infrastructure as an outcome, not have to build all the components and put it together. All the provisioning pain that goes with it. Yeah, and so when we were just EMC, we had one choice. We had what was called a VBlock, right? And then we built VX racks and VX rails. VBlock was so successful, really was. Yeah. We had a good job with that. From SAP. Now that we're Dell though, we have the PowerEdge family and we've been bringing that into not only racks and rails but looking at that in terms of building what we call ready bundles where we can actually deliver as a single. I think about that's ready solution because the thing that got me at EMC world was two things. The purpose built mission continues. I mean that in a good way. And two, the disruption of data protection and backup and with the cloud. The cloud is a new disruptor. Right. For some reason, backup and recoveries completely different in the cloud than it is on-prem. So we've seen a lot of action in there too. Those are the two ready areas and then also dynamic changes going on with backup and recovery. Yeah, ready systems, ready solutions was a huge thing. And this was part of the merger. We rebranded our solutions organizations into one. And so our whole, as the name implies, the whole goal is to deliver a ready infrastructure to the customer that they can just deploy so they can focus on their applications and their business and not worry about the server, the network, the storage. Which ones do I put together, for what reason? We want to give them that menu of choice whether it's a single node, a bundle of components or an actual system and deploy that in any way they want. Okay, what can we expect from Dell EMC, from your team vis-a-vis with respect to SAP? Next couple months, next year, what's the plans? What's the continued momentum playbook? Yeah, so some things that you'll be seeing more of if you go to the, there's a Dell Blueprints page where we have all of our solutions. You'll be seeing some new and refreshed offerings around HANA. You'll be seeing some new things around SAP landscapes and you'll be seeing much more, I think, formal communication around the cloud offering I talked about. Got it, yeah, and cloud seems to be, again, cloud is taking it outside the four walls, which is different. I mean, great capabilities, people going analytics, putting a lot of analytics in the clouds. You're seeing that being the first wave beyond dev tests. So dev tests, even though Oracle says dev test is really going to be around for a long, long time, people are already moving to analytics in the cloud. That's interesting, instrumenting for backup and recovery, what's possible. Quick thoughts on the changes there and the landscape between the old way of thinking about backup and recovery. And by the way, you guys have some of the best solutions out there, that whole data domain, stretch record, just a history, but now it goes to the cloud. Yeah, yeah. What's the tricky parts that you guys are watching? I think, yeah, on the one hand, I think there'll be people that want to worry about their mission critical and we, like you said, we have integrated offerings to the workload. So you can have a backup team handle it or you can have your workload team handle it. It's really up to you. As people go into the cloud, I think they have to decide what's the tiering strategy they want to approach to that, what's the retention data strategies that they need, and how is that going? Where the hell's the data going? Where is the data going? Yeah, I mean. Is it safe and secure? And how does that relate to how they're protecting their on-premise data? So, I mean, from our perspective, and back to the SAP example of where we have this uniform cloud approach, we have the backup capabilities built into that, whether it's long-term data retention, short-term backup and recovery, and yeah. So question for you. This is a test with a real-time CUBE test. Sure, you'll pass with flying colors. What are the biggest two waves that customers should be surfing in the enterprise? Two most important waves. I think one of them we've already talked about, which is certainly cloud. I think if you look at the whole digital transformation, which I know is related to cloud, but the whole digital transformation wave, I think is separate than that. So if you look at big data and analytics and machine data, every customer, whether it's a traditional, you know, RDBMS environment or what have you, they're all looking at how to harness that data. And I think when you get into that and look at all the data in your data center that you may not be using today, you may not have been trying to take advantage of with technologies like Splunk and other things that are out there to help you do that. That's a great thing to look at. We're seeing heavy transformation. So data, basically, cloud and data, the two big waves. Yeah, digital transformation and data, and taking advantage of that data. Well, there go hand in hand, because you get the scale with the cloud for compute and other things. Data drives digital, just digital is data. Digital assets are data, right? So everything's data. Yes, yeah. At the end of the day. So you would agree, cloud and data, two big waves. Yes. All right. Jason, thanks so much for coming on the CUBE. Anytime. And final comment, I'll give you the last word on SAP Sapphire. I know you've got a relationship, so you've probably got to be like, oh yeah, SAP, everything's great. Be straight. What's going on with SAP? What's the outlook for SAP from your perspective? I think there's a great opportunity to your point. There's also a good challenge because we're going through a merger. And I think we're making great progress to bring the two portfolios together. And SAP is being a great partner, helping, working with us. And you're cool with them now. You guys feel good about SAP. We feel great about them. We use them in our own environment. And, Dal, as Michael talked about, to run our own business. So it's a great relationship. And McDermott's been on remote telecast for former EMC world, so. Yeah. As you know, these partnerships in the industry go up and down, right? We talked a little bit about Oracle and over the years, that's fluctuated. I was dating myself the other day on a CUBE gig and I said, oh, it's a Barney deal, which in my language was no real deal because Barney was a character that kids watched, my kids watch. I love you. You love me. I'm not a fest but nothing happens. Right, right. It's called the Barney deals. But I need a new meme now because most of the people in the industry don't know who Barney is. Oh, I remember this. We used to joke about him when I was in Alliance as we called them Barney meetings. We'd have a good meeting with a partner, you'd all talk, and nothing would happen, right? So, yeah. You guys do not have a Barney deal with SAP. It's pretty deep across the board. Correct. And SAP has good relationships, I gotta say. They tend to do really, really good. They're either in or they're not, and it's pretty obvious. Right. Thank you, Jason, so much. Yeah, thank you. Who's with Senior Director of the Database Solutions Group with Dell EMC, joining us for our special three day coverage of Sapphire Now from our studio. Great week. We had Informatica, World in San Francisco, Google IAO going on today as well. We got live coverage today with Rob Hove, and I'll see Veeam on. It's in New Orleans, Dave Vellante's there, and I'm in SAP separate. A lot of coverage, four events for the queue. Stay with us for more live coverage after this short break.