 Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. Brought to you by Pure Storage. Graduated ASU. Welcome back to Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE, sporting the clonk of prints, formerly known as today, because we are at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, a really cool concert venue that's been here since 1915. I'm joined by Dave Baju-Valante today. Play the toast and tea. Pretty groovy t-shirt there. And we're joined by a couple of guys next. We've got Axel Stryker, the Senior Director of Business Application Solutions from Pure, and John Meng, the Senior Director of IT Operations at Simpson Strong Tie. Hi guys. Hi. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So John, first question to you. Tell us about Simpson Strong Tie. Who are you guys? Obviously you're a Pure customer, but give us a little bit of an orientation into the business. Sure, so Simpson Strong Tie, we're a public company based out of Pleasanton, California. We've been in business since about 1956, if I've got my history right. So we've been around for quite a long time. We're a marketing, excuse me, manufacturing organization. Basically, if you're building a home or a deck or if you're needing to put two by fours together, our niche is that little connector, that bracket that connects those two by fours. And we do pretty well in that business. Overall, our revenue is just shy of a billion dollars. So a pretty decent sized organization. So Pure passed you last year. Yes. You okay with that? I'm okay with that. So tell us about, from a business perspective, the need for Pure Storage, with specifically with respect to your SAP journey. Yeah, so a couple of years ago, when I came on board, the business had made a decision that they were going to get off of their old ERP system onto a new ERP system. When I say old ERP system, I'm being a little respectful there. It's a homegrown application running on SQL, which is basically they lovingly called it blue screen because you go to a file share and you double click on the executable that you need. For example, if you're doing accounts payable or accounts receivables or purchase orders or what have you, you double click on the executable you want, opens up a nice little blue screen and it's a DOS based blue screen and you tab around to enter all your information. They had been running on that application for about 30 years. Yeah, so quite a lot. It works. It works, right? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. But I mean, it was developed by a single person and it was time that the company kind of put on some bootstraps and hitched them up, right? So they went to market to decide on what ERP application they were going to move to and SAP won out. And they had actually been running for a year on a test system hosted by SAP when I came on board. So the decision had already been made, the application-wise from an ERP's perspective. But the next step in our journey for Simpson and my challenge was how do we host this environment? Do we host it in the cloud? Do we host it on-prem? And so as I took looking at our environment, a very distributed environment, I said, all right, well first and foremost, SAP is a centralized solution. Is there a way for us to create a single environment that our entire company could run on, not only for SAP, but everything else, a mixed-use environment? And I started having conversations with Pure. They actually let me talk to a couple of their existing customers who were very happy about their mixed-use workload, including ServiceNow who talked today. So definitely a shout out to them on the conversations we had back a couple of years ago. Anyways, Pure ended up being our foundation for currently our core tenant, which is SAP, but also the future tenant for everything else that we're going to throw on there. And it's been an incredible journey over these last couple of years with them. And why the decision to stay on-prem versus go to the cloud? Was it a function of SAP really not being there in the cloud or your data? You didn't want to just shove your business into the cloud? Yeah, yeah. So there was definitely a lot of analysis that went into that. Just from a financial perspective, I worked with the CFO and we put together a 12-year ROI on cloud versus on-prem. And just to kind of really give ourselves some understanding over time what the impact would be of renting versus owning. It was very clear that on-prem financially made sense. Then we had to talk about the business, what was the best for the business. We looked at it from a, when I came there, there was some, the project team looking at SAP, had really already made their mind up. They wanted it off of IT. They wanted it in an environment that they trusted. So when I came on board, I said, look, this is something I've done before. We have experience, we have the in-house expertise. You just trust me that this is the right thing. And let me show you how. And that's where, honestly, a lot of the information that I was able to pull off of FlashStack, off of SAP, it's a certified solution. Talking to ServiceNow, I was able to prove to the business that, look, hosting and internally made the most sense financially as well as for our business and what we were trying to achieve. They do happy. Yeah, it's not just that, but this is a story we're hearing more often now. So customers actually trying this out in the cloud and realizing, number one, the cost. It's not that cost-efficient and effective as they were planning for and seeing as, especially when you're making multiple copies of these SAP environments, right? The cost goes through the roof. And the other thing is also what a lot of customers then realizes, how do you actually get your data and get your communication from your data center back to the cloud provider, right? You need a big pipe and this communication cost just to get the data out is huge. It's sometimes huge. The other thing is SLAs, right? It sounds like a good thing, but in many cases SLAs, because they're not flexible, right? You're ending up, quarter-end, you need help and they're saying, nope, talk to you in four days, right? It's not really acceptable. And the third one is, you know, there's this whole concept around I don't really have to invest now into the knowledge, into the skill set, right? Because I put it all in the cloud. It's not the reality. The reality, you still have to invest into the skills, right? Isn't that? Everything you said is actually the conversations that we had in-house. Absolutely. If you want to do a data migration from QA to Dev or Dev to production or whatever your landscape is and how you want to move the data, oh, well, that's going to be a charge. Oh, well, okay, well, I need to spin up this extra project. Oh, well, there's another charge. I mean, it's just constant nickel and diming. And another key component that you hit on that I failed to mention was hosting it internally allowed us to control the end-to-end experience for our end users, right? When you're talking about hosting it in the cloud, your data is somewhere else and you cannot control end-to-end. You can control it up to a certain extent, but then from there, all you can rely on is the SLAs. And to his point, the SLAs are only what's on paper, right? They're not very flexible at all. So the business case didn't pan out for the cloud. Correct. But there's certainly attributes of the cloud that are attractive. So what are those attributes and how are you bringing those on-prem? So flexibility, right? So flexibility is huge for us. The ability to just quickly be able to spend things up and scale them back as needed. You know, I kind of look at it as, look, there's a waterline that you're going to use on a day in and day out basis for your organization. Maximize your investment there, right? On the peaks and valleys that you're going to have, that's where the cloud can really help, right? And so is cloud completely off the table for us? No, that's where we're going to be able to burst into that sort of scenario. If we need more compute, you know, we need more, you know, spin cycles, whatever we need from the cloud, we can throw it up there and then bring it back down. So a much more controllable cost in our mind. So a major change in the application environment, migration from an old platform, you had to freeze the app. Does that freeze the code? Yep. How long did you have to freeze the code for? So when we're talking about, just making sure I understand your question. Your homegrown ERP, you know, blue screen, C-Promp to the SAP environment. Yeah, yeah, so we're still, so the landscape as we have it today, we actually just went live on SAP early February and it's not company-wide, it's only a certain branch. In its strength, the beauty of that previous application, it was very decentralized and each branch where we have a high consolidation of users and workers, each branch had their own data center hosting their own ERP for their branch, right? So we could freeze their environment just during their time window. Now the challenge for us today is as we start consolidating, those windows start to overlap, right? But that's honestly why we've invested in technologies like FlashStack and so forth that come with the redundancy built in so we can work on the environment without having to freeze it or bring it down. So you need the speed to compress those discontinuities in data? Yes, absolutely. What about data protection? How do you, I know that's an area of expertise of yours, how do you approach data protection in this new environment? Are you doing anything differently? Where does PureFit? Well, so it's actually a huge shift for us on how we do things. I mean, from a data protection standpoint, we're talking about disaster recovery, business continuity, right? And so we have active passive data centers. We're utilizing what Pure has under the hood to be able to replicate in multiple ways, right? And that's the beauty of our setup that we've designed is the ability to replicate in multiple ways because in a multi-tenant environment, yes, there are certain parts of the stack that one shoe will fit all sizes. I would say that Pure Storage is that. But when you start looking, when you start getting to the details of each of the applications, they don't all play the same way when it comes to DR, when it comes to replication or data protection. And we will need to look at each one of those applications and design a data protection strategy around it as we import it in. So for SAP, we do have differencing of how we're going to protect that versus when we bring in our web servers versus when we bring in SharePoint and other core applications to the business. So actually, you mentioned, well actually, you mentioned that you had the opportunity to talk to ServiceNow. And maybe another customer appears when you were in this decision-making process. I imagine ServiceNow's business is probably quite different from Simpson-Strongtite. So what, Axel, I guess both of you, help us understand what were some of the similar challenges that, say, a ServiceNow face that you were facing? And then Axel, to your point, tell us a little bit about the SAP Alliance that you have with Pure and how customers, as big as ServiceNow and Simpson-Strongtite, are helping to evolve that relationship. Any first? Go for it. All right, so one of the biggest strategies, the focus that I had when I was making the decision around hosting SAP, I really wanted to make sure, I understood, did I have to go a silent approach? Was I buying architecture specifically for SAP? Or could I do a multi-use workload? Multi-purpose was huge for me. I was really, I couldn't understand how, or in 2016, when I was looking at this, I'm like, look, it's 2016. I know there's a solution out there that can solve this problem. And so that's what I was challenging Pure, and they're like, who do you want to talk to? And I said, well, I want to talk to somebody who's running SAP, and I want to talk to somebody who's running SAP in a mixed workload environment. And that's where ServiceNow came into play. And when I was having conversations with them, I said, all right, so do you run a mixed workload? Mixed workload, yes. Okay, when you have an SAP performance problem, do you have to, is there a lot of effort to show that there's, you know, where the problem in the performance is? And there was a pause on the phone and the guy actually giggled over the phone. Well, how else to say it? And he's like, performance problems, we don't have any. Right, and so when you hear that, especially when you're talking about SAP, which is a known beast of an application inside any environment, and it'll use whatever resource you throw at it, and it won't play nice with other apps. When I heard that, I was like, okay, where do I sign, right? So, I mean, it was basically that conversation that really said, all right, let's give this a try. The other thing, honestly, for us is, SAP is our first tenant. And as we start applying other applications to it, we already have our baseline established, and we can watch as the other applications are thrown in and it's not impacting anything, SAP, or on their own. It's a flashback, it's going to be able to give you a foundation to not only skill your SAP infrastructure, but also to expand to multiple platforms. Correct, yeah, I mean, for example, some of our public web-facing applications, we've already moved them in-house. We used to use a public service provider, a public cloud offering for this web service that I'm talking about. It would take, so you go out there and you say, you know what, I want a product catalog of all Simpson products. And you hit the button, 45 minutes later, it's downloaded, 45 minutes, okay? I took that workload and I put it in our data center, three minutes, 45 minutes to three minutes. Wow. And then another test was a web crawler, so we did a web crawler across that same web application to confirm when we moved it from one location to the other, we didn't miss anything. In the old environment, running on a public cloud infrastructure, it took 20 minutes, 17 seconds on our own. And it was run from the same PC, I mean, there was no, you know, it was pretty clear. And honestly, when marketing felt that increase in performance and saw it and realized it, they bragged at the CFO and then now the CFO is like, okay, whatever, you're going to get this out of SAP. Well, we have to get the whole company on SAP before we can really realize this investment, but they're very excited about the opportunities. And how long have you had the pure infrastructure? So we installed it probably about a year and a half ago because we had to get it prepared, you know, so, you know, we installed it right here. So you haven't had to do any upgrades yet? No, not major ones. We actually have our first major one this week, we're actually scheduling it. But, you know, one of the questions I was asked on an earlier panel is how do you handle outages with Pure and how's your experience been with support? Well, I'm sorry, we haven't had to call support yet. I've heard great stories about it, and I know that our guys that are working with support right now to get our upgrades done, they've had nothing but praise, but honestly, we haven't had a lot of interaction yet with their support just because we haven't needed it yet. And you have an in-house development staff, application development team? Yes, yeah. And has their workflow changed at all in terms of being able to share data, share copies of data, are you there yet or? We're not there yet, but one of the goals of our environment, so we have two data centers, and we have load balancers in front of the two data centers. When it comes to hosting our public website of things, the goal is to have a green and a red environment where you develop on the red, green is your production, and then when it comes time, you just flip the switch, and your development becomes your active, right? And so basically a lot of the nuances and strategies that you get out of public cloud, we're going to attain those using our private cloud infrastructure. Essentially using live data for the test environment and then cutting over immediately. You couldn't have done that three, four, five years ago. Absolutely, absolutely. So Axel, we're just about out of time, but how common is John's story with Simpson Strong Tie in terms of we haven't had the call support yet? Are you hearing this resonate pretty pervasively in your SAP install base across industries? I mean, this is a very typical environment. I mean, I would call it almost Greenfield, right? But most of the environments that we're dealing with are Brownfield, so customers are long time SAP users and customers, right? And they're going from, let's say the Oracle environment and to HANA environment. And the nice thing about this is that we are actually providing a platform that can help customers no matter where they are in their journey, right? If they're still on Oracle, they're already on HANA, they're moving on to AI, whatever it might be, they don't have to change anything on the infrastructure per se because there is no configuration or tuning necessary, whether it's Oracle, whether it's HANA, whether it's AI, right? So you're running it off the same platform. The other thing that I want to mention is because you asked me about our relationship with SAP, right? It's a very strong relationship. So we are actually working with SAP worldwide in their co-innovation labs, right? So they have labs around the world where they develop new solutions together with hardware and software partners. And they love to work with Pure Storage because it is so simple and they're coming from a functional side. They don't care about the infrastructure at all, right? They're saying, as long as it's simple, and you can imagine they're pretty much the Switzerland of ERP, but we actually recently published a white paper together with SAP around how to actually save license costs, SAP license costs, of up to 75%. Now you would ask yourself, why would SAP do that? Why would they promote something, push something that actually cuts into their revenue? But for SAP, it is more important to increase the adoption rate of HANA rather than the revenue that's behind it, right? So that's why we are publishing and it's on the SAP website that you can download and that you can see together with Pure Storage. It's an amazing story that we have. I mean, and honestly, that was part of why we chose Pure in the beginning. They're certified and I didn't have to go to the business and try to convince them, right? It was all on paper for us. I can't help but notice that you brought a little kitty cat to this set, Axel. Tell us about this little stuffed animal. So, I mean, maybe you heard it in the keynote this morning, we were talking about Pure Storage is actually moving from, you know, their solution development towards engineered solutions. We want to actually put more application-specific functionality and embed it directly into the array, right? And one of the big challenges that a lot of customers have is, how do I create copies, clones, and refreshes of my SAP environment, right? And we have customers that takes them sometimes nine days, just for one copy, right? Nine days, why? Because it's a very complex and complicated end-to-end process. So we thought about, you know, why don't we take this entire process, automate this entire process and embed it into our array? And we call this tool that we developed and that's available for everybody that it's included in maintenance, right? We call it copy automation tool. See, it- The cat. Cat, that's the cat. And that's what we are. So if people are asking, why is a cat copy automation tool? That's good, I was like, where is this going? I like it. I like it. If I get to keep the cat, it's all right. Very nice. This is a pretty cool swag. Well, Axel and John, thank you so much for stopping by and sharing with us the innovations that Pure and SAP are doing, how you're being successful. And now you are a reference customer for what you guys are achieving. Great story. Thank you. Thanks guys, appreciate your time. Thank you. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante and cat. We are live from Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. Stick around, Dave and I will be right back with our next guest.