 Okay, we're back live inside theCUBE, getting down to the final stretch here on day three of SiliconANGLE.tv's exclusive coverage of HP Discover 2012 in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org, and we're here with Ryan Virubotla from SAP, who's vice president at SAP. We were just at Sapphire, we were talking off camera a few weeks ago. First of all, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Great event. We did, there's a third Sapphire, John, right? Yeah, third year in a row now. Season three of theCUBE. Amazing to watch the transformation of SAP. Yeah. You know, you think of SAP as big and stodgy and slow, and boy, that wasn't what we heard at Sapphire. I mean, it was like mobile and personalization. And HANA, of course. A lot about HANA. We love, so two years ago, we were really bullish on SAP because the messaging was so good. You know, with HANA and the side-based acquisition, and this year, really again, leveled up again with some great demonstrations. A lot of customer testimonials, which added up to a lot of the positioning of the year before. But it's just, and I talked to Shnabe about, Jim Shnabe about this on my one-on-one with him at one of the evening events I had time with him on. And I said, you're a big data company. You don't know it yet, but you guys are big data. And he felt it was a little bit too hyped with their conservative positioning, but you guys got everything. Real-time analytics in memory, which is one of the hottest areas on the planet right now. And obviously the app workloads are changing in big time and throwing off more data. So, you know, you guys are a big data company. We have strong aspirations. I'm trying to get you to say you're a big data company. Come on, say it. The term big data is being over-hyped, over-used. We process terabytes and terabytes of data. HANA has no data limit. In our true-scale-out architecture, we can take some of the largest clients that are there with terabytes and maybe petabytes of data and analyze it real-time. So, we absolutely have a very strong product portfolio, very innovative product in terms of- Well, I worry about you guys because, you know- Worry? Well, there's some risk involved in the strategy, right? So, HANA is amazing, right? And with all the open-source activity going on around Hadoop that sometimes in history, the best technology doesn't always win. So, when I say that, I mean, I worry about because you have such good technology. With open-source, really disrupting the marketplace. You guys still are playing in these production environments. So, I wanted to ask you a couple questions around that. At the scale, because the scale is where that, you kind of can separate the men from the boys. You know what I'm saying? I can do batch, I can use Hadoop, but you talk about high availability in real-time. At scale, different conversation. So, I talk about the app workloads that are scaling and throwing off data. And then also talk about the role of flash in the equation. Because you've got companies like Fusion IO, violin memory systems coming out with really, really interesting offerings. And just to add to that, and your messaging is, imagine a world without disk-based database. Right, absolutely. So, let me address both the questions. First, let me start with the second question. There are some very interesting technologies coming up. Violin is an example. The world is moving to a non-volatile RAM, NV-RAM, where you don't lose data when you switch off the machine, which is somewhat critical for a product like HANA because it's all memory E-RAM-based. So, we are certainly working with a number of technology partners. Violin is an example. HP is a great example. We have a significant co-innovation with HP, not only to optimize HANA for HP environments, but also bring in some of the mission-critical capabilities like disaster recovery, disaster tolerance, high availability. So, those are some of the works that we are absolutely, very seriously kind of enhancing on a daily basis. And these technologies, these breakthrough technologies are a great trend that's giving us the on-RAM to get there and partners such as HP are definitely. So, John, as I was meeting with Joe Tucci at EMC World, right? We had the analyst meeting and I asked him about his relationship with SAP because it's very strong, right? You see HP competitor. I actually got him on social cam saying I got HP. And he said, yeah, I like Jim McDermott. I mean, Bill McDermott worked very closely with him. But I don't like their messaging at all. They got it all wrong. What they're saying is not right. We need disk. But what you just, and his point was you needed to be highly available to be backed up, to be protected. But you just said, essentially you can do that inside of HANA. So, technology is getting there. So, let me first say that even in HANA, there is a disk component. There is a log that gets written for persistency reasons. And you absolutely need it today. But where technology is headed is you could store data some semi-permanently in a RAM. So, that's the new technology that you just mentioned. But guys like HP want to store it permanently for you. So, that's where they come. And you don't want to be in that business, I presume, right? SAP is not in the infrastructure business, right? We are primarily in the innovation business. We bring breakthrough innovations to the market where we are really good at software. Hardware, we rely on the ecosystem and partners. There's innovations that you don't want to touch in hardware. Leave that to Intel. Absolutely, Intel is a great partner, by the way. Yeah, of course. I don't know if anyone mentioned this to you, but one of our key partners for HANA, who made HANA possible for us, is Intel. So, I manage the technology partnerships for SAP. And Hasso talks about that, right? Yeah, absolutely. So, Intel is one of my partner. I'm very proud of what we've done with Intel. I'm very proud of what we've done with HP. Awesome, Bob. You guys are doing great right now. And again, we always talk about Oracle and SAP, because Oracle's got their approach. And you guys are very well-positioned in the ecosystem around it's more open, more multivendor, than Oracle's approach, which is, you know, choke the market and try to suck all the option out of the room. But with that in mind, let's talk about this whole multivendor architecture, because with Flash, it opens up new possibilities, obviously enabling HANA to be highly more effective. You mentioned backup and recovery, data protection. Absolutely. Huge marketplace right now. EMC's the market leader. We just talked to, David and I just did a special session today on analysis of HP's approach. These new architectures are changing old ways. Absolutely. How do they do, when backup's never going to go away. I mean, people still want backup, but recovery is an issue. So, one, backing up stuff faster. Okay, that's getting better. HP's got a good solution there. But they need recovery. So, like now with big data and real-time analytics, which you guys do a lot on, and you might have something parked away for 50 days, you need it in five minutes, five seconds. So, can you share the vision of how that's changing architecturally? So, it's the rapidly evolving technology. So, let me give you a couple of examples. HP, I mean, since we are at Discover, let me bring up some HP example, which is very relevant to this conversation. We are working closely with HP Storage and they have a technology called StoreOnce, which rapidly enhances and backup and recovery capabilities. What that is, is you don't have to store duplicate records. It can optimize your backup set to a very small set of records that actually have changed. And it's all done at the backup system level. So, HANA is not loaded by that. The advantage of something like that is your backup set is small, so your recovery is faster. Because you're only touching the net view. You don't have to go apply the entire backup set way through everything and figure out exactly the records that have changed. You have a set of records that have changed and you could import that back. That is one such example, but there are absolutely mentioned flash, there are new ways of backing up. This whole area about in-memory computing in general and getting to mission critical stage is a very rapidly evolving technology. We are very glad we have such a market leading product in HANA. We feel we are setting the market trend and direction here. When you have that enabling change, that technology change where it's enabling new solutions, is disruption. So, who's being disrupted out there? Because that's kind of what everyone wants to know, because people hope it's not them. Certainly the business models are being disrupted. The customer environments are being disrupted. Well, Larry Ellison said you've taken him on in databases like him playing one-on-one with Kobe. So I'm assuming that that's one of the targets of disruption is Oracle, or else Larry Ellison wouldn't be saying anything. So I'm sure Larry focuses on a lot of things, but from our perspective, our primary focus is customer value. We care most about providing innovative solutions to the customer. Part of that is giving them differentiation and HANA does few things that are extraordinary. I don't think people realize HANA is in-memory engine, it's very fast, it can do everything in memory, all that is great. But apart from that, there's a fundamental value proposition of HANA, which is real-time. What it can do is take your transactional data. In normal sense, what happens today is you take your transactional data, you perform some kind of ETL on it, store in operational data source, and from there store into your data warehouse, and from there get a report, and the whole process takes about three to seven days. So really there is no scope of real-time reporting if you're talking about big data. Whereas what HANA allows you to do is take away all the layers in between. You can go from a transactional data directly to a multi-terabyte report where you can slice and dice. That is the huge disruption. So kind of taking away all these layers definitely impacts data warehouse, the way you think about data warehouses, the way you build data warehouses, so it disrupts that whole segment. Also HANA enables new class applications which in the past were somewhat inconceivable because you could not think that you could manage such a high amount of data and get real-time analytics. And databases, of course, I mean we are very serious about that. Bill McDermott is on record to say we want to be number two in the database market soon. Yeah, so obviously we do a lot of following you guys as well as HP, but also we follow a lot of the open-source movements and HP and Intel as well, but mostly HP and I was embraced open-source. I was with Hadoop, for example. I had a chance to talk to your co-founder, our inventor of HANA, about Hadoop. And I said, you've been following HBase and Hadoop and he goes, no, but one of my people has them. I'm assuming that's probably you, but... But HP... It's not me, but... Someone was underneath him. But that emergence is challenging as well as data warehouse because the economics are a fact. You can do stuff in batch and they say near real-time, but it's not as fast as what you guys do. What are you guys doing with the open? How do you guys look at Hadoop? Because certainly people are embracing Hadoop not trying to fight it. So it's not necessarily competitive. How do you guys look at Hadoop? It is very complementary the way I see it. In the transactional data world, the challenges are different. It's not just the size of the data. The data has to make sense. There's a lot of transformations. There are a lot of computing. There's a lot of summarization and materialization that goes on to get to the end result. Hadoop does a great job of kind of bringing the big data storage together. And it's very complementary to what we do in HANA. But HANA brings the additional layer of value, getting transactional data to reports in real-time, kind of having the ability to slice and dice and data real-time with the engine that can perform because of the in-memory nature, because of the performance improvements. So we see these two are somewhat of a complementary technologies. Obviously right now, based on where we are, we don't expect people to store petabytes of data in memory. Definitely hundreds of terabytes is feasible. So there is a coexistence strategy and we are working through that. There was some announcements at Sapphire about Hadoop and you will see a lot more announcements come through from their perspective. That's great. So I have to ask you, I have to go back to HANA because there's some skeptics out there and I wonder if you could address that. So they would say, okay, yeah, hundreds of terabytes, but the HANA deployments that we talked to, they're very, very small today. You've got to make inroads against traditional, well-entrenched RDBMS players like Oracle, like IBM, like Teradata. And you have a whole host of really low-cost sort of alternatives coming up, bubbling up well-funded startups, HP Vertica, they're a partner, but you've got some interesting technologies. And it's a very small portion of your financial performance today, 1% of your revenues. So how do you respond to that, those skeptics, right? So first let me address the HANA revenues. HANA is one of the most successful products that SAP ever had. The rate at which the revenue is ramping even beats SAP R3, which was our previous blockbuster product. We have gone from zero to 100 million in record time. If you think about it, HANA was released what General Availability last year, June. It's a fairly new product. For the amount of adoption it has received and the traction we have received, it is unbelievable and we would like to thank the customers, the partners for giving HANA the kind of momentum it enjoys today. There's public numbers on that, 160 million euro, right? Absolutely, absolutely. Now the initial use cases that we started with was to have HANA as a data mod, as a analytics tool sitting side by side SAP ERP. And then towards SAFAR time, we released the second phase of HANA Evolution which is putting HANA as the engine underneath our business warehouse. It's taken tremendously, the momentum is great. Customers are adopting, there's some great customer stories. Be happy to go into those details if required. So customers are picking up HANA. Now it's a new technology, it's a disruptive technology, so they're going to be some critics. Of course, our friends up the road from us won't like what we're doing, so there will be some amount of skeptics there as well. But the numbers speak for themselves and we feel it's adding tremendous customer value and that's all it's all about. At the end of the day, you must have seen in SAFAR there were a number of customer testimonials on the value that HANA bought to the table. Take T-Mobile, Long-Fool Springs, you got a Boschie. You guys did a great job at SAFAR. Here's the thing, so I had to ask the question and thank you for that answer. I think HANA, like big data, we've talked about this a lot, the impact that it will have on your customer's business is going to create a lot more value, much more value. So you're creating more value than you're extracting, which as Tim O'Reilly would say is a good thing. That's a self-serving principle, by the way. And you probably saw that with ERP. In the 1990s, early 90s, if you said who's going to win an ERP, you wouldn't have said SAP. And if you look at who made the most money in ERP, it wasn't SAP, it was SAP customers. Exactly, it's all about the productivity improvements. We are really proud, if you take even the ERP example, there is a statistic out there, the largest number of world transactions go through SAP, there's even a 60% number out there. And that is what we're looking to do with HANA. Significantly change the market and add tremendous value to the customers. All right, thanks for coming inside theCUBE. Obviously, SAP, we've done three years, part of the original CUBE inception. When we first started this now successful franchise, we want to thank SAP for allowing us to bring our independent coverage down to Sapphire. We've had Jim Schnabe come on theCUBE and he said this is a big concept, he loves theCUBE. We didn't have a chance to get him this year on, but last year was on for seven minutes. And great, great company, you guys doing great. My only criticism of SAP is, and there's not a lot to throw around there, but I'm going to really go try to find something, is that on the marketing side, I would embrace big data because customers at the C-level, we are selling the analytics, understand the mandate of big data. Sure, it's not still unknown, but the concept of big data, I think we're creating industry, and I think we've got that. Well, two years ago, John Furrier, you coined the term big fast data. And then Bill McDermott this year in his keynote, as you know, mentioned big data, not as many times as Joe Tucci in his keynote. But so my prediction would be, you're going to get there and take John Furrier's lead with big fast data. I'm sure he'll be there. You guys are well positioned in the big data space. And again, the area that's under amplified is the fact that the in-memory work you're doing is really phenomenal, and that's going to be paid dividends, I think. So, Brian, thanks for coming. We'll be right back with our next guest right after the short break. Thank you.