 from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. Well, we are live in Las Vegas. Here we are in the Sands Expo, day two of AWS re-invent. theCUBE here with our exclusive coverage, along with Justin Moore and I'm John Walls and now we're now joined by really kind of the Martin and Lewis, I think, of tech. I'll explain that in a second. They've been together for a while now. So, Hal Sien, who is the Solution Go-To-Market Product Manager at Cisco, so Hal, good to see you. Thank you. And Dr. Lars Daniker, who is a big data architect at SAPSE. Lars, thank you for being on. Thanks, thanks so much for being here. Sorry, I said Martin and Lewis, you know, a great team. You guys actually have been together as you've merged products, if you will. I mean, you came up with a partnership earlier this year that's gone very well and it has put the two of you together in several venues. Talk about the partnership and what each is bringing to the table. So, Hal, why don't you dive in on that? Yeah, thank you for that. So, it's been an amazing journey so far. I'm part of the Cloud Platforms Solutions Group in Cisco and we put together amazing new software solutions. Cisco is not known to be a software company, but we are making the pivot now from hardware to software and they're putting together some pretty new, interesting solutions around containers, around security and connectivity. So, back in February, I traveled to Germany with my boss and we happened to take a detour to Waldorf where we came into touch with Dr. Lars and his team. And it was kind of interesting to realize that as Cisco is embarking down this multi-cloud journey, so is SAP. SAP is transforming their company, much like we are, focused on the software side and looking to deliver a very seamless solution for our customers across Clouds. So, we started talking and one thing led to another and they realized that we had a very nice continuum platform. Now, in the Cloud, across Clouds, containerization is being adopted as a common layer and what Cisco is doing there is providing you pristine upstream Kubernetes but fully supported in a turnkey fashion and that was very interesting to SAP. So, Lars, yeah, from your side of the fence, why don't you take us through it? Yeah, so SAP always has, let's say, the goal to transform enterprise companies into what we call intelligent enterprises. So, basically allow build-up of data-driven applications across locations, across stores, across systems and applications and basically make a fully integrated solution for our customers. And when we designed the SAP Data Hub, which is a modern data orchestration and refinery solution across Cloud and across on-prem, we were searching for a solution how we can deploy this in a turnkey fashion and now we are coming already to the connection, right? In a turnkey fashion to the customer because we really had a problem, we were deciding some time ago that we go for Kubernetes, right? For this container platform built up by a lot of companies, Google Redhead and all of those guys and in the Cloud is very well adopted but on-premise, managing this on-premise is really, really a challenge, right? Some customers even don't know what Kubernetes is when we are asking them for that and even if they know operating it, it's really, really hard, right? And we even had this yesterday in our session here at the re-invent and we were asking the people who knows Kubernetes? Half of the room was waving their hands and we're asking, okay, and who can operate a Kubernetes cluster? Then we were down to three or four people, right? That's kicked out, isn't it? And that's exactly why the solution is so great because now we get something where the customer basically plugs the container platform, his Kubernetes cluster into his racks in his data center, pushes the power button, gets the whole thing up, installs the SAP solution on top of that and he's done and he can operate and run it. He gets full stack support from Cisco, software support from SAP and he has a complete enterprise-ready, production-ready solution with one push of a button, virtually said. So describe to me the connection between the Kubernetes side of things where you're running containers and the data hub. So you're loading some data into this and like SAP customers generally have lots and lots of data. So where's the connection between the data and the Kubernetes side of things? Or is this something that customers just don't need to worry about because you just make it seamless? In principle, they don't need to worry about but they can if they want, right? But the SAP data hub, let's describe it really as a bridge between the on-premise world and the cloud world. So you can connect your SAP systems, SAP HANA, BW, ERP systems on the one hand side and you can connect the cloud systems like EMR of AWS or DynamoDB on the other side, right? And now we are building basically pipelines that allows you to formulate an end-to-end workflow, allowing to read data from one source, transform the data with small transformations, date transformations or big transformations like applying a machine learning model and there's mainly seamlessly between on-premise and in the cloud. And the data hub itself is completely containerized and we have chosen Kubernetes as the platform the data hub is running on. And in principle, this is really nice Kubernetes because we can say, we don't care about the hardware beneath that, right? We can say, just provide us Kubernetes and you're good to go. And it's worth for a lot of customers because if they're running in the cloud, they're saying, okay, we have an AWS, we have EKS, right? A completely managed service, so we simply use it. But we observed a lot that there is, especially with enterprise customers, they have a lot of data they don't want to bring into the cloud yet. Sales data, HR data, things like that, right? And they need a hybrid solution because they want to have the data processed on-premise and the data processed in the cloud, right? And this brings exactly this together because we now can run the data hub on EKS, for example, on AWS in the cloud and on the Cisco Container Platform on-premise and really can get the so-called hybrid cloud aspect into the game and into the hands of our customers. Yeah, so Sir Hale, there's choices required here from customers so that they can decide which things that they want to host where. And there's quite a bit of complexity in making that decision and making that choice. How do you help your customers decide which things they should put into the cloud, which things they should run on your solution? Yeah, great question. So what Cisco brings to the answer here is we provide a 20 solution. The Kubernetes doing it yourself, a lot of moving parts, there's tooling, there's the bits itself, how do you upgrade, update them, manage them, security patch them, there's the OS, there's just too many moving parts, right? So a lot of SAP's customers and other customers struggle with that. Secondly, how do you integrate, how do you match what's running in public clouds? Amazon has EKS, there are other Kubernetes distributions running on Amazon, for example, providing a seamless experience that customers really shouldn't worry about what's underneath, that's what we are providing. We're adding in other elements from a solution standpoint. Security, for example, data, transferring data over, we provide a secure VPN tunnel using our software products, CSI 1K, that works with our container management platform. We do all the plumbing for you so you don't have to worry about it. But seamlessly now data can be transferred from the cloud in a very compressed format back on-prem and vice versa, it's two ways. So for customers, they really benefit from having such a turnkey solution provided to them. And best of all, this is an end-to-end stack. You have an application that's multi-cloud, that's running in AWS, that's running on-prem, fully containerized, running on a container platform that is based on upstream, but supported by Cisco. So you get the best of both worlds. You get great support from SAP and Cisco with an end-to-end solution that spans from on-prem to AWS. And this end-to-end key piece here, this is really the key for the customers. An enterprise customer, they don't want to have this small solution there. They have Doop cluster from this vendor and maybe they are streaming solution from another vendor and they have to bring this all together. They want to have end-to-end solutions. And this is what this combination really brings to the customer, right? And allows them then, this is what we said now, this hybrid cloud, data-driven applications. Lars, you mentioned that you did a session yesterday. Yes. Several hundred people, all those hands up, then they all came down. In the Q&A, what were you hearing about, if you could maybe say topically, this is where the questions were coming from the customer base. You know, how would you separate that or how would you organize that? What are people still curious about what they want to tap into? So I think one aspect we're especially about the security part, right? How is this basically happening? And I mean, it was not only me in the session, it was Kip Compton, so the senior vice president from Cisco together with the senior product manager. So we did a three-way session, it was really nice. And the question security was one. The second was mainly about how the integration of the user authentication works. Because if you don't have this integrated, you have your admins log in and manage the permissions in the cloud separately from managing the permissions on-premise, right? And this was a question, how is this working? Luckily, it was solved already, so we could answer those questions. But this was the main, let's say, the main directions that this was going through. And maybe a third direction was in how an enterprise application is running on top of that, right? It's where we also showed in a small demo of how the whole thing is really working. Yeah, actually, last year, a live demo. So the key element here with AWS is we are extending our single pane of glass into AWS. So from the control plane of the container platform, you can spin up Kubernetes workers in EKS. And this is the cool part. We are not building a layer on top of EKS. We are using native EKS services and APIs, right? This is what customers love. Easy, lightweight way to spin up your containers on public cloud and still view them on-premise. So you have a single dashboard with an application that's also multi-cloud running in AWS and on-prem that you can view the underlying infrastructure, which is the Kubernetes nodes, and you can even view how well the application is performing. And you can scale up and down using our cloud center CMP tool. So it's a complete solution. We're not talking about a specific one-off kind of a solution. It's a solution that can scale. And you can do monitoring, you can do migration, you can do scaling very easily. Good partnership. Things are going well. Congratulations on that. And good luck down the road. You still have a few months to get to that first anniversary, but I'm sure you're going to get there. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you for being with us here on theCUBE. We'll continue live from Las Vegas, where AWS re-invent.