 Hi everybody, we're back, this is Dave Vellante and this is theCUBE. We're here at 42 South Street in Hopkins, Massachusetts. EMC's having a big SAP customer event and we're here with Bernhard Schultzke who is a vice president, involved heavily in the SAP EMC ecosystem. Bernhard's with EMC. Welcome back to theCUBE. Hey, thank you Dave. So I'm going to control the mic if that's okay. So they say, you know there's an old saying in my business, never give up the mic. So anyway, so tell me what's new since the last time we've talked. What's going on in the SAP ecosystem? What are customers telling you? Customers are varying, engaged in looking at how to get more flexible TCO reduction. I mean, they hear a lot about HANA but they might right now really is on x86 migration, virtualization, getting there and so forth. So I mean, the event is just great. I mean, it's getting bigger every time. It's the biggest that we ever had and customers are all excited to hear from us from the set of specialists on how to do it. We've been speaking about, I'm not sure you can do a pre announcement here, but we've been speaking about how we've been bringing the right sets of skills set together to actually guide the customers from their physical to the virtual and customers are very well receiving that and there's a lot of anxiety to finally get there and a lot of good feeding and that we are structuring it out the way we do. Let's break down the customer problem here. So SAP environments are large, they're sophisticated, they're complicated, there's a lot of frankly, non differentiated heavy lifting that customers have had to do. Virtualization comes in, it simplifies things, you're talking about migration presumably from Unix to x86. So what kind of impacts are you guys able to have? Can you help us quantify that a little bit or give us some proof points? Yeah, I mean, here's the thing. Most of the things that customers want to hear about is like, okay, can we actually do it? Okay, so there's some doubt into, can the Intel platform do it? And we are quite able to basically make that call. And the next question really is about the change management to go there. Like, hey, we have these X, HPX folks and so forth, can we convert them over? Which is usually also not a big problem. And then there's the case of like, hey, we've got an environment right now, we have nice offers and so forth, should we be extending, can we do the math now? And what we kind of get to the ground to is like, SAP engagements are like, I mean, they are hogging all the resources. And I mean, SAP has so many great products, there's one more kind of each quarter that's been thrown out. And what customers find is they want to be able to embrace them because they finally get the bug of the better business processes and they don't want to be limited by the environment. So this is the kind of talking points that we're having here. So let's talk about the business case a little bit. I mean, what's driving the business case? What's driving CIOs and CTOs and CFOs to actually make the move and sign on the dotted line and actually expend resources to save money? And what kind of magnitude of savings are they seeing? Okay, that's a very good question actually. So I mean, if you're interested in money, I mean, if you're able to kind of half the cost of your infrastructure operation, I mean, that's interesting. This is what we see on average. I get my attention. It has mine also. What we also see is that it's a bit not an Apple to Apple comparison, but usually, I mean, if people go from their bit age to Unix environments to a new one, they see three times the performance and more. So I mean, half time the cost, three times more performance. I mean, what else do you want? I mean, this is what's driving it. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that you were saying that there's some skepticism up front about x86, and x86 is, you know, they say software's eating the world, x86 is eating the hardware world. So I'm surprised that that was sort of a main hurdle, but as you say, you're easily able to overcome that, yes? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, here's the thing, okay? I mean, the clock is ticking at different speeds, maybe for the technology geeks and for the customers, because I mean, customers need to run the daily operation, and they're being held responsible to meeting the SLAs and everything, so they can actually experiment and so forth. So talk to a customer yesterday who's still in the finalization of the SAP rollout, which kind of started six years ago. So you talk to them, they want to revamp their stuff. Yes, absolutely. The point that I'm trying to make here is, it's not about when you think like, oh, the new stuff is there, you just jump right on. I mean, we talk about companies that are actually embracing multiple holding style sub-companies that they all have responsibility on, so you need to have a controlled process to make that migration a totally smooth one. Yeah, because if I'm a CIO, I'm saying, oh, wait a minute, I'm concerned about risk. So yes, my Unix environment's proprietary is gonna be more expensive, I'm gonna be spending more on hardware, but I always, all these processes built up around it. I'm afraid, Bernhard, to move off of that on my watch. Maybe the next CIO. How do you help manage that risk? Take us through that process. Yeah, okay, I mean, that's actually pretty easy. So the migration process is not a very complicated one. It's actually a list of steps that you would have to take that you can line out on a couple of pages and so forth. So you basically put some examples in there. There's certain variations here and there, but essentially what you do is like, you line up with a couple of good guys and consulting folks or folks from the SI Alliance business and they will kind of hold your hand in that perspective, okay? They will tell you like, look, I mean, we're taking copy of the system, we test it through, we're going to show you, and prove to you that it's reworking smooth. We have a kind of a push button procedure defined. So you can take it one by time and you're going to measure the success. So there will be minimal disruption for you. And here, look at this, here's a couple of thousand customers who've been doing it before you. So this is usually that you wanna go through. It's like, let me find a good example. I mean, hiking a certain path, okay? I mean, you need to know the right way. You don't wanna basically step left or right and kind of fold E, but you know, if you take the step, if you take the guidance from your leader, it won't be a problem and you'll be enjoying basically everything else after on. So I'm thinking about that migration specifically. I mean, it's a package, right? So you're basically pretty easy to migrate a package, but some clients, I would imagine, have some custom code built up around it. Do you, are you running into those complexities? Do I have to do things like freeze the code? Is that, are there situations where it just, you know, it's a little harder and it might not make as much sense? No, actually not. Because I mean, the customizations are at an application level. That's actually decoupled from what we're talking about from an infrastructure. So that's not playing a major role in that respect. It would rather be kind of and further accelerator to go virtual and so forth because to kind of not out what you would have in your complex environment and want to copy it and transfer it to somewhere else, you can do that on a virtual infrastructure much easier. Yeah, now talk about virtualization a little bit. I mean, early on, maybe say two or three years ago, there was some concern about virtualizing SAP. I know a lot of application heads, you know, were concerned and maybe still be concerned about that. Can you talk a little bit about the virtualizing SAP, what the experiences have been? Yeah, I would basically cancel concern and replace it by uninformed because I mean, it's fully supported since when we do the math I think seven years from an SAP perspective. There's been just been going on some stuff with Oracle always tries to make it harder new from a database level. That's also fully supported from a VMware perspective. So I mean, it's kind of all a done deal. Some guys for whatever reason, I mean, the Unix folks to kind of try to keep them on their old side would tell you all kinds of anecdotal stuff on how crazy it is. But essentially, I mean, there's so many proof points there. That's not a real problem. And you can read it up. It's not a secret. So the gates are open, the flood gates are going. You guys are full guns. And I'll give you the last word for the audience. Hey, customers go for it. We got all the help lined up for you. Great, thanks very much for coming back in theCUBE. Appreciate it. Keep it right there, everybody. This is Dave Vellante and this is theCUBE. We'll be right back with some more guests from EMC's SAP event here in Hopkington.