 Inside theCUBE, this is SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage of SAP Sapphire now live in Orlando, Florida, theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, expect a signal from the noise, and we're here with Kristoff Struberg from EMC, 15-year veteran at Disney, SAP Architect, now working for EMC. And we have John Applebee, who with Bluefin, and I understand that you guys, EMC, Bluefin, and IBM and Optimal Solutions had a panna race. So John, tell me a little about how that went down and how you guys kind of met. Well, this came out of an idea with an SAP master, Amit Sinha, who runs the SAP HANA marketing program. He said, wouldn't it be cool to do something that was customer centric and showed how, in front of the customer, we could move a customer from a regular traditional RDBMS, I'm allowed to say traditional legacy, people don't like legacy, and move it on to HANA and show how easy it could be, right? Because everyone's like, oh, this is hard. So race from one side of the street to the other. Old stride of the street, broken down, slumming. To in memory, yeah. In memory, modern fast. Yeah, and I was there with, we're good for him, Vijay Vijashankar, who's now, who's worked for IBM at the time, and he's like, yeah, I'll race you to it. Now, IBM, they didn't want to go there. It turns out, yeah, Optimal were up for the challenge. So we said, let's do this, and from a race of time, we turned into a race of business value. So what are the, who can bring the biggest benefits? And just challenge of, you know, turns out you can do this thing in 90 minutes, right? You can move a system on to HANA in 90 minutes. What are we going to do for the rest of the conference? We've got 48 hours to do something new with this information that we've got. Well, before 90 minutes, you're like, we're done. Which is interesting that you bring this up because it happened TechEd last year, right? But people are still talking about the HANA race. In fact, I hear some SAP executives like to use that example to show customers how quick and easy it actually can be done. Well, the problem with a lot of the stuff out there, people love to see real stuff happen. And with social media, things can really be documented. The other problem though, is that a lot of these hackathons are kind of bogus. And people want to see the real, we call it meat on the bone. So, John, you run a consultancy with your brother. And you guys work with only the top, HANA, big disappointment. So, just share with the folks right now, what is the biggest misconception for HANA? In the, when I say HANA, in the real deployments, like the folks who really need it. You work with the top HANA deployments in the world. Vishal and the team does key notes with you guys. You're pretty high profile. And then, Christophe, I want to go to you, give your perspective, give in your experience. What are the big misconceptions as well? Yeah, what are people missing about HANA? Because people are trying to deposition it left and right. You guys obviously are claiming, or even SAP's claiming the fastest McDermott's up there saying, you know, 1,000 times faster. So, the other stats, put that all aside, it's like the reality of HANA. Well, and there's a lot of misinformation put in by both sides of the fence, right? But the biggest misconception, is it probably that HANA isn't the database, is what most people say to me most often. Like, it's not really a database, it's just a fast thing that makes your things go faster. But, you know, the reality is, HANA is a complete platform of application services and database, everything. It's the end to end. It keeps your information safe, secure, and it makes it fast. So, within the SAP world, okay, if you put the dome of SAP around the deployments, and Christophe, I want you to comment on this, because you spent a lot of time at Disney doing SAP, and it's not a small company, right? So, these big deployments are very SAP centric. Now we live in a world where, you know, you need to do other things. You got cloud, you got mobile, a lot of different touch points. And when HANA was developed, when I talked to Hasu about it this last year, you know, it was developed years ago before Hadoop, before other things were happening in open source. So, what's your take on now, HANA? I buy that it's real, but dealing with other stuff, how well does it work? Well, what I like about HANA is that it's not a one fit all kind of solution, right? SAP understands that. First of all, SAP understands the whole value proposition discussion, that finding the right use case gets HANA into the door in organizations, that is true for Disney or other organizations as well, right? And that's where companies like Bluefin come in, that's what John does all day long, right? It's also a very interesting technology discussion, and that addresses your question, right? The way you can deploy HANA, you can start HANA outside of the critical path, basically. You can sort of use it as an agile data mart, an old word, but it's still applicable to also HANA. And you can start, once you ramp up the internal knowledge in the company, first you have some help from an outside SI, for example, and you ramp up internally in the company, feel more comfortable with the technology, understand how to maintain it, run it, operate it in a data center, then you can embark on more critical things that are within your running your business, relying on it. So, you're at EMC now, but you had that experience. What are the biggest challenges and now that you're on that side of the fence, you know, the kind of consultancy that Bluefin does is pretty high-end. I mean, this is not trivial deployments to migrate. You know, the HANA race fun thing is probably really cool and probably relevant. I didn't see the details, but let's take it to the real world, right? You know, some of the things you guys go into. What are some of the use cases? What are some of those high-profile examples where it's challenging and HANA fits the bill? Well, again, I like the use cases on the side that SAP calls the art of the possible, right? Outside of the norm. And there are actually some examples also here on the showroom floor, like McLaren, for example, uses HANA for something very creative. Same is true for Bigpoint, an online game company who use HANA and they're not typical SAP customers. They don't use ERP internally, but they are using HANA to do something that they weren't unable to do for their business before. So, I like to use these kind of use cases because in most organizations that have run HANA or they have run SAP for a while, they don't think of SAP as a hot company that can provide something that unlocks new business possibilities. Typically, it's running your financials, you're running your HR, closing your books, that kind of stuff that is boring but essential, right? So, bringing that kind of idea to businesses who run SAP already for a long time is internally often quite a challenge. I don't know, John, do you see that kind of dynamic alter in organizations? Yeah, I think so, and I'm going to weave in back a couple of misconceptions whilst I do that, if that's all right. Yeah, absolutely. And I was in a room a couple of weeks ago and I'm sat there with a bunch of people and I'm just drawing up the HANA vision and what's going on. And I stopped and I checked myself. I said, to the room, have any of you guys ever used SAP? No? Do any of you know what SAP is? No? Do any of you care, no? And I realized that in the world of big data, people are not interested in SAP in itself, right? They're not interested in ERP. They're interested in analytic problems. So, that's the second thing, is a lot of interest in HANA is from people that are not interested in SAP's original core business, the ERP side. And then that brings me to the kind of the third one and I'll come back to the use cases at this point, which is HANA is the center of the world for SAP's big data story, but it's not the only thing. And for the kind of use cases that we're talking about, and Steve Lucas was at the big data event last night talking about this use case. I'm trying to get him on for Thursday, by the way. Oh, yeah, well, yeah. Is he good for the cube or what? Oh, yeah. Steve is awesome. Oh, yeah. You'll like it. I'll love it. But he was talking about this same scenario that we're working on, which is, suppose that we want to consume market trading data in real time. We need something to consume that, and SAP has an offering called ESP. That's part of the story. And we need batch loading as well, so an SAP has a product called Data Services for that. And then we need a really fast store for what's happening with trades and sentiment. Today, we're going to pull data from Twitter. We're going to pull historical weather data and we're going to consume all of what's happening in the trading world in real time. That's HANA. But also, we've got five years of history. And that, of course, is SAP's Column of Database, SciBase IQ. And what about all of this sentiment information back to the beginning of time? Well, we integrate with Hadoop. We federate all of that now with HANA. So all of that is available in one model. So HANA is part of this story for a use case with a very high value around how we predict what trades are going to happen, where trades are going to move next and where markets are going to move. I mean, it's really kind of the co-mingulate in multiple use cases. And in a way, it's a consolidation. You mentioned a federation. In a way, it is a federation model where HANA is now a new center of gravity around multiple things. So, hey, I want real-time unstructured data that's coming off the web public sphere. No problem, bring it in. If I got legacy dark data as McDermott ripped off from Gardner, it's no problem. I mean, the dark night is returning. It's called the data, right? I was sort of thinking I thought of it, but it's like, you know. But again, this is an architectural issue. So a lot of folks that we talk to on theCUBE say, hey, you know, we've been saying the modern infrastructure's here and it's not converged infrastructure. It's a new, it's flash, it's new architecture. So how do you guys look at that? When you talk to customers, this modern era is definitely here. What is the key thing? What is the key thing around HANA and what else is in that package that you're seeing? I think the answer is you have to create reference for the architectures for the stuff that show them how it should be done. And it's as simple as that. We need to take, everything is by industry now, right? It's by industry, by use. We take a use, we create a reference for that. We understand which products, how they're going to integrate and then we help these guys on the hardware side build hardware solutions that meet that package and that has to be a package solution. And that's where we come in, exactly. Yeah, talk about that. You're now on the front end, you're on the EMC side, but you have 15 years at Disney, you were in the legacy side, you were the on-prem king for SAP, right? So now, you're on EMC, clearly it added an infinite... Well, yeah, it's true. And some of the things that I used to rely on from EMC are things along the lines that most architects and customer installations for HANA are concerned about today. That is high availability, that's data protection, typical backup restore and disaster recovery. So those are areas where EMC and VCE have shined in the past. There's a reason for the majority of SAP customers running on EMC storage today. I mean, it's not by chance. You know, it's funny, we had Brian Gallagher on theCUBE last week at EMC World, he runs the supposedly dying symmetric business. It grew 10%. You know, so it's... Dying? Well, no, that's what the NAC is. Oh, it's dying, it's being cannibalized by... But what's happening is just the overall growth, it's still growing as people need to store stuff. They need to store more and more data. Data is growing. It's just one federated component of the architecture. It is, and this is great. So we move to misconception number four, if you like. We can keep going. All day long, I tell you. Which is, HANA isn't enterprise ready. Especially with the SP6 release, which is coming. Allegedly, these features are coming, I think. Yeah, I hear that. Probably not allowed to say solidly, but for me, the remainder of the enterprise-y stuff is done now. High availability, disaster recovery, point in time. All of the things that you would expect of a database exist in HANA, and sometimes people say they don't exist, but now I think it's really a full suite. You can back up from your disaster recovery node now, which is a big thing for people. You can stick all your researches on that other system if you'd like to. Because they slow down this one with all their difficult questions. So, yeah, it's all there. So John, I want to get your perspective. I wanted to ask Kristoff first. We had Henrik on earlier from EMC, and we talked again about this idea of speed and performance. A lot of the benchmarking that's been kicked around, whether it's Pivotal, Green Plum on the EMC side or someone else, everyone always has that benchmark. And Green Plum put out a benchmark before Strahd is saying, all right, we are zillion times faster than Impala, which is Cloudera's version of Real Time, which has its own issues, but Green Plum isn't pristine cleaning themselves. So, they know that, there's no damage done there. But Pivotal's going to take that all in. The data issue, right? So, data matters. Where the data is affects the benchmark. So, how does HANA, like the benchmarks all in memory, you got to move data around, you push the processors where the data is, where does virtualization fit into? I think it depends at the end of the day on the use case and the priority of the data, how it relates to the use case for the customer. And that's different for every installation or it can be different for every installation. I like to use the analogy of the time value of data, although time may not be the only metric that is of interest to move data from one location, if you will, to another. Over time, traditionally, however, that's a pretty good analogy. So, if you will, data that's applicable to the running business right now has a shorter period of time to live, right? It's more aligned with the technology that HANA provides. Data that is much larger in nature and maybe in itself doesn't add the requirement of the time element in its own use case may be applicable to something like what Pivotal does or Hadoop, not everybody knows that HANA and Hadoop actually work quite nicely together, especially with SP6, right? So, I love that time value of data because that's truly relevant. Latency, people we had a big discussion two shows ago about IAPS versus latency, completely different metrics depending upon what you're looking at. So, latency matters. And I'd frame that almost slightly differently in HANA terms to how a green plum or on a teaser would explain this. Which is, with HANA, we always store data at the most granular level, we don't aggregate. And we know how fast we can aggregate. And the number is 12.5 to 13 million aggregations a second per core. So, based upon how many aggregations you need to do, and you just need to- Think about that, that's awesome. It's amazing when you see it. And just to put that in context, like on a small HANA appliance like this, that means that if you've got, let's say, bank transactions and you've got three billion of them in two seconds, you can calculate the total average spend for all transactions there. So, all you need to figure out is how many calculations do you need, how big a box do you need? It's almost un-plausible, people don't even understand it. It's like, you know, it's not really a lot of doubting Thomas's out there. No, when people see it the first time, that's what happens. They say, no, that's not true. Every time. So, that's why the sales guys use Amazon so they can get the POCs up and running so they can see as much as possible how fast. And the enterprise cloud now where you can have much bigger systems. In Amazon, you're limited to like 64. All right, so let's- We'll get back to your question originally about benchmarks, right? I think from a customer perspective, and I used to be a customer for a very long time, in the decision process and figuring out what is the right tool, who's the right partner, there are a bunch of different points of criteria if you will, that formalize a decision. Benchmarks is not the answer to everything. It is one criteria. It is an informative one, but it's- It's a sizzle, not the speed. Right, exactly. It's one point in your collection of data that helps you to make up your mind. Okay, you got my attention. Now, you're either going to get kicked out on your butt or you can take the next step with the benchmark. As you said, it's impressive. And the big thing with Hunter, and this is what we try and display every time, is you can get the information in near real time and you can aggregate on it at the same time. So, if you can get the information in, you can ask the questions at the speed of thought. And that's really the limiting factor is, can you get it in and can you formulate the right question? So the only bottleneck in that equation and based on the benchmarks, which I haven't seen, I haven't looked at, I'd love to come in and check it out at SAP labs so I can see it for myself. Who know, invite me up to Palo Alto, and I live in Palo Alto, I should be up there, but it's really architecture. So what is the bottleneck? What is the bottleneck for folks? I mean, it's like the miracle drug, right, for IT. So what is bottleneck to this? Why aren't people just trampling down SAP's door? Or are they? Well, they have a thousand customers in 18 months, right? But I think it's again the idea that something, that revolutionary, that it can be attractive to businesses running SAP or not running SAP comes from SAP. I think that is a hurdle that SAP themselves are about to overcome with this HANA solution. I think the messaging has got to be tight on how it fits. Architectural reference designers, still a little early, but I think that's what I'm finding, is people trying to figure, okay, where is it fit? Is it a square peg in the round hole, or is it, you know, they can shape it any way they want? HANA seems to be elusive that way. You could actually move it any way you want. You mentioned people who use it, but not even have SAP. Correct. Yeah, I think there is a couple of things that will make a big difference in the next year on HANA. I mean, first of all, you have to reformulate your questions quite often. The questions have to be able to parallelize, right? So, you have to build a model that works. And that can be challenging. And the second thing is that from a hardware perspective, the current generation of hardware wasn't built for in-memory solutions. The next generation, which I think there's some of those kicking around that are coming, those are truly built for in-memory solutions. And they're smaller, they're cheaper. And all the hardware, we're going to have Don Bacille on Thursdays, the CEO of Violent Memory Systems, and Fusion IO, obviously they had a little management problems on top there. They've shifted over, now Violent and Fusion, they've proven that you put server-side flash architecturally opens up a lot of creative opportunities for technologists. Yeah, although actually in HANA is kind of the opposite with HANA because flash isn't overkill. You only need the disparate persistence. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I'm going to add- I guess there's some data areas that benefit from it, but not everything. Yeah, you don't need flash. Correct. So, the answer again, like your questions, you asked a question about the bottleneck, right? In the past where you call them traditional database systems in the past, right? The bottleneck used to be between compute and storage, right? And it required a lot of performance tuning. Now, buffer pool hit rate ratios and things of that nature, laying out the data correctly across spindles, all that kind of stuff. Well, if that is out of the equation, the next bottleneck that we now see with HANA is basically between cache and memory. David transfer. Yeah. It's all about getting data closer to CPU circles. And it's all the traditional, think of L1, L2, L3, cache testing. You start a whole other economics class, Christof, the future value of data. Yeah. You know, we can do a little, you know- And actually, I wrote something together with Gardner on that very topic. I'm passionate about that too. Yeah. Okay, well then I'll go start with a question for both of you, start with John. What was the most amazing thing you've done with HANA? The most amazing thing. Ah, I'm curious. Yeah, can I talk about it? Yeah, that's the question. You can generalize. John Doe, and... I think this one that we're working on at the minute is amazing, which is around financial services. The speed of thought, the one that calculates the balances of all the transactions. Actually, I mean, I love that one because it's such a great example because they came to me and they said, it's not running that fast on HANA. And I said, boy, there's a reason for this. You need to do a design that's not quite right for it. And it'd been taken quite a while to run. And then, like I said, the balances... So what were they doing? Taking the data, coming in? Can you explain that? What are they doing wrong? Yeah, no, what were they doing with the product? What was the solution? The solution is around ad hoc analysis for transactional data in financial services. Real-time financial data? Or not near real-time data? Generally, it doesn't really matter. And for analysts, they're not... What's transactional data, like... Transactional data, but taken in overnight because actually they're doing kind of research questions rather than real-time questions. So it's not time critical. It's a bulk of data that's pretty recent. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Recent, yeah, up to the day. And you want to ask questions around average balances, time, demographics. So free-form questions? Free-forms questions. No modeling, no front-end stuff, just like a Google search engine. Yeah, like that, exactly. And... Not run the BI query from the medium we have. Not bad to pass it. Right, no. Not a dark data query. They don't know the questions they want to ask. And they want to join... They want the flexibility to join. So I suppose you want to join the weather data for the last five years. Let's pull that in. Most people get to the right question after they've asked a few questions. That's the wrong way, right? That's the wrong way. Right, yeah. To your data point. Okay, you fumble through. It's kind of like, okay, that didn't work. Give me another one. Then you kind of get the creative juices going. Yeah, exactly. And they want to be able to do some of the stuff themselves. So the most amazing thing was what? The most amazing thing, I think, was the realization that they really can ask a question across five years of transactional data. And they can get an answer in a couple of seconds. And they can just keep asking. I don't think they believe that when they saw that. It's like, well, I can see average spend by customer, by sex, by demographic, by area. And I can visualize that. Did you get to see the people's faces when they were doing the queries? Or did you do that when you were... I wasn't there, unfortunately. Yeah, you saw the positive feedback. That would have been interesting, yeah. I would have liked to see that. Okay, your most amazing thing that you've done with Hanna, or been involved in. Yeah, well, I think the most amazing thing that actually happens right now, I can't talk about. The cube, I know, it's pretty odd. I know, exactly. But it's also something innovative in the financial space that we're doing. And there's a huge interest, I would say, because the analysis of numbers has immediate value to these financial companies. So from a business perspective, that drives a lot of interest, right? So I can't really talk about the details. But aside from that, I think we're worked also together with Blufin on something with VCE, right? Yeah, and we've been having some fun with that. Yeah. We said, basically, let's take a really easy, what should be a really easy example for people to understand, which, you know, Blufin runs SAP. We run it wall-to-wall, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. We got that checked off, right. Checked the box. Yeah, and we have a few processes which are a challenge, doesn't everyone, right? Probably our big one's our planning process, which is all of our resource management's done in SAP BPC. What about orchestration? I mean, that's a hard problem when you're dealing, you know, at the VCE, part of VCE, you've got VCE and you've got all these deployments. How are you managing the orchestration across all the systems? Orchestration of the code. So if I'm a developer, I don't want to, I'm a developer, I don't want to actually, I want to write, I'm writing an app. I want to manage all the infrastructure and orchestrate all my services across the infrastructure. So I'm thinking, okay, I want to use a little hon, I want some speed, I want some nests. I'm actually a developer. Infrastructure as code is a DevOps kind of mindset. That's a good question. I'm in the space of SAP, I mean, traditional SAP, you're really bound to ABAP. Still, I mean, SAP tried Java, it really didn't take off that much. So ABAP is the answer there. And in the space of HANA, it opens up a lot of, you know, other opportunities. And ABAP. We see a lot of developer start-ups, actually. I mean, the SAP start-up guys, they're like, oh yeah, they're trying to fund HANA start-ups. Have you seen any hot start-ups come out of the HANA space? I'm not aware of any, but... John, have you seen any? There are a bunch of them. I'm going to get in trouble here because I should be paying attention to this stuff because I know those guys. No, those guys really well. Are you too busy running? I'm busy on other stuff. But I talked to one last night. I thought it was... Don't pick yourself. Too hard. I think that's a pretty high-end stuff. There was one I was talking to last night that was pretty cool and we had a short conversation and he told me how they were doing refuse disposal or recyclable. So you can tell it, there's an iPhone app, you can download and focus. Only I can remember the name of the start-up. Pretty big problem. Yeah, well, yeah, but I spoke to him briefly. And basically, you open up the app and you tell it, what do you want? So I've got a, you know, I want to recycle this MacBook Air. It's not very good. So, and they'll tell you where you can recycle that. And they're looking from what I understood to monetize that by taking that out to the suppliers like HP and so on. And then using that big data information that they're gaining from the customers to help the suppliers sort of refill. You know, you should really buy a new toner now. I see you just recycled one, for instance. Using the power of HANA to give them analytics on that. I thought that was interesting. And you guys are working together. Obviously, the HANA race we had mentioned is some of the cool things you guys do at events. And that was really going to demonstrate the value and kind of give kind of a face to HANA. Just in summary, our last question for both of you guys is talk about, just for the average person out there who's trying to figure out what this is all about, HANA and what it means. Not just the geeky stuff, but what it enables. You guys are exposed to some pretty high-end use cases and pretty intoxicating when you think about some of the new creative things that are happening. What would you share with them around, peek around the corner and give them a little view of what you think's happening with this trend and what's going to enable? So, I actually send customers all the time to SAP websites. Because I mentioned earlier this, I call it the time or the value dynamic between HANA as a technology and HANA as a business value and driving new revenue and things like that, increasing customer satisfaction and all that kind of stuff. So, SAP obviously realizes that and has made available a website that everybody who is in the field of HANA probably should know and it's saphANA.com, very simple. I like that website because of two reasons. One, there are specific success stories, little videos out there that show what customers have done with HANA, what is possible on the creative side. Secondly, there is a growing list of use cases that are organized by industry verticals. One of the SAP mentors, Rukshan Omar, she's managing basically, she's the gatekeeper of all these use cases. Organized by industry verticals, researched well, documented just high level ideas to spawn sort of the discussion what is possible with HANA. At the end of the day, sure, the technology may be interesting to people like us, but it doesn't matter, right? The business case solves a problem or generates a new business revenue stream, if you will. And that's where I think the meat of the conversation is to be drawn first. What are you personally like? I mean, from a personal perspective, you've had a storied career in IT and you've seen old school project management, big deployments, a lot of integrations. You know, a lot of people made a lot of dough, right? And time to value was months, now it's weeks. So there's a new market here, right? It's accelerated all around. What I like for IT organizations specifically about HANA is it gives IT organizations a tool or a message to be more relevant to the business, right? IT organizations throughout industries struggle with the fact that they try to get out of the Nike swoosh job description, just do it, right? And try to add more value to the business. Well, the business may not be available or aware of a tool called SAP HANA but what it can do, that's why I like these websites so much because they help IT organizations to educate themselves and they can engage the business, draw business people in, draw IT people in, draw data people in and have more creative workshops internally before they reach out, for example, to SAP or their favorite SI on value discovery workshops. Great, awesome. John, you kind of have a rope, you're pulling customers into the future, you had to go into the future a little bit in your mind, see around the corner and visualize these architectures. What would you share with the folks out there around, what sort of cool things you're in seeing that could be possible that yet have not been formed in terms of opportunities? I think the, if I think of the biggest challenge with HANA, right, it is making that journey to understand what you could do with it. So that's the big challenge and they talk about it as being a non-destructive technology and I'm not with SAP on this. HANA is a non-destructive technology but it's a technology which can disrupt markets. And that I think we haven't really seen yet and the things that you can do with it will blow your mind when you get there. People get afraid when they see something they don't understand and it's always the same question. What do I do with this? What can you do with it? A new weapon, a new opportunity, a new tool. And I think the real value, and I think McDermott got it really great today when he brought NBA in particular on stage, right, which is humanizing data. Because this NBA information, it's so easy to understand. Awesome. As an individual and I think- People can relate to fantasy football and stats and having stuff on the fingertips when they're watching the game or knowing, hey, pull the guy out, he tends to choke in the fourth quarter. Right, yeah. And I think that the real- You heard that up there from the Jed York. No, that was funny, wasn't it? But I think the real disruption in the markets is going to come from the humanization of that information and what change it brings. Humanization, guys, great conversation. I'd like to go more. We could go more, but we have to do a wrap-up towards the end of the day. It's already pushing 26 here on the East Coast. John Appleby and Christoph Struber, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. We'll be right back after this break from the wrap-up inside theCUBE. We've got EMC and we've got Hannah here having some great conversations. We'll be right back live from Sapphire. This is SiliconANGLES exclusive coverage. I'm John Furrier. We'll be right back.