 Five from New Orleans, Louisiana, at theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm here with Keith Townsend and I'm Stu Miniman. Happy to have on the program. First time guest, Joe Zarb, who's with SAP Labs. He's the Vice President of Global Technology Partners and welcome back to theCUBE. Long time guest, Venigapal Pai, Vice President of Customer Success with Nutanix. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Great to be here, Stu, great to be here, Keith. All right, so Venigapal, our audience has seen him a few times. Joe, let's start your role in inside SAP Labs, what your organization does. Sure, happy to do that. So, Joe Zarb, I head up our Global Technology Partners within our Global Business Development and Ecosystems team, basically helping our customers to respond to their needs and their wants for solutions that span not only SAP, but their whole digital transformation agenda. So, we do that with partners and we do it with global service providers, we do it with software technology partners and hardware technology partners. Yeah, and Pai, we talked to Inder earlier today about customer success, but from an application standpoint, to tell us why you're here. Of course, no, thank you, Stu, thank you, Keith, very good to be here again. So, the reason that I'm here with Joe from SAP is we've had a longstanding relationship with SAP, spanning almost four years. And the reason it's important is as Nutanix becomes the platform that customers started to depend on for the infrastructure, the key elements of what value we provide to customers is to mitigate a lot of the complexity that comes from infrastructure and allow them to focus on the business value of the application. And the predominant application as you start to global enterprises, large customers, SAP tends to be the lifeblood of that company and the business value of how they drive value. So, our partnership with SAP is to really make sure that as we start looking at transforming the data center and moving them to a digital platform that makes it very easy to consume, the ability for transcending the value to an SAP application, making sure that customers have the trust of, if I run SAP on Nutanix, the trust of availability, performance, scalability, all the things that they need enterprise vendors to stand up to, we wanted to make sure that our journey with SAP started up early, our journey with SAP in making sure they understand the concept of hyperconvergence and the impact of what it does for them has been a very fulfilling one and has been a journey that will continue on for a long ways to come. So, that's why we're here. So, Joe, let's talk about digital transformation in the drivers. You know, SAP rich set of data is the, I've heard it called the cash register of the world. So many transactions go through that. With that said, it's also one of those areas that you say, oh, doubts, they're not touch SAP. Like it is the system of record. However, it's a rich, rich area for digital transformation. The gold fast break things, break things, part of the IT team, wants access to SAP. They want to get the data from them. They want to update transactions. Talk about that conflicting role that SAP has of, you know what, we're steady, rock solid versus gold fast and break stuff. Right, so that's a great question. And what we're facing at SAP are demands that are coming from our customers around what people term as bimodal IT. It's, they got to run their business, but they also have to innovate. So, a big part of our strategy going forward is centered around HANA as you know, which is our real time database. And it's a translytics database, right? So you could do transactions in it, you could also do analytics with the database within the same data set. So it provides a very powerful platform so that you could do your transactional operations and the analytics in a way where you can innovate. So that bimodal IT and the relationship with Nutanix and the other hyperconverged infrastructure players that we work with is really to focus on driving down the total cost of ownership in those operational areas, get to market quicker with those and free up technical center of excellence and functional center of excellence resources so that they can help the enterprise innovate. We have an entire platform that's dedicated just to innovation. It's our SAP Leonardo platform with our SAP Cloud Platform with Nutanix and other hyperconverged players and our transactional systems. So that whole digital transformation really needs to take into account, hey, you got to protect the base, you got to run those core applications, but you can't take your eye off of innovation because digital transformation is all about innovations, business model reinvention, as well as business process reinvention. So I think that's a big part of what we're focused on. So I talk about Nutanix and Pro, how do you help customers with that goal of saying, you know what, we got to make the things that we've do before are critically important, need to keep doing them, need to do it cheaper, need to do it faster and need to do it more reliably while we look to innovation. Absolutely, and I think that's a great story in terms of what Joe talked about in terms of SAP's lead into making sure that the ship is steady as it goes while making sure that the innovation engine is not forgotten, right? Where we start seeing is the amalgamation of between the two saying, I've got my traditional applications running as is, but I got to embrace innovation. And if you look at what Nutanix has done and continues to do, as you saw some of the announcements in this event, is bringing that innovation in, but making sure that that innovation is brought with respect of applications running in the data center and still giving the customer the flexibility of, hey, I want to embrace cloud. I want to embrace the concept of what cloud means to me, not just taking my data and moving into the public cloud, but giving the ability to get the cloud-like heuristics, the cloud-like management, cloud-like flexibility, cloud-like agility, the consumption of cloud DevOps capabilities. So the combination of what we delivered in an infrastructure layer to convert hardware to software and tied to what SAP is doing to drive that innovation from an application level is a very good partnership conversation to have with, hey, how do we now blend this software base in terms of what we're doing in the data center and tie that to the innovation that SAP is driving at the application level? And together, that's when true innovation for customers starts bringing to light because they focus on the application because of infrastructure, but this partnership then brings the two together. So, Pa, let's put some meat on the bone. It takes nine months, 12 months to deploy SAP infrastructure period. Nutanix, Rack & Stack, I can get a whole cluster up in less than an hour. However, there's still that SAP layer, that basis layer that has to be laid out. How are you helping customers get more agile in that so that they wow the business? Absolutely, and just to put things in context, our SAP partnership has been around for four years, right? We've been SAP certified for two and a half years, right? Both for SAP NetWeaver running on VMware hypervisors and then as of a year and a half ago, running on our AHV hypervisors. So we're bringing that hypervisor innovation into the SAP world, right? So that's one side. When you start looking at our software stack that start animating the focus on why things take so long for deploying an application is because the application layer is complex and then the infrastructure layer is complex. So what we're doing is with the 40 to 50 customers you already have running on SAP is what we bring is if we can reduce the complexity of the infrastructure layer, the speed to value of deploying an application becomes much, much faster. So that's why customers are gravity and Nutanix is because the infrastructure complexity has been eliminated as, hey, it takes me six months to spin up a infrastructure that's meet or I have where the applicant run a VM with server, with storage, I knew figure out what networking and then I spin up the application. When we bring in Nutanix, the ability for us to aggregate, disaggregate all that layered complexity that comes into play speeds up the deployment of the application and therefore better time to value for customers and I got to spin up the application in a few months. I can't wait for nine months because the infrastructure is slowing me down. We start eliminating that complexity. Yeah, Joe, one of the more interesting things to watch in the industry is the change in how customers are purchasing, especially from software, the days of everything fully shrink wrapped or long behind us, it's the subscription economy now. Nutanix is going along that journey from buying to software to fully subscription model. Can you touch on what you're seeing and maybe either you or Pyle connect how that comes together with Nutanix? Yeah, I'd be happy to do that. So what we are seeing, and this is implemented in our strategy and our go-to-market approach, is really that we live in a hybrid world and I thought that that was a wonderful quote that I heard here at the conference or driven home in the keynote. So we do, we live in a hybrid world. SAP strategy recognizes that, that's what our customers want. So we work very closely with cloud partners like Microsoft Azure and Google and of course Amazon and others. And of course we have an on-premise suite of solutions. So when we start to look at these business models, it's oftentimes about right sizing the business model for the workload and the need of that particular customer sometimes for a particular industry. Now where Nutanix comes into play in this hyper-converged infrastructure is there's some really difficult things that need to get done to make this world a reality. If you're going to move workloads and have them run in the cloud, you might have them run at the edge. If it's an IoT solution leveraging our Leonardo platform, you might have them running in the core or you might have it running in a branch office. Every time you start adding those layers, you're adding complexity, you're adding cost, and you're adding a requirement for skills. So when we can work with closed partners to downgrade the skills, downgrade some of the number of people you might need, create simplicity and create an environment where really it's a Nutanix statement, but where our customers have that freedom to move their workload to the right environment to take advantage of it, those are the partners that we want to work with. So SAP Labs, we can't get out of a lapse conversation without talking, well no, we can't get out of SAP Labs conversation without talking mobile and Fiori and all the great stuff that's happening on just taking advantage of the deep data, data's the biggest access and mobile and getting that data mobile. Let's talk a little bit about the edge. What's the story between Nutanix, SAP, when it comes to stuff that CIOs care about today and that's Fiori? Yeah, so I mean, a great question. So if you look at what Satyam presented yesterday in terms of our direction around IoT and looking at the edge, as a very critical component of the entire operating system, enterprise cloud operating system model, one of the key things that we are spending a lot of time on is understanding the use cases for verticals and understanding, okay, when you look at a specific vertical, let's say it's oil and gas or energy or manufacturing, right? All of those verticals have a unique perspective of what IoT means to them. IoT is a good buzzword and a good catch word, but when it comes to use cases and verticals, there's a very specific nomenclature of what they mean by IoT for them, right? So the Satyam team and Nutanix are spending a lot of time in deciphering, deciphering what IoT means for customers, defining what use cases mean for that vertical, and then working with SAP and determining, okay, what does Leonardo mean for them? Because Leonardo is, again, is a platform. Within the verticals, we're working with SAP, okay, within the Leonardo platform, within those verticals, how do we define what our value prop within the IoT landscape is when it comes to the edge? And so you'll see more coming from us, but we truly understand the importance of data, like you said, and the creation of data at the edge, and the importance of analyzing the data, maybe in the cloud, and that transformation of where the edge data is created and where it needs to be analyzed, that journey is very complex, and if we can make that journey simple, then SAP customers win, SAP application, deployment wins, and we're able to therefore mitigate some of the complexity that comes with making that journey simple. You know, I might add to that is, again, what Pi said is spot on, but if you look at it from a manufacturing point of view, moving to the edge, you know, customers are confronted with the reality of the networking complexity, and they're either going to take the processing and move it to the problem, or bring the problem to the processing, and so to do that takes hard work and servers, and so there's a whole new genre of high performance gateways and hardware that's emerging on the market from players like Fujitsu and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Dell, what have you, and you end up having a plethora of these devices at every well head on every AMI, AMR, meter reading infrastructure in the utility system, or in every single plant floor, so how do you take that level of innovation that's happening now at the plant floor and make it part not only of your operational system, but of your IT and your data center so you can manage it with all the illities that IT people do. I think Nutanix and SAP are working to solve that problem and our Leonardo platform is what we have to drive that edge and with Nutanix it's a very manageable environment. Great, well, Joe and Pie, really appreciate the update on where you are today, where some of the direction are, we're going to the future. Getting towards the end of two days of live coverage here at Nutanix.next 2018 for Keith Downsend on Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE.