VMworld 2018 - SAP

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[Music] hey I was going to keep Townsend from the CTO advisor vmworld 2018 where you know we moved from location to location cameras are portable these days Joe were just talking about you've worked at NBC and the thought of doing high quality production stuff in a mobile suite like this a couple years ago few years ago would be unheard of unheard of unheard of Keith so we're having conversations about technology and I'm loving that we're up leveling in conversation Jose our vice president of partners that's

right our global technical technology partners at sa P your first vmworld that scratch which is an example of the melding of infrastructure and a player needing to come and have a single solution presented to the customers super excited about that and then we can't have a conversation about s ap without talking about Leonardo Merlin Gamzee yes solution architecture center of excellence for Leonardo yes that we're gonna have I think a great conversation merlin owns the be honest keep here you know our our previous interview experience

we usually talk you know it that that that what like to call that market texture their engineers always mess up my - beautiful architectures with reality right so we'll give some some doses of reality on what exactly truly possible what versus what was too fanciful so first off Joe let's talk about the obvious what why why come the VM world this year like what what the what's the initiator that that is a great question and I'll tell you it really centers around a lot of sa

P strategy to really bring the intelligent enterprise to market and of course our core competencies are around critical business applications and innovation platforms but really to deliver an intelligent enterprise you need intelligent infrastructure right and this is a place where s AP can come and not only participate with VMware but all the SI partners that participate and work with VMware and most of the hardware partners so there's a bunch of partners here a bunch of sa P customers here and an SI p intelligent enterprise agenda

that is uniquely met by partnerships with companies like VMware so Merlin as we talk about platforms like Leonardo yeah how important are the relationships on the show floor that's enabling companies to kind of you know what get a peace of mind the infrastructure stuff is cool but as I wrap my head around the cape business capability leonardo brings i can't spend time on that stuff like that so why well based on the conversations on so forth so typically when customers start a project like that they

think about the use case they think about the business outcome but one part of the thing that they don't think about is how will this work yeah yeah how do I get it to work and when it's working how do you get a seamless right mhm so that's usually happen after the fact like you do the PLC you did a pilot and then oh yeah we get a good outcome now let's implement protein and then they start thinking about oh those are devices edges get a

bunch of raspberry pi feel so yeah it all works perfectly fine all right you know you go to the edge you might wait this thing is shooting off all its own of data how do I get that data back I choose my waters I see my f AP Hana instance yeah how do I get this data back yes so you need to manage the infrastructure and that's a key piece of it so the the the VM were a city relationship is really about VMware taking care

of the infrastructure plain because really taking care of everything so that you have your mind part of that an SCP is taking care of the data plane on the application so this joint collaboration is really key for customer because at the end of the data end-to-end solution is what they care about right yeah and so Joe I think as your this is your third VMware so you know you're used to the you know the intense focus on infrastructure yes Joe I'd like to get your first

impressions of any like eye-opening experience or interactions veining just a conference that's clearly focused on Jeff infrastructure yeah so I learned a couple of things here and I they were wonderfully eye-opening first you know when I came in I opened up my VMworld app and I searched on sa P and there were a plethora of presentations targeting the s ap community and how s ap customers can innovate from hyper-converged infrastructure and virtualization etc so that was one thing that was enlightening second is like Merlin mentioned

when you get into the nuts and bolts of it the use cases I was expecting kind of one or two use cases all right what I really found was there's a lot of use cases so just some of the low-hanging fruit that really resonated with me and Merlin hit on it as well as when you walk the show floor you've got a multitude of hardware vendors all of whom have edge gateway devices all of whom are certified to run sa P Leonardo but the question is

how do you manage that if it's heterogeneous and widely distributed VMware was able to provide a vision and some insights in terms of how you create that into a unified domain so to speak and then second we've got a huge movement of customers moving to our premier platform and digital core s4 HANA and when you make that move it's not like you're deploying an application or I got tests prod QA you know and then a disaster recovery and hyper-converged infrastructure and virtualization allows customers to right-size

where they want to run that workload whether on Prem or in the cloud and being able to move instances about and so get him back to your friend who simplified his life by moving into a condo you know you could kind of now have enterprise class you know mansion like experience at condo ease right ass week so it's that was really enlightening so I you know I had a really great first show here so I'm really interested in in this digital transformation journey that sa P

is helped helping to leave you know was that the net admin site last year and the CEO of NetApp was talking about how data-driven medicine helps save his son's life and how those innovations are permeating from industry we're hearing repetitive stories maybe not necessarily life-saving stories but industry disruptive conversations of how applications like s ap are being leveraged to disrupt and change entire industries and one of the things that I think one of the parallels between infrastructure and application layer you can look up and there's

a ton of technical debt that we've just whether it's you know someone's over over customized s AP and they've neglected to upgrade for some time and now they find themselves at a competitive disadvantage because they need to they need to move they don't need the advantages of Leonardo they need the advantages of the latest version of si P but they're they're stuck what what's the first step to getting unstuck like how do i how do i get it as a former SI p guy i can

look at it i could be overwhelmed right like the the i just look at my landscapes and thinking man i need to i need to be more agile in my landscapes to even move to feeding plan upgrade process that's exactly right so let me hit on that maryland maybe you could add some points yes so first you kind of nailed it that really everybody is looking to move to this digital digitization world and if they don't they know they're gonna be very vulnerable to competition and

other market forces so our approach really has been a couple of things one to enable channel partners that we work with so a lot of the SI partners to re-engineer our own sales force and then really to focus on the three things that we think matter and that's customers its industries and its markets so a couple of things how we help customers approach this new world of digitization is we take a step back and that usually involves design thinking and it's really about bringing the customer

together sometimes with some of their customers sometimes with some of their suppliers to better understand what is their value proposition what's their value chain and what makes them unique what's the secret sauce and then what is the supporting data that is going to help them make decisions and take actions that are fundamentally transformative right and so that whole process of design thinking taking that step back and really helping the customer as well as helping us ap focus on what we can do what parts we can

help them with and what our partners can bring to bear to really help transform our customers that's that's a big part of where that journey starts with our customers it's it has literally nothing to do with the software it has nothing to do Algie it's it's that step back and let's rethink about what we're trying to do is as business partners and from a business point of view and moving to the cloud with help on the the landscape right right by moving all the innovation that

we call in the cloud you will not be stuck in your instance anymore right what if I'm running like literally is my job the last s AP environment Ren was just a couple of years ago yeah and we're on hp-ux so you know not another slam I mean SAPT runs final hp-ux but if I'm looking at Hana and I'm looking at next-generation technologies that's gonna move the business forward that is colle wasn't enough and so you know I can't all due respect to HP be agile

or you know I can't pay enough it took me six months to spin up a new romantic right so no that's not possible yeah moving to the cloud help really dried those those challenges right so that you are always up to date right so the ICT strategy with the cloud first approach I think it's a very compelling for moving customer rocket rapid deployment moon rapid innovation ago we we talked at a sapphire about the the agility that's brought via the cloud right and how vendors and

now the front there's still CTO visor so I try and be as as independent as possible but VMware NetApp HPE although the whole partner ecosystem is needed to move forward this is immensely complex one of the things that we haven't talked about at all is automation the ability to automatically spin up environments you know Leonardo where we're talking about mobile and IO team moves extremely fast right traditional s AP not so much so talk to me a little bit about the importance of automation and hoping

to bridge the gap between the fast-moving mobile development and IOT landscape yeah and that more traditional you know what system of record we have to keep the system up and running and stable so from that side so for example on your tea typically you have to unboard devices great ways right and you have thousands of those so if you think about what was done in the past and boarding a device can take about let's say a day or two yes if you think about the number

of devices that you need on board it would be years before you take the data you know what I do a little transformation Jeff feel typically so so what the new friend is about fast onboarding automatic onboarding so VMware example is bringing us a this new technology where you can avoid a device in let's say automatically in second right so that that will help to scale and to bring those devices up and running faster than ever right and then you need to keep monitoring those devices

managing securing those devices as they they get on board right right so you keep so everything need to be automated you won't be thinking of oh if something happened 10,000 devices how do you want to get there and know or manage that so you need automation you need to make everything good yeah and what what I would add to that Keith is you know we talked about the cloud providing that flexibility and simplicity but these HCI vendors you know really have brought that hyper scalar cloud

simplicity and management manageability on-prem right right so now you can get a lot more done with less technical center of excellence professionals and less functional center of excellence professionals then you could before so now you're starting to get some parity between that hyper scalar experience and that hyper-converged experience yeah the the design phase for just you know V Mac or HDS or whatever it was that was gonna run my Oracle piece was an amazing amount of complexity that's right then I had team I had a

team that Jeff just looked at storage performance and capacity management so that they can design the next phase of the upgrade of the storage array to keep up with the demand of the business HTI mates that just really something that's exactly right if you look at night annex you look at some politically from HPE and of course you look at the work that's going on here it's very clear that the ability to manage a fairly complex landscape through a single pane of glass is within reach

you know we can start to do that now and then adding on to what Merlin mentioned when you get into these IOT devices and you move into this next generation of breakthrough technologies machine learning blockchain stream processing etc you really have to make some complex decisions like do I take the processing to the data or do I bring the data to the process and is my data hot is it warm is it cold and when do I use the cold data when do I use the

hot or warm data where does it reside you start to get into a lot of decisions that that traditional IT environment never had to deal with right and and now we sort of we may not be fully there yet but we certainly have a vision of what kinds of technologies can help automate that administer it and manage it so let's close out we can talk about I can talk about ICP probably most infrastructure guys but people want to find out general generically about the partnership that's

AP has what is their landing page is their where can I go to find about ASAP partnerships yes so thank you for that question so if you just go to s AP comm and you could search on partners the partners that we really focus on are are global technology partners and our global service provider partners these are partners that have tremendous insights into S ap secret sauce and we have insights into their secret sauce we talk about certification programs but that's a misnomer it's really Co

innovation mmm-hmm our partners are making a commitment to support and develop products with us take them to market and support them so that mission-critical applications can be stable for years to come so you know I definitely encourage all your viewers to consider sa Pease partners both on a service provider side and on the technology side to help them with their infrastructure planning and s ap deployment plans Jose our really appreciate you coming on the CTO visor merlion yam Zee you as well yeah you want to

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