>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE. I am Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, and we are live in the NetApp booth at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018. We are joined by Robert Stumpf, Senior Director of IT, Enterprise Solutions Delivery. Welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you, thank you. >> So we're here in the NetApp booth at SAPPHIRE NOW. As they said in the keynote this morning, they're expecting a million people to engage with SAP SAPPHIRE this week. >> Yes. >> Think, I've heard rumblings there's about 20+ thousand people here in attendance. >> Yeah. >> Huge event, huge show, lots of announcements. Let's talk about NetApp and SAP as partners. Specifically in the context of the Next-Gen Data Center, bringing cloud-ready solutions to business application. What are you guys doing there with SAP? >> Sure, I can talk a little bit about that. The NetApp solutions fit into the Next-Generation Data Center in a variety of different ways. We have the All FAS Flash that really is the core of our product base and is really the workhorse of all the hardcore applications, gives you really a strong performance in the storage area. Then we have the Cloud Volumes with when you want to scale out to hyper scaler, and you can use the Cloud Volumes abilities there. And then when you look at our HCI components, it is capable of giving you a lot more of the container-based compute power, so we fit into a variety of different components there. >> So, Robert, we're at SAP. And SAP hasn't been traditionally known as a cloud-aware application. Tell us, from the NetApp perspective, what's changed with SAP over the years that now, you can comfortably talk about SAP as a cloud-aware application? >> So SAP's moving a long way in that direction. You saw it this morning in the keynote that they were talking about the C4, their customer-focused applications. That's really kind of putting a framework on top of all of the customer engagements, and making the customer the center of everything. So they're moving a lot in that direction. We at NetApp have implemented their Hybris platform, their cloud for customer application. We just went live with that last year, so we're on that journey with SAP as well. >> So, as we talk about that, what makes the application, or what make applications in general cloud-aware? >> Okay, when you look at making something cloud-aware, you want to really look at the architecture that you have underneath it. So you'll build something that has a lot more automation in it, a lot more scalable, where you don't have to, the scalability's built into the framework, like you're leveraging. In the case of our NetApp support site, which we just completely re-architected and went live last month, we have built that on what's called a MEAN stack, so that's where the Mongo database and the back-end that's a NoSQL database, and then on top of an Angular node.js, which gives you much more robust framework for you to be able to scale-out your application. So with it being a website, and your volume can go up and down, so you want to be able to scale the application without needing people to get involved in that scaling, so they will just fire up new containers as needed as the volume increases, and it's a lot more robust in architecture. >> So if we look at Hybris and we look at NetApp products and solutions, that framework and architecture. Can you paint a picture for us what NetApp solutions and products are cloud-aware? >> Sure, the cloud-aware applications, really you need to look at the complete stack of the Next-Generation Data Center, which is really embodying the on-prem data center, your hyperscaler cloud data centers, and then a private cloud if you so wish to build one. So the Next-Generation Data Center takes advantage of the All FAS Flash on your on-prem solution, so you've got your performance, high-performance scalability. Then your Cloud Volumes allows you to move your data between your on-prem out to the hyperscaler as you need to, and the HCI component gives you that container-based compute array that allows the applications to scale. Also, you can leverage StorageGRID, which is much more of an object-based data base, which is something that you'll use extensively on cloud-aware applications. >> So, thanks Keith. So one of the things that was announced this morning, you mentioned C/4HANA where Bill McDermott was sort-of expected to announce what SAP was going to be doing that's gonna help differentiate them. They want more share from Salesforce and Oracle. He made kind of some aloof references to that, but one of the things that he talked about was: companies need, in this day and age, speed obviously, but to move away from a 360-degree view of sales automation to an actual 360-degree view of the customer. I'd love to get your insight on NetApp and SAP as partners together. Are you seeing any particular industries leading here? We think of manufacturing, maybe automotive oil and gas, but I'm just wondering from NetApp's perspective, are you seeing any industries that are really leading-edge here in evolving to a Next-Gen Data Center that enables this 360-degree view? >> There's a variety of different industries that are doing that. If you take a look at applications like Netflix and Amazon Prime, those applications are architectured to be scalable and to be much more robust, and they are much more focused on the customer. And because you don't have outages, right? They don't take the system offline when they're doing an upgrade to their capabilities. When was the last time you heard of Netflix going offline for twelve hours to do an upgrade? So, these applications are built much more robustly around that, and that's what one thing that we are looking to do at NetApp with the Hybris implementation that we did with SAP, and we're also upgrading our back office CRM system to their CRM on HANA on-prem, and we're gonna be taking advantage of the Hybris capabilities there to give that full picture of the customer. We'll be heavily engaged with SAP on their C4 journey and making sure that we are a part of that as well. >> So it's great that you brought up Netflix as an example that continues to be operating an environment that has this huge back-end automated with technology. SAP traditionally hasn't been considered a technology that you could upgrade on the fly. I've managed an SAP environment where we can only take twelve hours of downtime a year because mission critical, it's very difficult to get that time. >> Yes. >> How has the NetApp data fabric story played into making that a possibility in your own environment and customers' environments? >> Okay, we leverage a lot of the NetApp storage on our on-prem system. I'm in the exact place, same situation as you were talking about. We have a lot of mission critical customers that are on our support application. I have to give 90-days notice to take the system down for any longer than four hours at a time, so I'm in that very similar situation. So we leverage a lot of the NetApp technologies to make sure that the applications are available when I'm doing the upgrades, and we can do rapid copies of the data that's in there, make sure it's all robust. Our data, failover database, failover systems, are set up that way so that they take advantage of the snapshots that we got from the application, and we're working with SAP. The SAP Hybris application is actually built on top of NetApp storage, and we're working very closely with SAP to re-architect our applications, to take advantage of the capabilities that NetApp storage brings to the equation. >> So none of this coming into its own in this hybrid cloud model that's been around 26 years, right, long time. But now, it's everything you see. You mentioned Netflix, and I don't know anybody on the planet that would survive if Netflix went down for an hour, let alone twelve. So speed, access to data, but this evolution of NetApp, I'm interested, and you know now again in this hybrid cloud model, you guys made your name from building network attached to storage on-prem data centers, the announcement with Google Platform just last week. Talk to us about some of the evolution from NetApp, from your perspective, from the storage perspective, into really facilitating this hybrid cloud model. >> Sure, we are really at the forefront of that because at the end of the day, it's all about the data. Right, your application can run wherever you want, but wherever your data is is really the key. And that's the framework that we're putting in place is to make your data a lot more mobile. So if you want to keep the data on-premise, then you can keep it on-premise. If you want to move it out next to the hyperscaler, you can burst it out, you can use the Cloud Volumes and migrate the data. So the NetApp picture, the story is really in making your data much more mobile and moving it to the location of choice for any particular workload that you're looking for. >> So, we can't have a discussion in 2018 about data without talking about privacy and security. What's the relationship in ensuring that NetApp and SAP is one, media requirements in GDPR, we have to talk about GDPR, we have to talk about security. How is NetApp securing data and ensuring that in-users' and organizations' data stay private? >> That's a very good question, right? It's definitely a challenge that a lot of companies are struggling with, and the tools that NetApp provides with our storage systems are paramount, security is paramount, and that's something that we're very much focused on in making sure that your data is your data, and the specific components of the data that you want to keep on-premise, which you want to keep as much more secure, then you can keep that on the NetApp All FAS Flash storage systems, and then you protect it as if it's in your own kingdom. But then the data that's a little bit more lax on the security sites, then you can push that out onto the hyperscalers and use the NetApp Cloud Volumes to have it outside of your on-premise. You know, it's like your own firewall. >> So one of the basic things as a ONTAP customer that ONTAP customers depend on and the private data centers, this ability to encrypt data on the fly. Now that we look at, you know we see ONTAP in the cloud, do we get that same basic capability to encrypt data on the fly or encrypt data while it's in transit? How do I know my data is protected from an encryption perspective? >> You get the same capabilities when you're using the on-cloud tools that we provide, so there's no real difference in that, and that's the beauty behind that. You're using the same storage management tools for your Cloud Volumes as you would be for your on-premise systems. >> I want to ask a question on competition. There's a lot of co-opetition that's going on just at SAPPHIRE alone. With what you talked about about how NetApp is leveraging Hybris, you mentioned, to really kind of get towards that model of connecting supply chain with demand, getting that full view of customers, SAP partners with probably all of your competitors. So how is what NetApp is doing internally to digitally transform, how do you see it as giving NetApp that competitive edge against the other guys? >> Okay, the way that we look at our competitive edge at NetApp from an application standpoint is really focusing on keeping our core capabilities very, very vanilla. So in the implementation with Hybris, we were very much focused on not customizing the application. But because at the end of the day, you sell stuff, you build stuff, you manufacture it, and you support it. So those are the core capabilities, and we've kept that very vanilla as much as possible within the implementation. Where we differentiate, that's where we customize. So our application landscape is much more focused on customizing for the differentiating capabilities, and that's the component that's specific to NetApp and how we do business. And that's the way that we go about differentiating ourselves from our competitors. So we use the core capabilities of all the enterprise applications that we have, that we purchase such as Hybris, and then we go build our custom solutions that are differentiated, that really searches our ASUP, AutoSupport system, that gets what's embedded right from day one, that's a custom-built application, it's very proprietary, it's really the keys to the kingdom for our organization. And that's something that's very, very integral as part of the NetApp culture. >> So, let's talk about some lessons learned from that. One of the pain points for many SAP customers is they look at capability like ECC on HANA, really want it, but they've customized their environment too much, so making that switch is extremely difficult for them. What have you learned as a team that says, you know what, the best way to stay in line with SAP and follow that roadmap for mission critical applications that are both stable and differentiating, you should follow these basic policies from a hygiene perspective. >> Sure, we actually went through that last year with our project where we replaced our Sales Force Automation system, and we implemented C4, C4C Hybris. So the key to that is really getting the executive sponsorship bought-in to making sure that you're adhering to the vanilla applications and not customizing it. So we were very fortunate where we had Henri Richard and Bill Miller, our CIO. They were the executive sponsors of the project, and they were adamant that we would not customize the application, and we went through, it took us six months to replace our CRM system for an office CRM system. Very proud of that project. It was an incredible painful journey to go through, but the benefits that we got out of the end of it are phenomenal because we were in that situation where we had an overly-custom SAS application that was running our sales organization that really wasn't meeting the needs of the business. Now we have a much more agile implementation that's on top of SAP's Hybris platform, and we're taking advantage of the new capabilities they introduce, rather than focusing on our own customizations. >> That's a great summary. I think you articulated very well what, one of the themes was from Bill McDermott's keynote this morning, is making things simple, is not an easy thing to do, but it's critical. There are so many-- >> It's totally critical. >> business outcomes that come out of that, not just stream-learning processes, improving sales and marketing and connecting them together, but really affecting revenue, profit, share, et cetera. So Robert, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and chatting with Keith and me today about what you guys are doing with SAP. >> Great, thank you, thank you for your time. >> We want to thank you. You're watching theCUBE: Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAP SAPPHIRE 2018, thanks for watching! (light percussive music)

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018, brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin, we are with Keith Townsend, we are in Orlando, in the NetApp booth, at SAP Sapphire 2018, joined by the CIO of NetApp, Bill Miller, Bill welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, great to be here, I really appreciate it. >> So, NetApp, 26-year-old company, you guys have been on a big transformation journey, give us some nuggets of NetApp's transformation story. >> Yeah, it's really a fascinating story, and it all centered around the customer. In going back a couple of years when we realized this story was evolving from a storage story and a storage history, to a data-centric story going forward. We spent a lot of time listening to our customers. We listened to them in briefing center meetings, we listened to them through strategic customer account sessions, and we really were drawn to this notion of providing outcomes for our customers rather than providing storage long-term. Storage, like all other appliances, ironically in the name of the company, a very well-established respected company, Network Appliance. It was not going to be about appliances in the future, it was going to be about data management and leveraging the value of the data for our customers. So our transformation was about bringing that journey to life and giving our customers choice. Choice around where their data resides and how they utilize that data and how they leverage that data for their customers. So as we listened and we, we kind of absorbed the impact of this, it became clear that for the foreseeable future we were going to live in a hybrid-cloud world. And really what I mean by that is our large established customers were going to have very consequential private cloud data centers for a long time to come. We did very large complex applications that served their customer communities. They weren't going to be able to pick up those large applications and move them quickly to the cloud so they were going to run in high-intensity private cloud very efficient data centers. But at the same time, they were looking to transform digitally, to go on this digital transformation journey, and the vast majority of them wanted to lean in to the hyperscale or clouds, the cloud suppliers, and build their future strategic applications in the cloud. And it became clear to us that their data was now going to be bifurcated, it was going to reside in their own prim facilities but critical, mission critical, and advantageous data was also going to sit out there in the hyperscaler cloud and a company like NetApp could build this data fabric to connect them seamlessly so that the customers had choice. I mean, that's really what was behind the initiative to transform NetApp. >> So as we talk about that transformation, NetApp identified the opportunity. >> Yes. >> Looked at the product portfolio, looked at the gaps. Identified where they needed to go. >> Right. >> NetApp the company needed to go through a digital transformation itself. >> Yeah. >> So as an SAP customer, as a NetApp customer, as the person responsible for enabling developers, application teams, product teams, to execute on that digital transformation, what were some of the challenges, lessons learned as the CIO of NetApp that you experienced. >> It's an awesome question. You kind of went from we're going to transform for our customers to what I did to, or my teams and myself did, to enable that. There's a middle step which is all of our business partners in the company. You know, whether that's finance or sales or marketing, having to realign their business processes to this new need. So let me give you an example on the sales, the go-to-market function, you know. We call this a go-to-market motion, you know, how you sell. Well if you're selling an appliance, you know a piece of hardware with some software with it, that's one very well-defined and familiar motion. If you're going to sell software solutions, if you're going to sell advanced professional services that advise our customers on how to leverage data, those are very different motions that you have to enable to be successful. So what that means is taking that set of business processes that are unfamiliar to us. You know, when a customer wants to buy our products on a pay-as-you-go, a consumption model, rather than a capitalization acquisition, that's a whole different set of processes we have to put in place behind the scenes. Financial processes, legal processes, and of course IT systems. So it started with the business functions, figuring out how they were going to transform their work flows, and then IT had to come in underneath and say do we have the systems, the tools, the platforms, like SAP and other partner-provided platforms to enable that and make those work flows come to life. So it was really a partnership across the whole enterprise and if you really listen to our CEO, George Kurian, George will tell you, this transformation affected every single employee and every single leader in the corporation. It was a major change for us to figure out how you're going to take a business steaming in this direction and turn them 45 degrees on a dime and quickly embrace those new processes and mobilize them through new systems, tools, and platforms. So this was a wholesale change to the corporation, I mean it was a burn-the-ship's model, we're never going back, (Keith laughs) this is the new way of doing business for NetApp. Very exciting, and at the beginning a daunting journey. >> We had Dave Hitz on theCUBE doing a NetApp insight last year and one of the things that he said, he had to come in and tell the on-tap engineers, on-tapping the cloud is okay, we're NetApp and we can burn down what we've done before and do it again, and we'll make that journey. So, it's enlightening to hear that NetApp was willing to burn down the old stuff to build the new. So as we talk about that new, what are the major drivers, as you're talking to other CIOs, you know, I'm sure the sales team wants more of your time than you can give. >> Very perceptive, very perceptive Keith. (laughs) >> As you're talking to CIOs, what is that conversation, what jewels are they trying to get out of you? >> So, we spent a lot of time with our customers. One of the enjoyable parts of my job is my customers are my peers, our customers are my peers, so I did spend a lot of time looking at what's on their agenda. They're driven by two passions almost globally and consistently across the industry. They're driven by a desire to move to the cloud, to move to the cloud aggressively for flexibility, to take advantage of these new marketplaces that the hyperscalers are offering. Hyperscalers and their partners. But if you come out to our home base in Silicon Valley, what you see, all the start-up companies are being designed in the cloud functionality, so that's where a lot of the new R&D and the new IP is being created. So, my peers want to invest more heavily in the cloud. And the second thing they want to do is enable digital transformation, real digital transformation, how do they monetize the wealth of the data that they've acquired through their relationships with their customers, and then how do they leverage that for their customer benefit. That's what digital transformation really means to CIOs, and how do I engage in the cloud to do that. So when we looked at that we said, okay the story's about data, it's digital transformation around data, and it's enabling that cloud journey for our customers at a rate of consumption that is acceptable and digestable to them, right? Because every customer has a different rate of motion to the cloud and depending on their industry type and their degree of risk and enthusiasm to embrace change, they're in different places. So, we had to be very flexible in guiding different customers in different industries to that cloud database journey and so that's why we have to spend an awful lot of time listening to our customers to help them do that. >> Did you find during this time where, not only are you having to burn some ships down and transform yourself, while still transacting business in a competitive way. >> That's exactly right. >> Did you find yourselves going, alright so NetApp's talking about data is key, data fabric, are you going away from storage, did you find that was a question that was commonly asked and if so, how are they responding now to NetApp's transformation? >> That's a great question. Let me get back to that as you know, NetApp going away from storage, and hit something both of you said. This journey of transformation, you can do transformation a number of ways, but the two common ways are I do it and I'm gone. In other words, I get through the fiery pit and I'm on the other side, I'm like, wow I'm glad that's over, okay? That's not the nature of our company. It is, what George would call it, a culture of transformation, right? It's about being willing to change directions if you need to change direction and go, in this dynamic world. >> Based on the customers, what they think, not what as a company, NetApp would like. >> And we're in one of the most dynamic areas of high-tech, when you look at data and you look at the cloud and the solutions. So we realize, it's not over, we haven't transformed and we're done. We're in transformation 2.0, which is the whole next generation, and most of our leadership team is very comfortable with the discomfort associated with continually transforming. >> Comfortably uncomfortable. >> Yeah and I think it takes a certain kind of person to lead in our company and you have to be bold. You have to be bold and want to do that, okay? >> So George gave some emotional examples last year of data-driven capability. In order to make these transformations, NetApp itself has to be driven by data. >> That's right. >> What are some of the key capabilities as a CIO that you've given the business to be data-driven? George can't make these decisions unless he has data. What new capability has NetApp provided George? >> Well, I'll give you an example sitting here at this wonderful SAP conference, you know? We rolled out SAP C4C Hybris this past year. A big journey for us, we were on a separate platform, we knew we needed to build these new work flows into our day-to-day processes and as we thought about what potential solutions would be to kind of break the mold from where we were and move forward, we really liked the SAP HANA platform. We think the HANA platform, very dynamic you know in memory, a high-performance computing platform that's built on the NetApp framework, right? It's a NetApp high-performance infrastructure with an in-memory processing capability that's second to none in my opinion. So we looked at data availability, reporting, insights that we could get, and the commitment from our partners to continue to evolve in insights. So you know, you hear about Leonardo here, and some of the AI and machine learning platforms that are being developed, we felt like that HANA platform would give us a lot of flexibility in the future to be data-driven, to pull data and to do it fast and dynamically to help our business make the right decisions going forward. >> I'm curious, as we finish up here, how influential is NetApp's transformation? And you're right, it's a journey, right? You're going to get a destination, oh and now we're an intelligent enterprise, if only. How impactful and influential has NetApp's transformation been on really continuing to establish NetApp's relevance and your customer base, have you seen that like make deals happen because look what they've done. >> Yeah, a couple things I'll say to that. First of all, customers admire companies that are bold and that really want to lean into technology and make change, so our journey of transformation is absolutely a fascinating one for our customers. They feel like, if you're willing to do that, if you're willing to change dynamically on the behalf of your customers, we got a lot more confidence that you're serious about what you're doing and you're committed to the future. So number one, they love it. Number two, they just want to know how to transform themselves, so any nuggets they can take away from our journey, and reuse and position in their business for future success is much appreciated. And then the third thing I would say, and it gets back to an earlier question you asked. You know, as we give them more choice, as we give them a choice to either advance their current data center with high-performing flash or build a really cost-effective high-performing private cloud with converged infrastructure or really venture out into that digital transformative space of the hyperscalers, we're giving them choice every day. So, we're not afraid to offer them data management solutions in all three of those environments and not only choice by going out to a hyperscaler, an AWS or an Azure or a Google Cloud platform, but to be able to choose multiple cloud supplier platforms so they can put some workloads in Azure, some workloads in GPC, and get a confident feeling that NetApp's going to be there for them in any of those platforms in any of those configurations. They really feel more confident when they hear that story, and I would argue, to some degree, they're more likely to buy our traditional storage if they feel confident of our future vision in the enablement to allow them to succeed with that future vision, so it's been well received at that level. >> NetApp, bold. I love it Bill. >> I think we are. >> Thanks so much for stopping by, and now you're Cube Alumni, so congratulations. >> Well thank you and I hope to come back some time. >> Absolutely, we'd love to have you back. Thank you for watching theCube, I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and the NetApp booth at SAP Sapphire 2018. Thanks for watching.