>> Announcer: Live from Madrid, Spain. It's the Cube. Covering HP Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Good afternoon from Madrid everybody. Good morning on the East Coast. Good really early morning on the West Coast. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here day one at HPE Discover Madrid 2017. My name is Dave Velonte, I'm here with my cohost Peter Berse. Randy Meyers here is the Vice President and General Manager of the Mission Critical business unit at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And he's joined by Alexander Zhuk, who is the SAP practice lead at Eldorado. Welcome to the Cube, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> Randy we were just reminiscing about the number of times you've been on the Cube, consecutive years, it's like the Patriots winning the AFC East it just keeps happening. >> Or Cal Ripkin would probably be you. >> Me and Tom Brady. >> You're the Cal Ripken of the Cube. So give us the update, what's happening in the Mission Critical Business unit. What's going on here at Discover. >> Well, actually just lots of exciting things going on, in fact we just finished the main general session keynote. And that was the coming out party for our new Superdome Flex product. So, we've been in the Mission Critical space for quite some time now. Driving the HANA business, we've got 2500 customers around the world, small, large. And with out acquisition last year of SGI, we got this fabulous technology, that not only scales up to the biggest and most baddest thing that you can imagine to the point where we're talking about Stephen Hawking using that to explore the universe. But it scales down, four sockets, one terabyte, for lots of customers doing various things. So I look at that part of the Mission Critical business, and it's just so exciting to take technology, and watch it scale both directions, to the biggest problems that are out there, whether they are commercial and enterprise, and Alexander will talk about lots of things we're doing in that space. Or even high performance computing now, so we've kind of expanded into that arena. So, that's really the big news Super Dome Flex coming out, and really expanding that customer base. >> Yeah, Super Dome Flex, any memory in that baby? (laughing) >> 32 sockets, 48 terabyte if you want to go that big, and it will get bigger and bigger and bigger over time as we get more density that's there. And we really do have customers in the commercial space using that. I've got customers that are building massive ERP systems, massive data warehouses to address that kind of memory. >> Alright, let's hear from the customer. Alexander, first of all, tell us about your role, and tell us about Eldorado. >> I'm responsible for SAP basis and infrastructure. I'm working in Eldorado who is one of the largest consumer electronics network in Russia. We have more than 600 shops all over the country in more than 200 cities and towns, and have more than 16,000 employees. We have more than 50,000 stock keeping units, and proceeding over three and a half million orders with our international primarily. >> SAP practice lead, obviously this is a HANA story, so can you take us through your HANA journey, what led to the decision for HANA, maybe give us the before, during and after. Leading up to the decision to move to HANA, what was life like, and why HANA? >> We first moved our business warehouse system to HANA back in 2011. It's a time we got strong business requirements to have weak reporting. So, retail business, it's a business whose needs and very rapid decision making. So after we moved to HANA, we get the speed increasing of reports giving at 15 times. We got stock replenishment reports nine times faster. We got 50 minute sales reports every hour, instead of two hours. May I repeat this? >> No, it makes sense. So, the move to HANA was really precipitated by a need to get more data faster, so in memory allows you to do that. What about the infrastructure platform underneath, was it always HP at the time, that was 2011. What's HP's role, HPE's role in that, HANA? >> Initially we were on our business system in Germany, primarily on IBM solutions. But then according to the law requirements, we intended to go to Russia. And here we choose HP solutions as the main platform for our HANA database and traditional data bases. >> Okay Data residency forced you to move this whole solution back to Russia. If I may, Dave, one of the things that we're talking about and I want to test this with you, Alexander, is businesses not only have to be able to scale, but we talk about plastic infrastructure, where they have to be able to change their work loads. They have to be able to go up and down, but they also have to be able to add quickly. As you went through the migration process, how were you able to use the technology to introduce new capabilities into the systems to help your business to grow even faster? >> At that time, before migration, we had strong business requirements for our business growing and had some forecasts how HANA will grow. So we represented to our possible partners, our needs, for example, our main requirement was the possibility to scale up our CRM system up to nine terabytes memory. So, at that time, there was only HP who could provide that kind of solution. >> So, you migrated from a traditional RDBMS environment, your data warehouse previously was a traditional data base, is that right? And then you moved to HANA? >> Not all systems, but the most critical, the most speed critical system, it's our business warehouse and our CRM system. >> How hard was that? So, the EDW and the CRM, how difficult was that migration, did you have to freeze code, was it a painful migration? >> Yes, from the application point of view it was very painful, because we had to change everything, some our reports they had to be completely changed, reviewed, they had to adopt some abap code for the new data base. Also, we got some HANA level troubles, because it was very elaborate. >> Early days of HANA, I think it was announced in 2011. Maybe 2012... (laughing) >> That's one of the things for most customers that we talk to, it's a journey. You're moving from a tried and true environment that you've run for years, but you want the benefits in memory of speed, of massive data that you can use to change your business. But you have to plan that. It was a great point. You have to plan it's gonna scale up, some things might have to scale out, and at the same time you have to think about the application migration, the data migration, the data residency rules, different countries have different rules on what has to be there. And I think that's one of the things we try to take into account as HPE when we're designing systems. I want to let you partition them. I want to let you scale them up or down depending on the work load that's there. Because you don't just have one, you have BW and CRM, you have development environments, test environments, staging environments. The more we can help that look similar, and give you flexibility, the easier that is for customers. And then I think it's incumbent on us also to make sure we support our customers with knowledge, service, expertise, because it really is a journey, but you're right, 2011 it was the Wild West. >> So, give us the HPE HANA commercial. Everybody always tells us, we're great at HANA, we're best at HANA. What makes HPE best at HANA, different with HANA? >> What makes us best at HANA, one, we're all in on this, we have a partnership with SAP, we're designing for the large scale, as you said, that nobody else is building up into this space. Lots of people are building one terabyte things, okay. But when you really want to get real, when you want to get to 12 terabytes, when you want to get to 24 to 48. We're not only building systems capable of that, we're doing co-engineering and co-innovation work with SAP to make that work, to test that. I put systems on site in Waldorf, Germany, to allow them to go do that. We'll go diagnose software issues in the HANA code jointly, and say, here's where you're stressing that, and how we can go leverage that. You couple that with our services capability, and our move towards, you'll consume HANA in a lot of different ways. There will be some of it that you want on premise, in house, there will be some things that you say, that part of it might want to be in the Cloud. Yes, my answer to all of those things is yes. How do I make it easy to fit your business model, your business requirements, and the way you want to consume things economically? How do I alow you to say yes to that? 2500 customers, more than half of the installed base of all HANA systems worldwide reside on Hewlett Packard Enterprise. I think we're doing a pretty good job of enabling customers to say, that's a real choice that we can go forward with, not just today, but tomorrow. >> Alexander, are you doing things in the Cloud? I'm sure you are, what are you doing in the Cloud? Are you doing HANA in the Cloud? >> We have not traditional Cloud, as to use it to say, now we have a private Cloud. We have during some circumstance, we got all the hardware into our property. Now, it's operating by our partner. Between two company they are responsible for all those layers from hardware layer, service contracts, hardware maintenance, to the basic operation systems support, SEP support. >> So, if you had to do it all over again, what might you do differently? What advice would you give to other customers going down this journey? >> My advice is to at first, choose the right team and the right service provider. Because when you go to solution, some technical overview, architectural overview, you should get some confirmation from vendor. At first, it should be confirmed by HP. It should be confirmed by SEP. Also, there is a financial question, how to sponsor all this thing. And we got all these things from HP and our service partner. >> Right, give you the last word. >> So, one, it's an exciting time. We're watching this explosion of data happening. I believe we've only just scratched the surface. Today, we're looking at tens of thousands of skews for a customer, and looking at the velocity of that going through a retail chain. But every device that we have, is gonna have a sensor in it, it's gonna be connected all the time. It's gonna be generating data to the point where you say, I'm gonna keep it, and I'm gonna use it, because it's gonna let me take real time action. Some day they will be able to know that the mobile phone they care about is in their store, and pop up an offer to a customer that's exactly meaningful to do that. That confluence of sensor data, location data, all the things that we will generate over time. The ability to take action on that in real time, whether it's fix a part before it fails, create a marketing offer to the person that's already in the store, that allows them to buy more. That allows us to search the universe, in search for how did we all get here. That's what's happening with data. It is exploding. We are at the very front edge of what I think is gonna be transformative for businesses and organizations everywhere. It is cool. I think the advent of in memory, data analytics, real time, it's gonna change how we work, it's gonna change how we play. Frankly, it's gonna change human kind when we watch some of these researchers doing things on a massive level. It's pretty cool. >> Yeah, and the key is being able to do that wherever the data lives. >> Randy: Absolutely >> Gentlemen, thanks very much for coming on the Cube. >> Thank you for having us. >> Your welcome, great to see you guys again. Alright, keep it right there everybody, Peter and I will be back with our next guest, right after this short break. This is the Cube, we're live from HPE Discover Madrid 2017. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)