>> Narrator: It's theCUBE, covering Sapphire Now 2017. Brought to you by SAP Cloud platform and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Welcome, this is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. Special Sapphire Now 2017 coverage here in theCUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier and I'm with Frank Pulambo with Cisco, on my left Margaret Anderson with SAP and Gary Gauba with CenturyLink. Some significant news announcing, in conjunction with Sapphire is the relationship between you guys around a significant cloud and cloud computing deal. Margaret, congratulations. This is significant because customers want more flexibility. They want to have a cloud native, they want to have the flexibility of a data center. Frank, talk about the deal from a Cisco perspective and the relationship to the context of this deal. >> John, we're super excited to be part of it, and especially with CenturyLink and a vendor like SAP. Really, our role in it is to help our customers run on print, run in the cloud and really our infrastructure products need to provide the simplicity to performance and the security for them to do that. >> Margaret, talk about the deal specifics. What does the deal entail? >> Well, it's a unique deal, because CenturyLink was already on of our partners for the HANA Enterprise cloud business. Then when the Cisco team came along and said, "You know what? "If we put our gear into the CenturyLink data centers "and power the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, "that would be a tremendous win for everybody." And so, we're very excited about that. >> Gary, I find this deal interesting because you have the engine of the SAP, you have the network and all the benefits that Cisco brings to the table. You're dealing with the implementation and manage to serve the customers. What's the important takeaway from this announcement? >> To me, I think if you take a step back, as we're siting down with some of the top SAP execs, and Chuck from Cisco and our CEO, Glen Post. We're talking, "Okay, how do we leverage "our joint assets together? "How do we create more value for our customers?" If you look at today, every customer the number one priority is digital transformation. The cloud obviously is part of that equation, right. The other bigger priority is, "Okay, how do I monetize this data "in this new connected world?" You're looking at 1.8 trillion connected objects by the year 2020, which will be generating 43 zetabytes of data. But let me quiz you out, how many zeros in a zetabyte? >> I think I knew this answer going in, since I got it wrong on our previous take. So, 12, it's 21. >> Maybe. (panel laughs) >> Okay. >> It's a lot. >> All right, I'm going to say 21 too. >> All right. >> Well, just a lot. It's a lot of data, a lot of devices. >> Yeah, I got to go with 21. It sounds like a good number. >> These are my cheat sheets, right. Anyway, they had-- >> Too many zeros. >> Too many zeros. >> Margaret: Yeah, too many zeros. >> And a significant, it's getting worse, the data tsunami is coming, it's already happening. >> It's happening. You think about the amount of data which is being generated. What we want to do is we want to provide highly secure, automated and in this case SAP certified private cloud platform from CenturyLink. Where we can really have the customers laser focus on the business they do. We help them with the deep platform which can help them monetize their data, help them drive their top line, increase the bottom line. Mitigate the rest in a fast manner and a highly secure manner as well, I'll talk more about that. >> Gary, you bring up a good point, and I want to get Frank involved in this and next I want to double down on the data comment. Because you factor in even the IoT, Internet of Things growth. It's going to be even more significant. Then, the security question pops up, because as the data centers move to the cloud and the hybrid and or pure cloud, the perimeter is gone. Now, the perimeter is how we managed security in the past. But now with the perimeter-less environments security is critical. How does this customer feel secure? And if you guys comment on the security aspect of how this relationship will roll out and the non-disruptive nature that you guys bring to the table? Because that's what customers want to know. >> John, from a Cisco perspective and Gary mentioned, when we talk about the digital transformation. And that's the buzzword in the industry, but most customers are looking for a business outcome. Really, to get that business outcome they have to make a business decision probably based off the technology like SAP HANA. This is mission critical information. At Cisco that's why we're in tune for what the network can do, because it's going to provide security at a lot of layers. Whether it's at the edge, whether it's at the aggregation point or all the way back to the data center, or into the cloud. The security at multi-layers and multiple places. With the bad actors out there that's the way you need to implement it. So you can start to bring this stuff together and give the customers the confidence that, "Hey, this transactionous data is going to be secure." >> Gary, the outcome that we're talking about is no hacks, no breaches, secure? >> Yeah, well it is highly secure, but you got to always be prepared. If you think about it, CenturyLink, we have 550,000 miles of fiber. Once we complete the level three acquisition, we'll add another 200,000 miles of fiber. You're talking about 750,000 miles of fiber touching 100 countries over six continents and 35 person of the global internet traffic going to our network. Once the level three acquisition is complete, we'll be the second largest network and we're critical to countries' infrastructure. There's a deep focus on cyber threats, things we do to avoid the bad actors getting in. >> I think that network intelligence too is going to give you more data to fight the actors as well. >> Absolutely, but to your earlier point, we truly, the situation gets compounded with this connected world revolution. When you are connecting these 1.8 trillion objects, you got to ensure each of these objects is secure. This is where the intersection of cyber security and IoT kicks in, and that's right in our wheel house. >> Don't forget latency, a word that's reering its head. More importantly it has people move across with IoT and across the cloud. Margaret, talk about the role that the HANA Enterprise Cloud plays in all of this. Is it the glue, is it the connecting tissue? What's the role of the HANA Cloud platform? HANA Enterprise Cloud, sorry. >> Yeah, I was just going to say. From a HANA Cloud perspective, it's a private managed cloud. We do an awful lot of work from an SAP perspective to make sure that the customer's environment is totally secure, but is also accessible all of the time for the customer. Because today, most businesses run 24/7 and they run all around the globe. When some team is working and this is their prime business day, later in the US business day, it's prime business time out in Asia, it's prime business time in Europe. You need a cloud that's always available, always up and it's secure. You can guarantee that no other data is leaking into it or out of it. That's really important for our customers, because if you think about it, we have customers today that are SAP customers running in the HANA Enterprise Cloud that are competitors to each other. You have to make sure that you can guarantee that there's not going to be any, data is going to sneak out the back door here or something is going to get in the back door over there. We have a fairly large security team at SAP. We have very stringent standards at SAP. Every time we form partnership with somebody, we say, "Here are our standards. "If you can't comply to these, "we can't do business with you as a partner." From our perspective, it's very important to know that anybody that we work with takes security as serious as we do. >> Well, certainly these guys are big partners, they're known companies, Cisco and CenturyLink. This is big. Talk about the unified, how you guys are going to help with the unified competing architecture that Cisco has. Because you guys have mastered this in the data center and you guys have a lot of experience with now the cloud. What's your vision on how this is going to play out from a Cisco standpoint? >> As Margaret described, their multi-tenancy in the SAP environment is a pillar for them, they have to make that work for the customer and that's something we've been driving at Cisco for a long time. When it comes to the computer platform, which we call UCS, we've been really the leader in converge infrastructure platforms for a long time with UCS and most recently now we're the number one platform for SAT with UCS in the converge environment. It's those attributes that have enabled us to really get inserted there to provide the customer value. >> You get the packet level of the network transformations, >> Yeah, John. >> So picked very nicely. >> You're more of a geek than I know. You're pretty good. >> Well, we follow Looking at the 5G network transformation you're seeing a lot of end-to-end architectures really winning out. I think why I'm excited about this new is essentially it's a partnership that's providing an need-to-end solution. Gary you are in the front line, you're the manager of service. Talk about the impact that you see this deal, because now you have to turn up services and have that customer touch point. >> If you look at how we're pulling together the solution. Obviously if look on the compute side we're using the UCS and on the switches there's the Cisco networking switches and then you're looking at the-- >> Nexus, Gary, Nexus. >> Nexus, all right. >> I didn't get to that. >> I wanted to make sure Frank is paying attention. (panel laughs) Then you're looking at the net app storage and the VMWare for virtualization. Then another key element we're using is Winamix, which integrates with the UCS and is pretty much integrating all the APIs for all these components. Obviously the powerful in memory HANA engine. All these things are pulled together to create a platform which we are providing to the customers, so that they can really focus on what they are good at, their business and they're delivering a powerful rally to their customers. What it does is, with the UCS and the Winamix and some of the other elements, we can onboard customers within this. What used to take us 32, 33 days now we can do that within 9 to 11 days which is a big big plus when a customer approaches us. >> It's a huge shape in the business model first of all, the client delivery on your end and service is significant. There's a lot of automation involved. In fact I was talking to a venture capitalist recently here in Silicon Valley and we were talking about network transformation, digital transformation and they invest in infrastructure. He goes, "Oh no, not a lot of new companies are coming out "with an infrastructure making hardware just as the cloud." He says plumbers are turning into machinists kind of indicating that a lot of automation is happening at the lower end of the stack and the action is happening higher up in the stack to your point. Things are happening faster in terms of level of services. >> Absolutely and I think another thing which we also bring to the table is that the deep essence expartice if you look at some of the mission critical applications whether it is SVOHANA, suite on HANA the ECC or the entire BI suite enterprise portal and the list goes on right. And that becomes critical so we can get them up and running very quickly and give us all in one on to the country. >> A significant endorsement with you, make a comment? >> Am just saying when you're talking about the visibility of the SAP platform this is something the customers thought about right. Its going to get to all levels of the organization and really they're making critical business decisions off of the SAP HANA platform its got to be there. I mean and that's obviously our challenge to meet that for customers. >> Margaret, HANA Enterprise cloud is the engine and you guys are providing significant on it. How do you see this collaboration playing out for customers? What should they expect from the collaboration of Cisco and CenturyLink? >> Well what we want the customer to have is a seamless experience. We tell them upfront that we have this partnership and that we're going to work together but we really want to keep them focused on the value that they get from running their applications. Because, think about it this way, when you get in the car and you turn on the engine, you want to drive away right? You know the engine is there, you know that the engine, depending on how much horse power you've invested in, depending on what kind of make and model, you get different things from it. But you know it's going to always be there, it's always going to work. Then if you want to enhance the engine, shall we say you want to know that the right people have the skillset for those enhancements. When customers come into the HANA Enterprise Cloud, sometimes they start off with the migration. One of the things you're doing is you're kind of sunsetting all the old stuff and you're helping them move on to our HANA platforms whether is S4, whether it's Suite on HANA, whether it's our VI suite, you're helping the customer get started. But that's the start, because after that there's all this other wonderful stuff that we develop at SAP being that we're a software house, like IoT and our Leonardo that's being announced in Sapphire and we want customers to be ready to take advantage of that. We tell the customers, "You need to move away from all the "old stuff because it's not reliable any more, "we want to move you into a different level "of reliability so that you're ready "to scale up your organization. "And so that you can do more business." And in the end the customer says, "Okay, I need to know the cloud is there for me, "I don't want to have to be thinking about it everyday. "What I want to be thinking about is "how can I do new business, how can I open up offices "in other parts of the world, "how can I transact business globally?" They're not really thinking about, okay, I need more stuff. If they need to expand we call up our partners and we say, Okay the customer wants five more terabits or something, 10 more terabits of whatever, and they just want it to happen. They don't want to have really long projects, they just want it to be there for them, they want to know that they can scale out and scale up. >> One thing just to add, I think Richard mentioned, it just becomes critical that the redundancy is there. This is where the MetroDR capabilities which we bring to the table. That becomes very powerful and if you look at what we have done is, we have created 10 parts, in the US you have those in Santa Clara, Dallas, Chicago and the Dc Sterling area. Then Singapore and the London market. The MetroDr capabilities are available in all the three markets. Which is a very critical element that the customers know. >> This is, the recovery certainly is really a big deal because you can think about after effect, you've got to think about the upfront in the service. You cannot just say, "Oh I forgot that thing about DR." >> The thing is, you get into a lot more preventive maintenance because this is where there are dedicated teams which are doing nothing. Once the bill processes down you get them up and running and how do you ensure we are able to predict before anything? >> I think this news is significant, one the size of the players involved but two, it speaks to the transformation that's happening in the market place. Customers are moving to a new way to operate their business and at the end of the day you guys are making it easier to run some of the core software that can scale. But it comes down to, how do you migrate and scale without having any kind rip and replace or lift and shift. Lift and shift, I would have said is codeword for rip and replace, but customers are on an evolution journey, there is no silver bullet in the cloud in my opinion, some we've covered that with you. You're thoughts on this, do you guys see it the same way? Customers aren't just going to move tomorrow, they're going to want an evolutionary approach, but they're going to want to have a scale. >> It's a journey, oftentimes customers say to us, what's the safest thing to do first? What pieces of my environment can I take into the cloud and then gradually over time, whether it's a few months, whether it's six months increments. It depends on how the customer is running their business. Can I keep moving it in there so I can keep getting value and at some point his is all done, goes away and now I'm fully transformed into the cloud. We see some customers who can do really quick projects, they're very agile and they're very nimble and so we can migrate them in and get them going and running very quickly. We've got other customers who are more risk adverse. They want to proceed a little slowly. We can do all of the flavors, depending on what they want to do and so when we first talk to customers about the HANA enterprise cloud, we talk about the options. We talk about what they can do, we make recommendations from an SAP perspective as to what we think their speed could be and then we help them get into the cloud. Because they might get left behind if they don't make that move. >> The modernization trend is key, people want to be modern, the apps are being written differently, the more the relevance is more towards agile and speed. I think I like this announcement you've got the reliability that Cisco would move in packets around the data center rock solid, the software, core engine on Enterprise cloud and scale the manage service level that can give you the flexibility to run whatever you want. I think that's interesting, did I get that right? >> I think the other thing is, it's not like we've been working on this thing for a week, we've bene working together on this solution for years now that you've got to make it right. There's different stages along the way. >> What are some of those key stages that a customer should know about? >> We were just talking about HANA Enterprise Cloud, could you run HANA in the cloud now? No, that's faded completely, it's already done you certainly can't. Customers can make decisions now to say, "Hey am I going to start on prime, am I going to start "in the cloud?" And go though that whole kind of process of what's the best thing. We're providing that flexibility but this is something we've been working on for a while and I think, when you look at the other solutions out there of customers making the right evaluation, you want to go with a CenturyLink SAP and Cisco to say, "Hey, this is the right muscle, "the right process behind us." >> This is amazing, you guys are a great deal, again Frank, senior vice president Cisco and Gary who is the chief relationship officer and president of the Advanced Solution Group and Margaret. All the senior executives, the principals here congratulation on this news, we'll wait to see how it plays out. >> Margaret: Thank you for having us today. >> Special keep coverage of Sapphire 2017, I'm John Furrier. Back with more live coverage after this short break. (electronic music)