Henrik Wagner & Mike Harding | SAP SapphireNow 2016
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2016-05-19

01. Henrik WagnerVirtustreamvisits #theCUBE!. (00:17)
02. Mike HardingEMCvisits #theCUBE!. (00:49)
03. The Virtustream Update and Motive for the EMC Acquisition. (01:09)
04. Virtustream's Deep Expertise in the Platform. (03:50)
05. EMC's Adoption of SAPHana On-Prem and Cloud. (05:23)
06. Virtustream Cloud and Sales & Operations Planning. (07:05)
07. Reaching Out to the SAP Ecosystem. (10:12)
08. The Vibe of SapphireNow 2016 and State of SAP. (12:38)

Track List created with http://www.vinjavideo.com.
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A peek inside the SAP-EMC partnership | #SAPPHIRENOW

by Gabriel Pesek | May 192016

While EMC’s merger with Dell has been receiving massive attention in coverage of the tech worldless attention has been paid to the innovations EMC is achieving with other partnerships.

Henrik Wagnerglobal SAP alliance lead at VirtustreamInc.and Mike Hardingdirector of Architecture at EMCjoined John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris)cohosts of theCUBEfrom the SiliconANGLE Media teamto talk about how the two companies have been cooperating to meet customer needshow functionality is key and where the next big opportunities are expected to emerge.

Drawing customersengagement

Wagner helped explain the SAP side of thingssaying“What we’re seeing in the community with the use-cases is we’re being pulled in in a lot of placesand in a lot of places that a year or two ago that you wouldn’t think that they would look at an enterprise-cloud for mission-critical workloads like SAP or HANA. So not only are we out there pushing itbut we’re being pulled in both from the customers and from the partner communitywhich is pretty exciting.”

Considering the change in these customer attitudesWagner had a number of contributing factors in mind. “I think a combination of the software and the functionalityand the services that we’re able to offerwe can offer a better SLAlower TCO overalland our SAP clients are really happy. They’re moving more and more of their HANA and SAP workloads to our cloud.”

Teching the game

Harding shared the EMC perspectivegiving some insight into how it is distributing market penetration efforts and development investment. “What we’ve started to do is map outone by onefrom an application perspectivewhere it’s going to make sense to push some of our assets off-prem” he said. “And then at the same timewe’re starting to flesh out; this is now a whole level of flexibility I didn’t have in the past. … So now with the fact that we have that cloud environment available to usit’s giving us a lot more flexibility to meet our business needs.”

Harding also gave a view into how the utilities provided by HANA and other SAP tools have altered EMC’s approach to internal growth. “As we released a whole new coding solution to our sales engineersone of the things that came up early was the ability to get a little more granular in sales and operational planning” he said. “We had kind of invested in this and started to deploy it on-prem. It’s growing faster than we have capacity for right now. We’re kind of at the point where we have to make a decision: Do we invest in more infrastructure at this pointor do we start to push some of our workload out to the cloud?”

Successful teamwork

Both sides were more than happy with the results of the partnershipwith Harding stating“It’s giving EMC as a company better exposure to the SAP ecosystem. From my perspective … I’m definitely excited about the opportunity that we have.”

Wagner concurredsaying“The relationship and the doors are opening up well; it’s really been exciting. I think the next step the folks are starting to think about is ‘OKwhat is this S4 thinghow real is ithow can I start building my business case around it (because there’s a lot there)’”

Harding added“… and so thatI thinkis a little excitingit’s starting to have those conversations around as a communityhere’s our ‘what’s next’ move.”

According to Wagner“On the SAP sideI’m really excited about the innovations they’re doing around HANAand then as for HANA from an application perspective … the innovation and courage of SAP to take that next step and drive innovationand still balancing the riskboth from the platform perspectiveand then on the application” Wagner said. “As for HANAthat’s why I’m really excited to be around SAP. … I’d rather be around or work with a company that’s willing to drive and take that next step.”



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