>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE.
Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018.
Brought to you by NetApp.
>> Welcome to theCUBE.
I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend.
We're in Orlando at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018.
We're in the NetApp booth,
and we are now talking to Wolfgang Hopfes,
the Head of the SAP Business EMEIA for Fujitsu.
Wolfgang, welcome to theCUBE.
>> Thank you very much.
It's a pleasure to be here.
>> Great to meet you.
So Fujitsu and SAP have been partners,
global partners in technology in services and hosting
for over 40 years.
Fujitsu runs SAP, SAP runs Fujitsu.
You guys have about 8,000 joint customers worldwide.
We are at an enormous event.
This is not just 20-plus thousand people,
but this event location is about
16 American football fields.
>> Really? >> It's huge.
Tell us about what's new with Fujitsu and SAP.
What excites you about this longstanding partnership?
>> Number one, we are building, or we are trying to build
additional business on our strong foundation,
which has been growing over 40 years.
So we are coming from very early days,
where we were named Fujitsu
and transformed several times into that.
Nevertheless, the customer requirements
to a company like us are kind of
stay the same and stable.
Also, everybody's evolving.
So what we are trying to do is,
we are trying to accompany our customers
in a way where
their customer requirements transform
quicker than they are able to react,
where all the technology is filling in
quicker than we can expect, software technologies,
artificial intelligence, and we try to be a company
that helps the customer managing
all these complexities in a really powerful IT world.
>> So, let's talk about that from a practical sense.
Fujitsu, if the average would think,
"Oh, Fujitsu, servers; NetApp, storage;
"SAP, software; we understand your relationship."
But the relationship is much more complex than that.
Fujitsu not only provides the physical infrastructure,
but you guys offer services as well.
>> What are some of the services that you offer?
How does that feed back to the infrastructure?
>> So general, and this is really something that
at the moment we are trying to fundamentally change,
because we are coming this is based on history
from a strong technology foundation, yeah?
Over the time, we added some system integration
and consulting capabilities and skills across Europe,
and this is what we are trying to change at the moment.
So we tried to make out of at least
two to three distinct business areas.
We tried to glue them together
and start thinking from a customer perspective.
So because the customer no longer buys technology,
the customer buys the functionality.
And look maybe 20 years back.
Maybe it's a little bit longer, but when I was young,
when I bought my car, I bought a car,
and then I started to integrate different things:
a stereo, speaker systems, whatsoever kind of fancy things.
And you did it by your own.
Today, you order a car in a completely different way.
You have a configuration tool
at your manufacturer of choice, and you say,
"I wanna have leather seats, seat heater,
"whatsoever kind of things," and then you click,
and you get the car which is perfectly designed
for you in a different way of standards.
And this is exactly my vision of
what I wanna achieve in the IT world.
So I wanna make the complexity and the technology consumable
for the business units and not for IT guys.
So that means that we glue together
our services capabilities, our technology capabilities,
to provide the customer an SAP system for his future needs.
That will include all these fancy stuff,
like artificial intelligence, blockchain, analytics,
big data, all these kind of things are coming together.
And we heard an announcement today from SAP,
the HANA database management suite, which is,
my understanding so far, kind of an umbrella kind of thing
gluing different functional building blocks together.
And you need more integrating, technology integration,
application integration, capabilities in your company,
to make your customers landscape-run,
and this is what we are trying to achieve.
>> So there's two similar, I think,
adjacencies to your example.
The first, you know, when I got my first car
a little bit ago, five years ago
I just got my license five years ago.
You know, I'm so young.
I'd have those challenges.
I'd buy a stereo or I'll buy a after-market something
to improve or customize my car.
However, when it was time to upgrade or do maintenance,
I'd take it into the shop, and they'll look at this thing
and say, "Oh, it's not standard.
"We can't fix it,
"because you've modified it in a way that breaks it."
One of the challenges with SAP is that customers
in the past modified the solution to fit their needs.
One of the challenges with SAP and infrastructure in general
is that it's very bespoke, and I've designed
a server, storage, and compute model
that was very bespoke to my business.
Talk about how Fujitsu is helping customers,
through the relationship with SAP,
deal with this modernization of their datasets.
>> So there are a couple
of different aspects in the whole thing.
The first one is, so when we're talking about
NetApp and Fujitsu, so,
the two companies sat together maybe a year ago,
maybe a little bit longer, and came up with the concept
that is called NFLEX, which is an integrated system
that reduces already this complexity, because it glues
the compute and the storage power together.
Also, some networking kind of things.
And this gives the customer already a ready-to-run platform
just from a technical point of view.
So if you use this building block and find different
and we are working on that
on the application side, different building blocks
And we're really we can deliver the whole stack that is,
the foundation is built on Fujitsu
and NetApp compute and storage power.
So we are combining the different technology worlds with the
special needs for our customers.
This is what we are doing.
>> So along those lines, I just read that Fujitsu
was named the Competitive IT Strategy Company for 2018.
So I'm curious, what is it that
Fujitsu is driving towards in 2018
to deliver this competitive IT strategy,
like what you just talked about.
How does that give you a competitive edge?
>> Yeah.
So first of all, we have
and this is based in our headquarters in Japan.
We have really a lot of things to talk about
when it comes to artificial intelligence,
deep learning, blockchain and big data.
So the company is investing heavily in these things.
And this is what we are trying to tie together,
because this gives us a uniqueness in the market.
These are elements that everybody needs
for the digital transformation.
And today, you often hear some sentence like,
"It's running on a platform."
"It's running on a SAP platform."
The reality is that about 90%
of today's S/4HANA customers are still running on premise.
So we see a move into cloud environments.
We see a move into hybrid or multi-cloud
engagements in customers, and this is exactly
When we just look onto the application
or this digital side of the business,
we forget that the customer has a business
and a technology foundation, too.
And this is where we are taking care of.
And this gives us this advantage
where we think this is needed from the customer.
>> So, talking about customer experiences,
customer relationships,
what are some of the key considerations
as customers look at Fujitsu?
I will call this infrastructure is Fujitsu's wheelhouse.
>> Yeah.
>> What are some of the key differentiators
customers need to look at as they examine
potential infrastructure solutions?
>> You need to differentiate
and this brings me back to my car comparison.
If you wanna have just building blocks,
and it's the customer's responsibility to,
number one, get them to run,
and number two, operate them over a certain
period of time with a service level.
So within Fujitsu, we are prepackaging
and we are taking care of the customer.
So, first of all, we are not delivering components.
We are delivering an up-and-running platform.
And secondly, we are taking the risk away from the customer.
So that means we give service levels,
we give maintenance, we offer managed services so that
the customer can really focus on their business
instead of wasting energy on his IT systems,
because this is what we are good at,
and this is what we are offering to the customer.
So this is a really big difference.
We are providing a ready-to-run system,
and we are taking care on the maintenance,
regardless of what components are in the system.
So we are also taking care, if we put on NetApp storage
and the Fujitsu server together,
Fujitsu is taking care on the maintenance issues.
Whenever something may go wrong with the system,
it's one face to the customer.
And this give us a very strong position.
>> So for that managing servers, how deep does that stack go?
I mean, one of the appeals to customers
when it comes to cloud is that,
you know what, all the way, to some cases,
BASIS is handled by someone else.
I'm just laying my application.
I'm installing my application.
I'm making the modifications that SAP kind of says,
"These are the guardrails we'll make."
And from every other system, you can count
on consistently from SAP platform the SAP platform.
How far does Fujitsu go in managing service for SAP?
>> So we are offering many services,
starting technology foundation, starting going
into SAP BASIS, going into the complete application.
So we are offering the complete stack
also on the managed services side.
The customer can start with an easy,
just managing his hardware, managing
his platform, managing his whole system.
So the whole landscape can be under contract of Fujitsu.
And it's just a consumption model for the customer.
Risk-free, that's all what he needs to take care of.
So we are really taking based on customer
needs, requirements, and desires, we are taking the risk
on the Fujitsu side that the customer has
an up-and-running SAP landscape.
>> So one of the big challenges that enterprises face
when it comes to SAP in general
and it's not just SAP, it's all big enterprise apps.
On the stage floor, Bill McDermott said this morning
and I was taken aback, I don't know if this is,
in my experience, it hasn't been quite the experience
that he had a customer from discussion to implementation
to all business processes, six weeks to implement S/4.
That was a bit of a dream.
>> Absolutely.
>> Not typical of the experience, but even,
let's say, a lot less complex than
just raising a developing environment, where customers just
want to experiment, they wanna fail fast,
they wanna take a copy of production,
put it into development,
create an application, see if it works.
How does Fujitsu help speed agility of customers
who just simply wanna get up
a faster-running development environment?
>> So, in this case, we'd definitely recommend.
So these are use cases where we would recommend
going into a cloud-like environment.
So, easy.
In an Amazon or other world, you get
one-terabyte HANA system within 24 hours later.
So you just need a credit card; that's all you need.
The interesting part starts when
you exactly go through this exercise,
and did your experience, and then you wanna
take whatever you experienced back
into your production system, because then,
the complexity for the customer starts.
Because what you get in these
hyperscaler clouds isn't platform.
But you're not getting service to get your results
back onto your production system.
And this is where are taking care on.
So we are going beyond this "just a platform"
or "just a device" or "just a server,"
because the agility to get a platform is not necessary.
You can have this everywhere.
The luxury to get your results, your data,
back and forth from your production system,
make a copy, move them, transform them into an Amazon
and back again, after you've made your four-weeks
development cycle, that's something
where the value for our customer is in.
So sometimes, it's not only about the speed
and the time and the agility.
Sometimes it's about the completeness of getting
the whole thing back again so that you can use your results,
use your experience that you made over this short period
of time, and bring it into your production system.
That's a key message.
>> Yeah, well I'm glad you answered
I think that's legitimately how customers look at it.
The cloud is for a short burst,
I need to get it up and ready and quick.
Steady state, SAP HANA, SAP in the cloud,
and especially hyperscaler specifically,
probably doesn't make any sense
because those are known steady workloads
that are probably best suited for the private data center.
>> Not only that, so it's about the stability.
So my experiences in talking to customers
and I know at least two, and both are in the Middle East.
Two customers who decided to go out of the cloud again
because of, it does not make sense for them.
So cloud is especially for this use case,
try something, start something, four weeks,
collapse it and do something else again.
The important part is,
normally customers wanna be sure of where their data is.
This is a big issue at these times,
especially GDPR, especially in Europe.
So I've seen customers asking me somewhere in Russia
or the Middle East, "Can you ensure that my data
"is stored in Western Europe?
"Or, even better, in Germany?"
So, yes we can, with our concept.
And most of these customers are likely to wanna have control
over their production systems.
So the core, where the customers' data are located,
they wanna have this
somewhere where they can go and feel and touch it.
So this is important for them.
Everything else can be in the cloud.
So that means two-third of today's SAP landscapes
have the ability to be moved in a cloud.
But the stable core, which is S/4HANA core business,
should be somewhere where the customer can get
feel it again.
>> Get their hands on it.
Wolfgang, thanks so much for stopping by
and sharing with us what's new with Fujitsu
and SAP, and we appreciate your time.
>> Thank you very much.
>> We wanna thank you for watching theCUBE.
Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend
from Orlando at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018.
Thanks for watching.