Jeff Frick of theCUBR recently spoke to Ganesh Radhakrishnan at the EMC World 2014 conference. Radhakrishnan is CEO and founder of Wharfedale Technologies, Inc., a firm that specializes in providing infrastructure integration. In addition to helping customers migrate and adapt to the world of cloud computing, the company also provides the training necessary to allow customers to manage the new technologies available.

When asked about the big announcement Wharfedale made at the conference, Radhakrishnan responded by talking about SAP on production HANA, designed to run on VMware. Now, with SAP HANA going into production on a virtual stack, Wharfedale’s customers can drive their VMware software capabilities, as well as areas such as disaster recovery software, and other new areas. SAP can help make EMC products, such as ViPR 2.0, more software-defined.

Radhakrishnan pointed out that even as all of this new technology is becoming available, more and more customers are welcoming the changes. However, he was surprised by who actually wanted to initially run project systems and test and develop the systems. As it turned out, the enterprise customers were all for migrating to the cloud. Normally, he would expect the mid-range customers to aggressively want to make the switch, but this time it was the enterprise customers.

According to Radhakrishnan, “A lot of customers, such as enterprise customers, are very interested in lowering their costs in their IT space. So not only virtualization helped them lower their costs but doing a hybrid cloud is going to help them even more.”

Radhakrishnan continued, “The SAP/EMC relationship is very strong. EMC, with its federated model, has implemented a fabulous thing, but at the same time there is a lot of confusion with all of the new things coming together. For our part, we basically have to keep educating our customers on the value that these new systems and technology can bring.”

The next 12 months should provide an interesting journey as Wharfedale seeks to educate its customers on all of the new technologies coming out. “Talking about the hybrid cloud, talking about software defined, is all great, but how a customer can seamlessly migrate into these platforms is something we need to educate them on,” Radhakrishnan concluded.