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

Henrik Wagner, global SAP alliance lead at Virtustream, Inc., and Mike Harding, director of Architecture at EMC, joined John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about how the two companies have been cooperating to meet customer needs, how functionality is key and where the next big opportunities are expected to emerge.

Drawing customers, engagement

Wagner helped explain the SAP side of things, saying, “What we’re seeing in the community with the use-cases is we’re being pulled in in a lot of places, and 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 it, but we’re being pulled in both from the customers and from the partner community, which is pretty exciting.”

Considering the change in these customer attitudes, Wagner had a number of contributing factors in mind. “I think a combination of the software and the functionality, and the services that we’re able to offer, we can offer a better SLA, lower TCO overall, and 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 perspective, giving some insight into how it is distributing market penetration efforts and development investment. “What we’ve started to do is map out, one by one, from an application perspective, where it’s going to make sense to push some of our assets off-prem,” he said. “And then at the same time, we’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 us, it’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 engineers, one 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 point, or 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 partnership, with 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 concurred, saying, “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 ‘OK, what is this S4 thing, how real is it, how can I start building my business case around it (because there’s a lot there),’”

Harding added, “… and so that, I think, is a little exciting, it’s starting to have those conversations around as a community, here’s our ‘what’s next’ move.”

According to Wagner, “On the SAP side, I’m really excited about the innovations they’re doing around HANA, and then as for HANA from an application perspective … the innovation and courage of SAP to take that next step and drive innovation, and still balancing the risk, both from the platform perspective, and then on the application,” Wagner said. “As for HANA, that’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.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of SAP Sapphire 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE