SiliconANGLE » SAP

Rumble in the Cloud: SAP Makes An Investment in Procurement with Ariba

Maria Deutscher — Wed, 23 May 2012 20:20:28 +0000

Business software maker SAP announced its latest multi-billion dollar deal today: the acquisition of Ariba.

SAP has agreed to pay $45 per share, a 20 percent premium over ARBA’s closing price on May 21. The merger will have to go through the regular round of regulations before becoming official, and experts believe that the transaction will finalize sometime around the end of August.

Ariba offers hosted collaboration commerce solutions for the enterprise, and maintains a network of over 730,000 suppliers. It also has an equally impressive clientele, and all in all the acquisition will most likely prove to be a much-needed big boost to SAP’s cloud lineup.

“”We don’t have the DNA in the cloud,” SAP co-Chief Executive Officer Bill McDermott said in an interview. “We’re probably the most strategic cloud player in the enterprise software industry.”

The BI giant is in fact on a race to build up a competitive cloud portfolio, and one of its biggest rivals is Oracle. Today the database kingpin made an acquisition of its own, buying social media marketer Virtue for a more modest yet still formidable sum of $300 million with a similar agenda of stepping up its act and better compete against the likes of SAP and Thismoment. The latter sells a platform that brings together services similar to what Ariba and Virtue are offering under one pane of glass.

This is not the first time that Larry Ellison’s IT behemoth decided to counter its German competitor. Shortly after SAP bought SuccessFactors for over $3 billion, a deal that went through only in February, Oracle signed an agreement to pay $46 per share for Taleo, a firm that also provides cloud-based human resource management software.

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In the same vein:

How In-Memory and Flash Compare to Relational Databases and Legacy Storage

Alex Williams — Tue, 22 May 2012 00:40:34 +0000

Last week at SapphireNow I had a great chat with Lloyd Palfrey, a senor technical architect with Bluefin Solutions, one of the leading SAP services firms. I caught up with Lloyd at the bar (where the talk gets better as the night goes on) and had one of those conversations that gives a whole different perspective about the impact of data and what it means for the market.

The conversation centered on HANA and then turned to how the in-memory technology affects the storage market. The inverse is also true. The new Flash storage technologies are having an impact on the database market. And data is what makes the difference in it all.

Disruption

It’s a context to consider as EMC World starts this week. Storage vendor EMC is as disrupted by Flash as relational database vendors are disrupted by NOSQL and in-memory technologies. As a note, EMC and VMware have a partnership with SAP to integrate HANA. Another example to show it is not always as black and white as it appears.

To be fair, EMC and Oracle are making their own progress, with EMC maintaining it has a flash first strategy. Last month they announced the acquisition of xtremIO, a pure Flash array company out of Israel. This week at EMC World, Flash is at the center of the conversation. At Oracle OpenWorld, the company announced a NOSQL database.

Making the Comparison

The impact on traditional storage is the same as why relational databases have less relevance. Data is ubiquitous and flows at such velocity that it requires new methods to make the data readily accessible. NoSQL, for example, has the capability to do huge read/write workloads. Relational databases do not.

Hard-disk storage has a similar legacy issue as compared to relational databases. Hard-disk storage is limited by the mechanical disk, which can only move so fast. As with legacy databases, the hard drives do not handle large data volumes very well. The restricted I/O for a hard drive causes bottlenecks. As a result, IT administrators will add more big storage systems that require lots of space and more people to manage.

Data also serves as the basis for the comparisons between in-memory and Flash technologies. Both tecbnologies are well-suited to handle large data volumes. They are symbiotic technologies in many ways, comparable to the integrated environments of relational databases and traditional storage.

SAP Mentor Sina Moatamed has a blog post that provides a strong analysis of the need for new Flash storage that fits with in-memory technology. He is more forceful than I am in his declaration that “SAP Has Declared War on the Hard Drive Industry.” But his argument is a strong one.

Moatemed goes through the basics about HANA: How it works as a database that resides in-memory with a columnar architecture. How the read/write activity occurs in memory and writes to a traditional hard drive database. The hard drive database is needed for system restarts so it can load the database back into memory.

Do You Need a Data Warehouse and All That Goes With It?

During our conversation, Palfrey and I discussed how the data warehouse serves as an inflection point for consolidating the data center. The perspective parallels what Moatemed says in his post.

You won’t need a separate data warehouse to do your analytics. It will all happen in-memory. That in itself will cut in half the amount of infrastructure required with a traditional model.

Now take into consideration what comes with Flash. With a 100-terabyte HANA environment, you might need 5 racks for hard disk storage. But with Flash, the numbers drop precipitously:

In one single rack of equipment you could have the computing power to run the largest enterprise business systems. With a footprint this small, cloud providers can now operate greener, and more efficiently scale their infrastructures. This also means the age of the on-premise SaaS appliance has just become a reality.

There you have it. Flash storage is symbiotic with in-memory technology. You consume less space with flsh and the differences in velocity makes hard drives seem antiquated. As Moatemed says, it’s time to put that old hard drive in that dusty old bin with all that other old hardware that once seemed to so represent the next generation of technology.

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In the same vein:

Exploring SAP’s Mobile Strategy at SAPphire 2012 [Video]

Josette Rigsby — Sun, 20 May 2012 16:35:51 +0000

The Cube’s John Furrier, Founder, Silicon Angle and Dave Vellante, Co-founder, Wikibon, interviewed Thorsten Stephan, VP Mobile Applications Unit, SAP at this year’s SAP Sapphire Now in Orlando, FL about SAP’s mobile strategy (see full video below). SAP is clearly making a large effort to rebrand itself as a company that offers technology solutions everywhere, and mobile is a core component of that transition. According to Stephan, SAP wants to provide customers best of class, highly user-centric mobile applications. The company has already created a robust core mobile platform, and is now focusing on creating and shipping applications.

Vellante questioned Stephan, who has been with SAP for 15 years, about when SAP first realized it was important to embrace mobile technology. Although Stephan didn’t provide a concrete time frame, he explained SAP has had specialized mobile offerings for many years. However, a few years ago, after observing the impact of the iPhone, iPad and other smart mobile devices, SAP recognized that the consumption of data and applications was fundamentally changing, and they needed to change as well. SAP wanted to ensure their applications were available everywhere users worked. Stephan continued, “It was a natural next thing to do.”

According to Stephan the utility, manufacturing and petroleum industries could significantly benefit from mobile adoption. However, SAP has not focused on creating mobile offerings for specific sectors. SAP has included a few industry customizations, but the company has primarily designed its mobile solutions to work across industries. Stephan explained that SAP’s strategy to support verticals is really about empowering its partners. Stephan described SAP’s mobile products as very flexible, which allows the company’s partners to enhance the applications to meet specific industry requirements.

Growing the SAP Mobile Ecosystem

SAP is making a significant investment in its partner ecosystem. The company encourages partners to participate in trade shows, offers certification and provides recognition to partners. Furrier asked how SAP planned to attract non-SAP developers to its platform – something critical for SAP to gain true traction in the mobile space. Stephan said that SAP is adopting open industry standards like OData. SAP has also partnered with other companies to provide services on top of their platform to make it easier to use for mobile developers. Stephan said where ever developers can extend the native processes SAP supports to mobile, it adds value. Although SAP has new partnerships focused on mobile development, Stephan did not provide a concrete time frame for when he sees adoption of SAP’s mobile platform really gaining momentum.

In addition to SAP’s efforts to attract developer interest, they also have to provide guidance and address customer concerns about moving to mobile. Stephan said that businesses are concerned about how they will support the wide variety of devices employees are requesting and the security impacts of allowing employee owned devices to connect to their network. SAP has solutions to address security concerns, and Stephan advised that cautious organizations should start by adding mobile support in a single area where the technology is a natural fit like travel expense management.

The Cube concluded the interview by asking what’s the future of mobile. Stephan predicts that the future is convergence. The distinctions between consumer and enterprise technology will continue to erode. That sounds like a pretty good prediction to us.

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In the same vein:

Day Three Recap: SAP Sapphire 2012

Josette Rigsby — Thu, 17 May 2012 21:50:44 +0000

The Cube’s coverage of SAP’s annual Sapphire Now 2012 in Orlando, FL continued on day three of the conference. This year’s event was another opportunity for SAP to promote its transition from a traditional provider of on-premise ERP solutions to a cool vendor of mobile, cloud, social and big data enterprise solutions. Although everyone might not be sold on the new identity yet, SAP has been gobbling up companies and polishing up its marketing messages with complete confidence that soon everyone will embrace the newer, shinier image.

SiliconAngle founder John Furrier, Wikibon Data Analyst Jeff Kelly and Wikibon Co-founder Dave Vellante sat down to discuss their impressions of day three in front of the camera yesterday. Kelly kicked off the discussion saying,

“I had a few things I was looking for coming to the show. One of them was to see more customers on display actually using HANA in production, and we got that. Last year was a lot of talk about vision and future benefits. This year we saw them execute to some degree.”

Kelly added that SAP seems to be embracing big data, but redefining it in terms of their customers. This means terabytes of data, mostly stored in SAP – not the Internet scale repositories that many other providers discuss.

Data was clearly a central topic at Sapphire, but the CEOs have said they don’t really want to be associated with the hype of big data, which John Furrier considers a huge mistake. Furrier continued, this year’s conference everything was centered around one major gravitational pull, HANA. SAP really wanted to make the in-memory database real. On day three, the keynotes all focused on the technology, but according to Furrier, SAP might not have spent enough time really explaining what in-memory data really means. Kelly further cautioned that SAP should be careful with its constant attention to HANA. The company could risk alienating its customer base, most of which are still heavily invested in SAP’s traditional offerings.

Although HANA was the foundation of many Sapphire presentations and discussions, SAP also spent a notable amount of time making it clear to customers they are becoming a cloud company (if they weren’t already convinced by the huge sum SAP spent on SuccessFactors in February). The company’s on-premises offerings will still exist, but the cloud will play a much larger role in SAP’s success, as will social and mobile technologies. Beyond the technology evolution, Furrier explained, that SAP realizes it needs to grow its developer ecosystem; the company is making an effort to appeal to the development community.

Unlike last year’s conference, which focused heavily on the future and the possibilities for SAP, this year’s conference balanced the messaging with real-world customers using SAP technologies in production. However, SAP’s marketing is still moving faster than its implementation teams. All of the keynotes had a laser like focus on SAP’s core message. Dave Vellante pointed out, that SAP is evolving, but has made some missteps. SAP will need to demonstrate that it can deliver on its vision into the future.

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In the same vein:

How Sybase 365 is Helping SAP Build “Very Real” Mobile Products [Video]

Josette Rigsby — Thu, 17 May 2012 19:37:59 +0000

The Cube’s Dave Vellante and big data analyst Jeff Kelly sat down with John Sims, President, Sybase 365 at the SAP Sapphire Now conference held this week in Orlando, FL (video below). Sims was appointed president of Sybase 365 almost a year ago in June 2011.

Sybase 365 provides mobile commerce services and controls a significant share of SMS infrastructure market processing 2 billion per day. SAP acquired Sybase in 2010, a move that might have been one of the first signals of SAP’s intention to expand its business from enterprise resource planning (ERP) into mobile products and services. In addition to providing SAP a foothold into mobile, Sims said, the acquisition of Sybase 365 by SAP also allowed Sybase 365 to expand its focus beyond the telecommunications and banking industries to additional, more consumer focused sectors, like utilities, retail and consumer packaged goods.

For many industry watchers, the combination of SAP and Sybase might not have seemed like a natural fit. However, now the transaction may be viewed in a bit more of a positive light. According to Sims, five years ago mobile was about providing information, but mobile has evolved into a channel for transactions and building loyalty. Mobile has become much more engaged. A huge amount of data is available with each interaction – who the customer is, what they are doing, where they are going, what they like and don’t like. Sims continued,

“with SAP, Sybase’s analytics capabilities and HANA you have a way of delivering even more value to customers from each engagement.”

When the Cube questioned Sims about SAP’s vision for these products versus the reality of what’s happening in the market, Sims affirmed that the benefits of SAP’s new offerings are very real. Sims cited Sysbase 365 customer Dutch-Bangla Bank, which provides banking services to the “un-banked” population in Bangladesh, as an example. The information the bank is able to collect from transactions allows them to better target customers for potential cross-sell opportunities. Because of the new capabilities provided by Sysbase 365 and SAP, the institution’s retail banks now have quantitative sales quotas for financial products, which has improved revenue.

However, success isn’t limited to formal banking transactions. Sims explained that although micro-transactions haven’t gained wide spread adoption in the U.S., internationally there is enormous growth in the market. In the U.S., most consumers think about smart phones, but internationally there are also enormous number of feature phones, and international businesses can’t afford not to engage large segments of their customers simply because they didn’t have the right device. Sims said,

“Companies are recognizing that their customers live in a mobile environment. What they are finding is that a smart phone app isn’t sufficient. It’s part of the solution, but the rest of these customers exist in SMS, or in some countries, USSD. So, Sybase 365 provides a solution that covers all of those channels.”

Mobile’s Contribution to Big Data

Mobile has become a significant contributor to data growth. Sensor data (e.g. location), commerce transactions and communication details produce result in gigs upon gigs of content each minute. This is definitely true within Sybase 365 where they process 2 billion messages for thousands of carriers each day. According to Sims, that’s where the company is beginning to use SAP’s much hyped in-memory database. Sim’s envisions a future where they can use HANA to add value to commerce transactions. Sybase 365 doesn’t just want to replace their customers’ credit card terminals with a mobile platform. They want to provide additional information during the transaction that could help reduce fraud, make the transaction more efficient or improve the interaction.

What’s next for Sybase 365? Sims says one of his key goals is integrating and teaching the broader SAP organization, about the capabilities Sybase 365 brings to market. According to Sims, the mobile division has been bit of a well-kept secret within SAP and even within Sybase before the acquisition, so it’s important that the entire organization understands the value Sybase 365 provides. Beyond the normal merger pains, Sims says Sybase 365 will be heavily focused on expanding into new markets with a need to better engage consumers with mobile.

How Sybase 365 is Helping SAP Build “Very Real” Mobile Products [Video] is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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In the same vein:

SAP Strives for Unified Experience, Even with Varied Underlying Systems [VIDEO]

Guest Author — Thu, 17 May 2012 15:30:58 +0000

In their ongoing coverage of SAP SAPphire at #theCube, John Furrier and Dave Vellante interviewed Dinesh Sharma, VP of SAP Cloud Marketing to discuss the company’s new directions (see full video below). Sharma explained SAP’s new emphasis on money, people and suppliers, a shift from their earlier focus on integrated application. The transition is a part of SAP’s aim to allow clients to tailor their own suites for more efficient cloud solutions.

Furrier asked about the implications of Oracle’s 6-year Fusion project for SAP platforms and Success Factors. Sharma responded: “[SAP] does not want to be religious in terms of platforms…trying to pull everybody on to one platform.” Sharma referred to Success Factors ability to grow within different technology stacks. “Even within a number of acquisitions they’ve been able to continue to successfully run them because the customer sees a unified experience…they don’t need to have the underlying platform be exactly the same.”

Having recognized different patterns in software consumption SAP will now provide more loosely coupled suites. Customers consume software at different paces and cycles within various parts of the organization. For example, corporate financial may have a much longer time cycle and some of the social areas will be on a faster cycle. Given these trends SAP will “now provide solutions along a continuum, ranging from collaboration to social.”

Social competencies will play a major role in SAP’s future solutions. “We’re thinking of social as being embedded in absolutely every application from now on…we won’t be releasing anything that doesn’t have social capabilities from the get go.”

Furrier and Vellante continued their discussion of SAP to focus on the company’s internal structure and new directions in public-private cloud solutions (see the second half of the interview here).

Vellante asked about Employee Central’s core functionality. Sharma explained that SAP invested significantly in Employee Central to make it more functional for Success Factors: “Employee Central was a Success Factors product when we acquired the company. What we’ve done is put it into kinda warp speed with the resources that we’re able to bring to bear from SAP.”

Forecasting the look of the cloud 3 to 5 years ahead, Sharma suggested it would be more of a mixture between public and private. For example, SAP solutions will allow clients to take their own installations and put them into a private cloud. Applications will not be as one-dimensional, but will give users the versatility to solve problems “at the speed of business, not at the speed of where systems potentially get in the way of business.” SAP is also working toward a new platform in java, ruby and other application environments. They predict this expansion will grow their reach to millions more people.

Vellante suggested SAP will have to be strategic in expanding its client base beyond sizable organizations stating: “Nobody thinks about writing a Facbook App on SAP, but your goal has got to be to appeal to those individuals. And, that is a major challenge for a company that has always focused on its largest customers.” Going forward, Sharma says SAP will create technology with millennial perspectives, particularly those coming out of college, in mind.

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In the same vein:

SAP Technology Adoption in the “7th Inning Stretch” says NetApp VP

Guest Author — Thu, 17 May 2012 13:45:40 +0000

As part of their continuing SAP SAPphire 2012 coverage at #theCube, John Furrier and Dave Vellante spoke with Thomas Stanley, former baseball player turned tech Global Alliance VP for NetApp (see full interview below). Vellante noted that SAP SAPphire messaging had changed since last year, now focusing more on “speed, simplicity, personalization [and] mobility.”

Using the baseball analogy, Stanley explained in terms of new technology adoption and SAP, “we are definitely in the 7th inning stretch.” Now the products are on the marketplace and the important questions according to Stanley are: “How does the ecosystem come together?…What are [the] workloads [and] customer requirements?…Are we able to fulfill them?”

SAP provides major workloads to NetApp and Stanley explained the company’s go-to-market for SAP meant maintaining their status as leaders in innovation and data solutions.

Stanley also discussed what Vellante considered the “land grab for FlexPod.” Net App has had significant growth in FlexPod architecture and clients appreciate the enhanced innovation and R&D. For NetApp, Flex Pod helps provide the architecture that allows its clients to realize their main goals of reducing time to market, cost and risk. The value Net App brings suggests there should be no premium attached to FlexPod architecture. Vellante predicts that, in the future, most of the market will converge and open architecture will be the largest segment.

NetApp plans to continue integration with SAP, a big drive of workload, to bring significant value to the marketplace. Stanley suggests: “It’s not just what our people do with our software…it’s what do we do with our software connected to the applications that SAP is bringing to the market…our job is to be number 1 in that.”

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In the same vein:

SAP CIO Oliver Bussmann: Real Time Analytics Will Change Everything

Matt Weinberger — Thu, 17 May 2012 02:07:33 +0000

SAP CIO Oliver Bussman stopped by The Cube (see full video below) at SAP SAPphire 2012 this week to talk about our own John Furrier and David Vellante about his life as a social media maven and how his internal IT staff becomes the taste-tester when it comes time for SAP to eat its own dog food.

The conversation kicked off with a discussion of how Bussmann was recently named the most socially-active CIO out there, ahead of his counterparts at Google and IBM. Basically, Bussmann says that it’s just become a natural part of his day – SAP partners, peers, customers, analysts, press, all of them have their own social media presences, and it’s simply a better way to stay in touch.

The fact that he finds his own productivity and efficiency increase due to the collaborative aspects of social media makes him a living, breathing proof of social’s place in the enterprise, he says. Later, the conversation would turn to the value of social media to SAP at large, with Bussmann affirming the value of the feedback that user communities can bring to the table in real time.

In short, social media needs to part of any modern executive’s workflow, or else risk losing critical insight. In fact, there’s a behavior shift coming, and executives are going to expect to be kept up-to-date with social media and the associated analytics all the time, in the same way that most decision-makers are glued to their e-mail. To that end, real-time analytics need to be made easy to consume and mobile.

Another growth area for SAP is in mobile device management, Bussmann says. CIOs still have a pressing need for solutions to help bring Apple iPads and iPhones online and ready for business. Mobile device management (MDM) is a growing field, and bring-your-own-device isn’t going away in light of rising smartphone and tablet sales. Bussmann highly recommended that CIOs make the investment in mobile.

Mobile apps, Bussmann notes, are a country-specific, product-specific and user-specific issue. There are questions of infrastructure (online/offline functionalities), of device type (smartphones vs. old-school phones), and generally, customer needs and behaviors.

On a topic change, Bussmann says that big data is a big value driver in today’s IT landscape. When it comes to social, mobile, analytics, the cloud and everything else that’s been on SAP’s agenda at SAPphire this week, he has 5 percent of his budget earmarked for having it deployed on internal infrastructure. Internally, SAP is using big data to analyze the transactions of 4,000 sales reps, judging whether a deal is likely to go through based on mountains of past experiences recorded in a database and make intelligent choices around prioritization.

For the second half of 2012, Bussmann says his priority is on leveraging more of this cloud and big data technologies for SAP’s internal IT usage. That goes especially for ERP deployed on the SAP HANA in-memory database, a spotlighted product at SAP SAPhire this year. And, as employees come in to SAP with their own experiences, they’re going to be expecting a certain level of mobile readiness, and it’s up to Bussmann to get SAP there.

And, on a final note, Bussmann noted that SAP has already applied gamification principles to its SAP Mentor program, and that yes, that’s a trend that’s only going to keep growing.

For the full interview with Bussmann, check out the video below.

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In the same vein:

SAP Annnounces Free HANA Developer Images on Amazon Web Services

Alex Williams — Wed, 16 May 2012 22:19:37 +0000

Over the past week, SAP and Amazon Web Services announced a number of alliances. Earlier this week, SAP said they would sell Afaria, its mobile management software, on the AWS Marketplace. Last Friday, SAP and AWS announced that SAP customers can now deploy their SAP solutions on SAP EC2 instances in production and non-production environments for both Linux and Windows environments.

Now comes the news that developers may now set up a HANA database on Amazon Web Services at no cost. This is huge. HANA is the in-memory database that SAP is positioning to compete directly with Oracle and SAP.

It’s a major coup for the SAP Mentor community, and people like Vijay Vijayasankar, John Applebee, Jon Reed and Dennis Howlett, who have been pushing SAP for the past two years to take this kind of step.

It’s noteworthy, too, as SAP is now without question the most developer friendly enterprise technology company in the market. IBM nor Oracle nor HP can match right now the level of commitment that SAP is making to developers.

Developers who sign up are able to run their own pre-configured HANA instance to create their data analysis application. The signup page includes detailed instructions for the setup.

SAP is making three different sizes available for developers. As noted on the SAP community network site, you can use the AWS pricing calculator, which is pre-configured for 4 hours of daily usage on the smallest available size.

More information:

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In the same vein:

Bernhard Schulzki from EMC and Satinder Sethi from Cisco Talk HANA at SAPphire 2012

Kit Dotson — Wed, 16 May 2012 20:52:06 +0000

Bernhard Schulzki, Vice President of EMC Solutions Group, and Satinder Sethi, VP of Service Access & Virtualization Technology at Cisco, spoke with Dave Vellante at SAPphire 2012 about the cloud and HANA infrastructure. (See the video at the end of the article for the full interview.)

Schulzki says that the specific emphasis on solutions with SAP in partnership with Cisco involves HANA and the journey into the cloud. Especially because Cisco is one of the leading providers helping to deliver people into the cloud via broader networking and datacenters.

He also spoke about how EMC intends to use Cisco led certification for HANA in order to move forward with development. “We’re responding to customer needs,” Schulzki said. “Everybody loves HANA,” and this appears to be the direction that the customers want to move in and therefore that’s where EMC and Cisco choose to attend.

Sethi said that Cisco sees a huge need in the market for a differentiated computing architecture and that this will lead modern day infrastructure.

“It doesn’t really matter what application I’m running or what point in time,” Sethi said speaking about abstraction and architecture under the tutelage of Cisco and their technology. “Look at some of the capabilities that HANA is trying to drive such as faster response time, information available instantly…agile infrastructure that can be scaled out, repurpose at any given point of time, and being able to deliver the performance that customers are looking for.”

Dave expanded that SAP becomes part of the mission critical horizontal app infrastructures, enabling the capability of running any app at any time they want and providing the agility to shift between different applications when they need it. With the advent of cloud-technology, applications are no longer tied directly to hardware, but are abstracted across clouds being upheld by a lot of networking infrastructure coupled with storage.

Schulzki went on to speak about how EMC Solutions has brought resilience to HANA architectures through an SAP context by providing fully automated storage tiering and being able to integrate with legacy systems or migrate from older systems. He expects that working with SAP’s infrastructure agnostic systems will help with virtualization and abstraction and as a result may simplify the toolset needed to make datacenters run.

“SAP has a roadmap that we want to attach to,” he said speaking about the cloud-to-cloud, “…and it’s good stuff coming out.”

In-memory computing is a very big deal in this industry because often software decisions are made based on the hardware available at the time. Hardware is a long-term decision that needs to be maintained and upgrade for future projects and an early decision can cripple future agility and growth—however, with SAP HANA solutions and layers of abstraction the hardware underneath doesn’t matter as much to the software on top, thus enabling customers to look to companies like EMC and Cisco to resolve their on-the-ground problems and use the abstraction software layer to provide them agility.

As a result, such products will be very fruitful for companies like Cisco and EMC as they allow them to collaborate with customers to give them the best possible infrastructure without locking them into something that may restrict their ability to remain customers in the future.

Bernhard Schulzki from EMC and Satinder Sethi from Cisco Talk HANA at SAPphire 2012 is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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