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.