EMC Acquires Virtustream, the leader in cloud for mission critical apps like SAP HANA

EMC has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Virtustream!

This will dramaticaly improve the value of the EMC Federation in the SAP space, and will further simplify the deployment of SAP Workloads, including SAP HANA, for all those organizations looking for an Hybrid Cloud environment, that has the flexibility to adapt to each company's specific constraints in terms of Risk, Compliance, Technical and Financial conditions.

This is a BiiiG topic for SAP customers around the world and for service providers as well, and for that, let me spend some time to share my own personal perspective on why this matters to you.

The news came out yesterday, and you can read more about it, or subscribe to listen to the recording of the press conference at: http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2015/20150526-01.htm

Virtustream, being already quite known in the U.S. and in particular in the SAP World for providing Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, for enterprise, mission critical, high workload applications, isn't yet a familiar name in many other parts of the world.

To better understand Virtustream's current capabilities, have a look at the following charts from some of the Market Analysts:

Forrester classified Virtustream as the clear leader in "Hosted Private Cloud Solutions", and Gartner recognizes Virtustream's leadership as a niche player. Now with the EMC Federation on its back, Virtustream's (and the EMC Federation) position in Gartner's analysis, will only improve.

The relevance of the names already in Virtustream customer list also confirm their strength: http://www.virtustream.com/customers/list

So, let me share some words to explain my own personal perspective on what is the value for SAP Customers, from having Virtustream joining the EMC Federation as an independent company.

          What kind of applications (workload profiles) Virtustream specializes on ?

First of all, it's important to understand what kind of SAP Workloads Virtustream has been hosting.

So, let's imagine that you have two applications in your datacenter: one to support your "order to cash" process, including billing and accounts receivable, and another to do career planning and performance appraisal for your employees.

Both applications are important, but the impact of instability or even unavailability of these two applications on the ability for your company to keep operating, are significantly different.

If you loose your career planning and employee performance management system for a couple of days, your company will not stop to operate and generate revenues (and some employees may even be happy about it), while if you loose your "order to cash" system, money stops coming in and your company will go into serious trouble.

This is why, most companies can easily buy into the idea of running the "career planning and performance management" system in a public cloud environment (where they have NO span of control on the architecture stability and resilience), and hesitate a lot (not to say that won't even consider) to run their "order to cash" system in the cloud.

So, let's agree at this stage to call the "order to cash" system, a mission critical workload, in the sense that without it, companies loose their ability to keep operating and fulfill their goals, or even if those systems see their performance and stability decay, it will imply an important negative impact on business.

It's all a matter of risk evaluation. For organizations to consider running mission critical applications in a cloud environment, they will need to ensure a set of conditions: availability guarantee, performance guarantee, and ability to audit (and for the service provider to demonstrate) capability to operate such an environment in a stable and predictable way.

The majority of public cloud offerings do not offer such guarantees.

Well, Virtustream having been born by the hands of people coming from the SAP ecosystem, that had experience setting up and managing these mission critical systems, do fully understand the implications of hosting and operating such environments, and have build their offerings to address specifically the needs of the Global 1000 (the 1000 largest organizations in the world) in regards to cloud offerings for their most critical business systems.

Also Virtustream, understanding well the reality of these large global organizations, also understands that for some systems, those organizations - not wanting to engineer and manage them - may want to keep a significant span of control on them. Meaning, having them be operated in a "hosted, managed, private cloud environment". So, it's having the systems under their span of control (or even under their own property), but hosted and managed in a cloud model in the same way public clouds are managed, to reap all the benefits in terms of business agility, operational risk and costs that a cloud model can offer.

These companies may want as well to dynamically choose what systems run on their own private cloud, and which run on a public cloud, dynamically moving (and controlling the movement in real time) of these systems between their private cloud and the public cloud.

          What are the business benefits of the Virtustream model ?

Such a model enables them to manage risk in the sense that they decide which systems are 100% under their span of control, and which ones are not, by being able to dynamically move systems across boarders between their private cloud and the public cloud.

It enables them to manage cost, by ensuring the same efficient management model that exists in the cloud for a better utilization of their assets, while being able to leverage the public cloud for peaks in demand, avoiding the need to over provision capacity for projects, and keeping their "private systems" provisioned just for average workload needs, and so maximum utilization.

Here Virtustream is really unique as they charge by utilization, and not by allocated capacity like most cloud companies do, making them way more cost effective for that reason, and boosting the benefits for organizations from operating in a Hybrid Cloud Environment. This is a part of the Virtustream secret sauce, where they have come up for example with the concept of microVM.

It enables customers to be more agile, as Virtustream has embedded in their Cloud offering and orchestration software, way more than just provisioning of virtual servers. Coming from their SAP background, Virtustream founders have build in as well automation mechanisms for things like systems cloning and refresh (fundamental and usually labor intensive for most SAP customers), making it simpler for IT organizations to keep up with the demands from their business units.

And again, with the beauty of all of this, in having the private and public cloud resources managed through the same tool set, and both able to bring in the same benefits > complete transparency.

Don't want here to explain what is Virtustream, as you can have it explained in 5 minutes in the words of its founder and CEO "Rodney Rogers" at http://www.virtustream.com/blog/2015/05/24/virtustream-technology-overview/

          How Virtustream joining the EMC Federation, benefits SAP Customers in general ?

So, why is this so important for SAP Customers: Virtustream joining the EMC Federation as an independent company.

First of all, Virtustream has been working very closely with SAP (having SAP been one of the early investors in Virtustream) to drive cloud adoption for SAP applications, and SAP HANA in particular. There is a lot more to the collaboration between Virtustream and SAP, which you can read about at the Virtustream site and blog.

On the other side, Virtustream having started as a "Venture Capital Funded Company", would need at a certain point in time to expand their financing capabilities in order to scale and be able to keep up with the significant demand increase.

Also, to expand its reach it would need further access to the supporting technologies of their business model, and access to markets by means of a broader sales force generating demand for them.

Being today the collaboration between Virtustream and the SAP Community inside EMC already very close, being SAP one of the top strategic partners for the EMC federation of companies (EMC Information Information Infrastructure, VMware, Pivotal, VCE, RSA) and running Virtustream most of their operations on top of technologies from the EMC Federation (VCE VBlock, VMware, etc), all of this aligned to the partnering model the EMC Federation of companies fosters, I truly believe that Vistrustream was a perfect match for EMC.

So, joining the EMC Federation as an independent company will provide Virtustream the robustness of belonging to this amazing groups of companies, enabling it to accelerate their growth, expand their reach, and extend their coverage way further from their current market reach and portfolio. By being an independent company within the Federation, it will enable Virtustream "not to get dispersed or diluted" like it happens on many acquisitions in the IT world, and so keep focused on its unique business strategy. That is why it is referred on the announcement that Virtustream is now "EMC Strong".

As I meet with CIOs and their direct reports all over the world (just landing now coming from a CIO Summit in Prague), they all agree with my own experience that, what works for SAP Applications, will work for almost everything else as well. So I would say, that coming from an SAP background, it shouldn't be hard for Virtustream to expand their reach into other application areas.

With Virtustream, EMC completes its vision for an end-to-end cloud offering, from the "Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud" which aims to cover the private on-premise needs of customers, with Virtustream covering the on-premise and off-premise managed private clouds, and vCloud Air providing a completely public cloud environment (customer has no span of control on infrastructure architecture/operations), having these three working seamlessly.

In summary, for end customers: this acquisition of Virtustream by EMC, will enable you to implement an Hybrid Cloud model today, with out of the box, ready to use architectures for your private cloud, leveraging all the best practices from operating a public cloud, being able to leverage Virtustream's expertize also to manage your environment up to the SAP Basis layer, including if needed performing the projects to migrate your workloads to the cloud, all with the assurance of a robust global corporation recognized for its strength in the "mission critical world" like EMC.

          How about companies with technical and legal limitations to use U.S. based clouds?

There are 2 additional key aspects to which I'm very aware, as I do also work a lot with customers in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa, that are very important in regards to customer decisions about any "cloud plans": technical and legal limitations for cloud in these regions.

One of the key limitations of the "U.S. born and based" public cloud offerings, is that they were born to be "public cloud only" and most of the times hosted only on a very limited number of datacenters, mainly in the U.S.

Well, for a U.S. based company, or a company operating mainly in the U.S., this only represents advantages. Even for most truly global companies, this does not represent a problem.

But there is a lot more world than the U.S., and the geo-political environment in other parts of the world, associated with technical limitations like the access to cheap, stable and reliable broadband communications, makes it impossible for certain organizations to consider the possibility to host any of their business critical systems outside the borders of their countries. More, in many countries in the world, there are "data sovereignty regulations" that forbid local companies from placing their data from outside the physical borders of the countries.

There are also the cases of Global Corporations, that having operations in certain countries, are also obliged (either due to legal or technical reasons) to host their systems closer to their operations.

The consequence here is, even if the existing public could offerings based out of the U.S. were reliable enough to host "in-production" business critical applications like SAP (which most are not), due to the technical and "data sovereignty" constraints, those offerings would not be an acceptable (or even possible) alternative for many companies in the world.

One possibility would be Virtustream "managed cloud services", enabling the systems to be in the location of the customer, but being fully managed with all the cloud best practices up to the SAP Basis layer.


          EMC, Virtustream and Service Providers

But there is another perspective here, where both EMC and Virtustream share one common understanding, that they will not be able to reach to the whole world, and maybe it isn't at all a good idea to try and do it all themselves. In most cases there are already local service providers who are building their own local public cloud offerings to attend to the needs of those companies limited either by technical or regulatory limitations in regards to hosting their business critical data outside the country.

Virtustream, apart from providing their own "Infrastructure as a Service" public cloud offering in the U.S.  and Western Europe, and their "managed cloud services", also licenses their software to power Service Providers all over the world.

EMC also has a strong program to equip service providers around the world with "cloud enabled infrastructures".

So, here both companies come together to provide a comprehensive "hardware and software" solution, ready out of the box, either to power service providers or large enterprises looking to build their own private clouds.

Check here the EMC Cloud Service Provider Directory

Having Virtusteam's own IaaS offerings in a Public Cloud model, as well as their managed services targeted at those customers wanting to have a managed private cloud, together with a vast and strong network of service providers all around the world operating on the same architecture, along side with customers having their own private clouds running on this architecture as well, will truly enable IT organizations and their CIOs to become "IT service brokers" for their businesses, procuring the right IT services, being from their private cloud, a local cloud provider or a global cloud provider, according to their financial, technical and regulatory context policy (needed span of control) applicable to each application environment, knowing that they have partners in the public side ready to host and operate their most critical business applications.

          Conclusions

So, I believe these are truly amazing news for the SAP ecosystem (SAP themselves, customers, system integrators and service providers), as the acceleration of the expansion of this model all over the world, will further simplify things like migrating to SAP HANA, and reducing the operating costs of running SAP Applications (including SAP HANA) while improving the performance and agility of existing business systems.

For example, with Virtustream operating as an independent company within the EMC Federation, a Global Company will now be able to have a truly global cloud strategy, that fits its legal, technical, financial and risk model, for their most critical applications (SAP and non-SAP, as what works for SAP will most likely work for everything else), managed through the same model, using public, private, managed or hosted-managed as appropriate without getting locked-in, truly making justice to the principle of "think global, act local" within a Global Hybrid Cloud.

I would invite you also to have a look at the blog Virtustream's CEO, Rodney Rogers published at the time of this announcement with his own personal perspective.

Adding to this fact that I already have some very good friends at Virtustream, it will be truly a pleasure to bring the Virtustream value to my conversations with IT leaders all over the world.

Know more about Virtustream at: http://www.virtustream.com/

What is still missing on SAP's S/4 HANA Vision

As I'm flying to Amsterdam today, on the plane I saw myself thinking on all the meeting I had during SAPPHIRE a couple of weeks ago in Orlando. And one topic that came across in many of those meetings was: how to make HANA and S/4 become a reality in a cost effective way in my datacenter. So, let me take these two hours of flight to share a bit the raw thoughts that are coming to my mind on this topic.

There are no questions these days that the future of SAP is S/4 and that it runs on HANA.

In the words of a good friend that was already around when SAP migrated from R/2 to R/3, "it's a completely new application stack and solution set".

Also on his words, like it happened with the R/2 to R/3 migration which started in 1992, many working in the SAP world, will take some time to realize and accept that this is the way and there is no way back.

So, for all of those in the ecosystem, the word is: refresh your skills to the new era!

So, applauding the initiative from SAP in reinventing its core Business Software Stack, I still see some aspects missing from the architecture vision, that if not considered will make this transformation fall short on expectations and market potential.

Through this blog post I'll share some of the desires large organizations around the world shared with me, associated with my own interpretation of the situation, in regards to how the reengineering of the SAP Business Suite should look like, as we transition to the new S/4 HANA world.

Let me say upfront, that I agree that what I'll say is not simple to implement. Can say either whether there is someone within SAP thinking about this already as I have NO privileged information. What I can say, is that if SAP really wants to be up to the principle of "Run Simple" these aspects would be major in making it happen.

So, let first have a look at what we know at this date.

We know that SAP is redesigning its applications according the following principles:

   - simplify the data model and reduce the data footprint by eliminating data duplication within the SAP Aplications Landscape.

   - rebuild those applications for Fiori and UI5 for better user experience and productivity;

   - enable guided configuration for simpler startup through configuration wizards and "rapid deployment" easy to consume business scenarios.

All of these will make SAP Applications definitely easier to consume.

To these aspects that SAP announced we can also add other aspect we already know that come from the fact that S/4 is running on top of HANA:

   - pushing calculations down to the database layer, leveraging SAP HANA realtime capabilities to speed up processing;

   - merge OLAP and OLTP on the same platform, enabling real time operational reporting, elimination of data availability lead times and data duplication;

   - enable the processing of structured and unstructured data on the same platform, making it possible to get business insights in real time out of machine, social and other types of unstructured data.

Again, all great here!

So, what am I missing? What are some customers asking about?

I've written a lot about TCO. This is engraved in my reasoning from the days I worked on IT operations and on Management Roles, where I realized in the flesh the weight of OPEX in the agility of organizations, and their resilience to unforeseen events.

And let me reinforce the business agility and ability to react to unforeseen events, as over the last 15 years, with the increased globalization driven by global communications, not only of data, but of people and money as well, we have been going through a series of events, that the majority of the economic players were unable to predict.

Things like the burst of the .com bubble in 2000, the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on 9/11, the SubPrime crisis in 2008 due to real-estate speculation, the European Debt Crisis that we are still struggling to come out of, and that has been having a significant impact on the global economy affecting companies all over the world, and making us see banks considered references for decayed break in the U.S. and Europe.

All of this makes it that - like I read in a McKinsey Quarterly article in 2003 - the only way for companies to survive is either to shape markets or to be very agile in adapting to changing market conditions. Would even say, that in today's economic environment, being able to do both, and reinventing business models is a must to be a player in the future.

As a side note, this is definitely what companies like SAP and EMC are doing by disrupting themselves at their core to get ready for tomorrow.

Not all companies in the world are as prepared for this, and the fact that information technologies, that provide faster and better business visualization to management boards are today slow to react and adapt is a key contributor to that lack of business agility by many organizations.

It is today an absurd that having Information Technologies came to "automate the business processes of organizations", their management and change is still so manual. There is a dramatic need to change in paradigm.

So, one thing that should be included on the reinvention of hardware and software stacks for this new world of uncertainty and rapid change, should be the premise that the systems and architectures should be designed from the start to enable simple and fast change from top to bottom.

This may seem an obvious aspect, and some would argue that this is a lady being done now.

My point of view, and the one of some customers and partners I've had the privilege to discuss this with, is that SAP is still missing some important points.

Why?

One thing we will never be able to fully eliminate will be the human intervention in IT. it can definitely be reduced by increased automation, but at least for the next 10 to 15 years, there will still be a significant human intervention - at least - in two critical phases of the IT lifecycle: when you set it up, and when you need to change it and evolve it either due to obsolescence of the underlying components, or due to dramatic shifts on companies business requirements (maybe driven from change forces in the market.

And this leads to a series of principles that should be though, as a consequence of understanding the human mind.

I believe it was Jack Welch that said that a company who needs super mans to be managed is condemned to failure (forgive me if I quote the wrong author... hope not).

I would say, that an IT Landscape or architecture that need brilliant brains to design it, implement it, manage it and change/evolve it, is condemned to drag down its company's business agility.

So, how do we solve this equation?

I would add two variables: use standard and modular building blocks accross the board as much as possible.

And this goes down to the infrastructure! Some by reading this will think on what is today called the 3rd platform applications as described by IDC. No, I'm not talking about that implicitly.

What I'm thinking about is: look at what infrastructure components are today the most standard, more broadly used components in the market, and design your applications to leverage those!

This is what I though SAP had in mind when they came up with SAP HANA Scale-out architecture, now enhanced with Multi-tenant database containers and Dynamic Tiering, these last two features announced with SAP HANA SPS09.

Let me start to tie in all of these together.

When I asked to some SAP employees involved in the HANA and S/4 roadmap discussions internally at SAP how were they planning to manage the ERP redesign to HANA, the answers I got disappointed me.

Maybe... And I have to repeat... Maybe, they could not disclose anything more than that at this stage. Don't know. I might even speculated that this isn't even yet in the table of discussion today.

Well, I developed my question as what I was looking for would be any hint that SAP would take this opportunity to go deeper into the data model and application architecture redesign.

Talking about the existing SAP Applications (ERP, CRM, SRM, etc), each of these applications is composed by a number of components. SAP started splitting the development cycle of these components still in the R/3 era when they started to provide support packages in separate for HR and the rest of the R/3, back then integrated in the "APPL" component. Today we have even more: these is the Basis, ABA, BW, etc, etc, etc.

Back then the logic SAP communicated for that change would be to simplify the application evolution, since HR had a lot more fluent updates due to legal requirements than the FI/CO/MM/PP/SD/etc modules. And it evolved to keep breaking each application stack in multiple components that led later to the Business Suite running on top of the WebAS. 

Small curiosity: I was teaching SAP Basis academies for SAP when this happened, observing closely the evolution from R/3 3.1i to 4.6d where JAVA was first introduced.

Maybe I'm asking too much, but my expectation now would be for SAP ago further reduce the size of the monster (ERP is still one of the largest and most critical databases in many customer environments, the larger it is, being more expensive and difficult to manage/evolve).

So, I was "dreaming" of a split of the ERP in its fundamental components, being each component installable as a separate entity, and within a separate database.

For example: if SAP delivers as they are saying, that communication between Database Containers within the same SAP HANA Database Cluster, will be almost as fast as if they were in the same database, then it would make all the sense to split logistics, finance, HR, etc... down to all the industry verticals into a separate database container.

This would make each of this pieces "so small" according to today's standards, that it would then make it very simple for customers to install scale-out clusters, with all these applications split accross the multiple scale-out nodes. Here I'm imagining that one application would be able to call data accross containers, leveraging the massive paralel processing of the scale-out, shared nothing cluster architecture.

But, what I've been told so far is that each of the existing SAP application components will keep existing together as a single database.

And this is not good, because even with the data model simplification, and increasing number of customers will see their database sizes such, that they won't be able to use today's most commonly used infrastructure components. For example: in terms of servers, a 4 socket server that with Intel x86 Ivy-Bridge CPU can host up to 3 TB of RAM.

Do, coming from the infrastructure upwards.

The idea would be to take the assumption that whatever SAP redesigns today must aim to fit in a 4 sockets Intel server. So, for example, the ERP would be split into a number of independent modules (the smallest installable modular unit), that could then be distributed in a Multi-tenant, scale-out SAP HANA Cluster.

This would enable simpler and faste backup times for each of the components in paralel, faster restart times enabling bette Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) t a cheaper price, would enable simpler evolution, for example through the usage of the capabilities of VMware...

And by using the most commonly known infrastructure components in the market, the probability for organizations to have a ton of people inside with that skill set would be higher, making it simple to do a risk assessment when change needs to happen, and evolve faster and cheaper.

Again, thine se are the principles of what is called 3rd platform applications, where you design your application through "micro-services" each of them existing in a container, all loosely coupled and hosted on a cheap, standard, massive paralel scale-out cluster.

SAP, where are you on this journey? If you are working in this direction, I'll bet you would win more in sharing this with the community sooner, as it would build more confidence and gain further support to help you through this transition.

So, I hope that something is already happening, and I'm just not aware yet. As otherwise, SAP is missing here a massive opportunity to lay take its application stack to the next level in terms of future proof architecture.

Tying in the Data Temperature concepts, would then make sense for me as well, while we move to a world of OLAP, OLTP, structured and unstructured all in the same platform (SAP HANA), that all this application modules could be able to also consume and push data to a series of "different storage containers" based on the business value of the information.

So, it would make sense for SAP HANA to be able to access and manipulate unstructured data directly from HDFS storage, which would provide "infinite storage for lower value, higher volume" unstructured data.

Then for those slices to be able to use as well a "warm store" ( here relating to the extended store announced with Dynamic Tiering on SAP HANA SPS09), to park structured data that being important, doesn't need to be accessed by the business so often and so fast.

Would also make sense to have a 3rd store that I would call "frozen" archive, that would be read-only in nature for compliance reasons. And this could just be an export to a file in a file system, as there is a ton of technologies today in the market to take care of this.

Leaving to be stored in memory, realy the most critical data which is needed more and faster by the business.

Then coupling flexible storage, with modular application components, distributed in a cheap server farm (Intel E5 - 4 socket severs today), would realy make the core SAP Business Software be set for the future (beyond the next 15 years), while enabling organizations to have it in cheaper, simpler and faster do change infrastructure architectures.

As a conclusion:

I know that what I'm saying here is not easy, and may take SAP quite some effort to realize.

I also understand that they need to show something valuable fast, to be able to monetize the development investments and reduce the profitability impact of reinventing themselves.

So, I would accept that migrating the ERP to HANA as is might be a good first step.

What I did not like was listening from the people I talked with, that just redesigning the ERP for Fiori and HANA, while keeping the monster ( and maybe even adding some other monsters like BW, CRM, ETC) was the end arrival vision.

If this happens, if we make a paralel to More's law to the volume of data an organization will generate with HANA speed, the problems customers came to feel today due to the gigantic databases they come to build, just give it 5 to 10 years for those problems to be back again.

One final comment to cloud: public cloud will still take some years to be an option in certain parts of the world. Either due to technical, legal, confidentiality, competitive or economic restrictions. Not all the world looks like the U.S., Northern Europe or Japan. There is a lot more world contributing to SAP's revenues. So private cloud environments will still be around for quite some years, and hope SAP remembers that as they design the medium term vision.

Key take aways out of SAPPHIRE Orlando 2015

It's time to say goodbye to Orlando after SAP's SAPPHIRE event, with a week loaded of customer and partner meetings.

The technology related news were few:

   - SAP HANA productive support for scale-out on VMware is now on Controlled Availability

   - New servers based on the Intel Haswell CPU started to appear, promising increased performance per CPU core

But to be fair, and putting my self in the shoes of our customers, it was a very full week, with all the focus on:

   - what business outcomes can SAP HANA enable (S/4, Board room of the future, real time cash management, real time supply chain insight are just few of the many examples through the exhibition)

   - how the Internet of Things can impact business (integration of machine data into business decisions, HANA managing structured and unstructured data under a single pane of glass for better business insights)

But the highlight out of my meeting with customers and partners was an increased awareness and concern with:

   - understanding Data Temperatures in HANA as a way to reduce TCO when integrating massive volumes of unstructured data, and keeping infinitely the structured data generated by the organization

   - realization that implementing SAP HANA as an appliance might have been the only option in the past, and is definitely not the best, and so customers that have already been running HANA for some years, came all over wanting to understand better SAP HANA Tailored Datacenter Integration as a way to reduce TCO and enable the leveraging of existing infrastructures and operational processes for less risk, as well all things about running SAP HANA on VMware as the simplest, cheapest and fastest way to start a SAP HANA project.

So, although the majority of SAP's talking points were targeted at C-level executives, the teams of these executives also came by and they were all about "how to make it happen in the simplest, most cost effective way".

For me personally, this was a massive event! I had an agenda so loaded with customer and partner meetings, and meet so many new faces in the community alongside with an increased interest on the topics I've written the most about, made this week exhausting, but very rewarding.

I' leaving with the strong feeling I've helped many organizations move forward with their SAP HANA adoption plans, by making it simple all things related with SAP HANA Infrastructure Integration.

Topics I would have liked to hear more about and that we're almost non-existent, were:

   - preview on SAP HANA SPS10

   - evolution of the Multi-tenant database containers feature

   - evolution of the Data Tiering feature

   - what is being done to make SAP applications running on top of HANA better for scale-out scenarios

   - more insights in to what is planned in regards to "HADOOP alike" capabilities coming to HANA, for example enabling HANA to natively access and process data available on HDFS stores without need for an HADOOP cluster in the middle.

Well, the plane is coming, and I need to run, but didn't wanted to leave without leaving my first impressions "hot off the press".

It was great meeting you all (customers, partners, SAP friends, SAP Mentors, company colleagues), thanks for all the interesting discussions, or just the fun moments, and looking forward to see you all soon!