Gardner: What is it about private cloud that made the  most  sense for SAP?

Krips: Expanding a bit on the use case, there is a specific challenge here. In  the training business,   people book their courses, and we know only on  Friday evening who is   attending the course on Monday. So we have only  a very short amount  of  time over the weekend to set up the systems. That was one of the big   challenges that we had to solve.

The  second challenge is that,  at  the same time, these systems become more  and more mission critical.   Customers are saying, "If the system isn't  available during the course,   I'm not willing to pay." Maybe the  customer will rebook the course.   Sometimes he doesn’t. That means that  if the systems aren't available,   we have an immediate revenue impact.

You  can imagine that if we   have to set up a couple of hundred, or  potentially a couple of thousand,   systems over the weekend, we need a  high degree of automation to do   that. In the past, we had homegrown scripts,    and there was a lot of copying and stuff like that going on. We were    looking into other technologies and opportunities to make life easier    for us.

A couple of challenges were that the scripts and the    automation that we had before were dependent on the specific hardware    that we used, and we can't use the same hardware for each of the    courses. We have different hardware platforms and we had to adopt all    the scripts to various hardware platforms.

When we virtualized and used virtualization technology, we could make use of linked cloning technology, which    allowed us to set up the systems much faster than the original copying    that we did.

The second thing was that by introducing the    virtualization layer, we became almost hardware independent, and that    cut the effort in constructing or doing the specific automation    significantly.

Gardner: What did you need to put in place, and how difficult was  it?

The important piece

Krips: Luckily, we already had some experience. The big thing in setting up the cloud is not getting, say, vSphere in place and the basic virtualization technology. It's the    administration and making it available in self-service or the automation    of the provisioning. That is the important piece, as most would have    guessed.

We had some experience with the Lifecycle Manager and the Lab Manager before. So we said at that time because we did this last year, we set    up a Lab Manager installation and worked with that to realize this  kind   of private cloud.

In this specific cloud, typically we have between a couple of hundred  and a couple of thousand VMs running. Overall, at SAP we're running more  than 20,000 virtual machines (VMs). And, in fact, I have about 25 private cloud  installations.

... As I mentioned, this cloud has to  work. If this goes down, it’s  not  like some kind of irrelevant test  system is down -- or test system  pool  -- and we can take up another one.  Potentially a lot of training   courses are not happening. With respect to  mission criticality, this   cloud was essential.

Gardner: We often hear similar  requirements being applied to a test and  development environment. Are some of your clouds involved  with the test  and development as well?

Krips: As I mentioned before, we have 25 private-cloud installations,   and in  fact, most of them are with development. We also have cloud    installations in the demo area. So if sales people are providing demos,    there are certain landscapes or resource pools where we are    instantiating demo systems.

SAP wants to shorten the innovation   cycles. Internally, we've  moved internally to a development  model,  where every six weeks  development provides potentially a  shippable  release. It doesn’t mean  that the release gets shipped, but  we’re  running through the whole  process of developing something,  testing it,   and validating it. There  is a demonstrable release  available every  six weeks.

In    the past, with a traditional model, if we were provisioning physical    hardware, it took us about 30 days or so to provision a development    system. Now, if you think about a development cycle of six weeks and    you’re taking about nearly the same amount of time for provisioning the    development system, you’ll see that there is a bit of a mismatch.

Moving to the private cloud and doing this in self-service, today we can provision development systems within hours.

Gardner: That’s what I hear from a number of organizations,   and it's very  impressive. When you had a choice of different   suppliers, vendors, and  professional services organizations, was there   everything that led you  specifically to VMware, and how has that  worked  out?

Krips: I can give you a fairly straightforward  answer. At the time we  started  working with private cloud and  private-cloud installations,  VMware was  the most advanced provider of  that technology, and I'd  argue that it is  still today.

Gardner: How about security and management benefits?

Very reluctant

Krips: From   our perspective, we wanted to have the advantages of cloud with   respect  to flexibility, provisioning speed, but we didn’t want to have   more  security headaches than we already had. That’s why we said,  "Let's  get  our arms first around a private cloud."

Gardner: Is there something about a standardized  approach to your cloud stack   that makes that hybrid potential, when  you’re ready to do it, when  it's  the right payload, something that  you'll be pursuing?

Krips: That’s one of our biggest problems that we're having. Clearly, if one had a standard cloud interface like a vCloud interface, and it was the industry norm, that would be extremely    helpful. The issue is that, as you can imagine, there are a couple of    workloads that we also want to test in some other well known clouds. I'm  having a bit of a headache over how to connect to multiple   clouds.

... Now, if a couple of interesting providers had a standardized   cloud interface, it would be very nice for me.

Gardner: Any thoughts about what your experience and benefits with cloud might  mean for your future vision around client devices and mobility?

Krips: Dana, the thing is pretty clear. If you look at the strategy that SAP  pursues, mobility is an integral part.   We also think that not only that  business process mobility is more   important, but what we’re also seeing,  and I mentioned that before,   with the agility and development. So for  instance, there are people who   are working every couple of months in new  teams. For us, it's very   important that we separate the user data and  the desktop from the   device. We’re definitely pushing very strongly into  the topic of desktop virtualization (VDI).

SaaS application

The    big challenge that we’re currently having is that when you’re moving   to  VDI, you take everything that’s on the user's desktop today, then   you  make out of that more or less  a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application. As you can imagine, if you’re doing that to development,    and they are doing some complex development for the user interfaces  or   stuff like that, this puts certain challenges on the latency that you can have to the data center or the processing power that you need to have in the back-end.

From    our side, we’re interested in technologies similar to that view, and    where you can check out machines and still run on a VDI client, but    leverage the administrative and provisioning advantages that you have    through the cloud provisioning for virtual desktops. So it's a pretty    interesting challenge.

We understand what kind of benefits we’re    getting from the cloud operations, as I said, the center provisioning,    application patching, improved license management, there are a lot of things that are very, very important to us and that we want to leverage.

Particularly for us, the VDI, the benefits, are very much in the kind  of   centralized provisioning. Just to give you an example, imagine how   easy  it would be if you’re doing desktop virtualization, to move from Windows 7 to Windows 8. You could basically flip a switch.

On    the other hand, we have to solve the issue that we’re not blowing the    business case, because the processing power and the storage that you    have at the end point is relatively cheap. That’s why we were so  interested in VDI technologies. That would allow us also to take care of    all of our mobile users.

But we’re confident that we can get the business case to work.

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