Rajiv Thomas, a Sales Consulting System Engineer at Cisco, gave an interview to Wikibon’s Dave Vellante during the SAP Week gathering at EMC’s EBC in Hopkinton, MA.

Vellante starts by noting that Cisco, a dominant player in the networking market, is one of EMC’s biggest partners. The vendor is a major backer of VCE, a joint venture that sells cloud-in-a-box modules, and the two are collaborating in number of other areas as well. Servicing SAP users is one of them.

Thomas says that the traditional performance-driven systems that have served enterprises for the past 30 years are being replaced by flat distributed architectures. Compute is still a top priority with this new approach, but other factors, such as the ratio between power consumption and cooling, have become equally important.

Thomas acknowledges that many enterprise apps are optimized for mainframes, but he highlights that modern mission-critical apps are developed with distributed environments in mind. He lists the SAP HANA in-memory database as one such application.

The executive says that SAP is taking a hybrid approach to the cloud: it has a broad portfolio of hosted services, but on-premise software remains the primary focus. Demand for cloud solutions such as Salesforce is rising, he admits, but many organizations are looking to replicate third party services in their private cloud environments.

Later in the interview Vellante brings up the topic of scale-out commodity infrastructure, and notes the diminishing role of disk storage. Thomas enthusiastically provides his take on the matter:

“In the past we lived in a world where compute is driving all the innovation in the market. Today we’re seeing that memory is driving innovation, why is that? Everybody cares about the quality of data, the quality of data in real-time. And because of that we can no longer rely on the slowest component [disk storage], we can’t rely on that slowest truck in the military convoy; everybody has to move in the same speed. As a matter of fact everybody has to accelerate ten times faster than ever before.”

For the full interview, including Thomas’ take on metadata, check out the video below.