Bernhard Schulzki, vice president of technology partner management at EMC, plays a key role in his company’s ecosystem. Wikibon co-founder and chief analyst Dave Vellante caught up with the executive at SAP Week to discuss a few of the more important issues facing organizations that leverage SAP in their environments.

Schulzki says that customers are pursuing opportunities to lower the TCO of their infrastructure and inject more flexibility into their deployments. There’s a lot of chatter about SAP’s HANA in-memory database, but migration from UNIX to x86 and application virtualization remain the most prominent two trends on the field.

Schulzki says that SAP Week gives customers an opportunity to have a meaningful discussion about their IT roadmaps. He highlights that the first thing they tend to ask is “can we actually do it?” a question that is usually followed up by inquires into the two other top priorities: change management and cost.

There are few very good reasons why CIOs are so interested in shell out big bucks on upgrades. Schulzki says that virtualization can halve infrastructure overheads, and adds that moving an app from UNIX to a modern system can increase performance by an impressive 300 percent.

The executive admits that virtualization and x86 have been around for a while, but he points out that large organizations take time to adopt new technologies. One customer he talked to yesterday was at the final stages of completing a SAP project that launched six years ago.

After briefly discussing SAP consultancy, Schulzki notes that the company’s apps are optimized are optimized to run virtualized environments. He concludes the interview by saying that custom code doesn’t make migration any more difficult because it’s a part of the application layer.  See the entire interview below: