Image courtesy of EMC

Terry Breen, the senior vice president of global strategic sales for EMC, attended the recently concluded SAP Week and shared his take on the cloud, HANA and a couple other topics in an interview with Wikibon chief analyst Dave Vellante.

Breen says that the event is an opportunity for EMC, VMware, SAP and VCE to sit down with customers and discuss opportunities to transform their businesses. He adds that companies are leveraging many different technologies to adopt this goal, but two in particular stand out: HANA and x86 cloud environments. Migrating to the latter from traditional UNIX environments helps organizations drive operational costs down, he notes.

Vellante asks Breen about the role of third party service provider in the SAP ecosystem. The executive says that providers make sure applications run optimally from a hardware standpoint, and give customers the choice of deploying their software in-house or in a public cloud environment. He stresses the importance of partnerships in today’s IT market: you either make friends and offer solutions rather than components, or risk falling behind.

Breen concludes the interview by addressing Amazon Web Services. Every CIO has some sort of cloud strategy, he say – it’s only a matter how far down the path their organization happens to be. He says most companies leverage a combination of traditional, private and public cloud solutions.  See Breen’s entire segment below: