One of the most talked-about announcements at this week’s SAP Sapphire Now event is a new managed service for SAP launched by CenturyLink Inc., based on FlexPad integrated systems from Cisco System Inc. and NetApp Inc. Cisco, as a key CenturyLink partner, is pushing for SAP deployments with its Unified Computing Servers. These integrated systems and managed services revolve around deploying SAP’s Hana platform.

“We’ve been working together on this solution for years now to get it right,” said Frank Palumbo (pictured, second from the left), senior vice president at Cisco Systems.

Palumbo, Margaret Anderson (pictured, second from right), senior vice president, SAP Hana Enterprise Cloud Team, at SAP SE, and Gary Gauba (pictured, right), chief enterprise relationship officer and president of the Advance Solutions Group at CenturyLink, joined John Furrier (@furrier) (pictured, left), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live-streaming studio.

The interview took place live from SiliconANGLE’s Palo Alto, California, studio to discuss news from the SAP Sapphire Now event, which was being held this week in Orlando, Florida. The panel talked about how SAP’s new managed service provides value to enterprises, as well as how clients will experience the service. (* Disclosure below.)

Providing value to enterprises

The deal is quite unique, according to Anderson, because CenturyLink was already an SAP partner for the Hana enterprise cloud business. So when the Cisco team approached them and said, “What if we put our gear into the CenturyLink data centers and power the SAP Hana enterprise cloud?” they realized it would be a tremendous win for all parties.

“For every customer, the number one priority is digital transformation; the cloud obviously is part of that,” Gauba said.

An additional concern that customers had expressed are strategies around monetizing the data in this new connected world. In fact, is anticipated that by 2020 there will be 1.8 trillion connected objects, generating 43 zettabytes (that’s 21 zeros, if anyone is counting) of data, Gauba stated.

CenturyLink will provide a highly secure, automated and, in this case, an SAP-certified private cloud platform. This will help customers to keep a laser focus on their core business, as they will have a deep platform from which they can monetize their data and mitigate any risk in a fast and highly secure manner, Gauba pointed out.

With Cisco’s compute platform, USC, the number-one platform for SAP, Palumbo said they have been leading in converged infrastructure platforms for a long time. “It’s those attributes that have enabled us to really get inserted [in the cloud] to provide the customer value,” he stated.

Seamless experience in the cloud

From a HANA enterprise cloud perspective, the cloud will be a privately managed one where SAP makes sure that the customer’s environment is totally secure and accessible. Since many enterprises have global businesses that run 24×7, the cloud must be up and running, no matter what time of the day or night. For example, prime business time in the U.S. is the middle of the night in Asia, and vice-versa.

“What we want to have is for customers to have a seamless experience,” Anderson said about the collaboration.

She explained it as an analogy: When a driver gets into their car, they want to simply turn on the engine and drive away. The driver knows the engine is there, and depending on horsepower and its make and model, they know what kind of results they can expect from the engine. And they know they can depend on the engine, knowing it’s going to always be there and it’s always going to work when they need to drive somewhere.

That’s what the managed service will do for enterprises, Anderson explained. Those organizations can drive their core services and not worry about the engine that’s driving those services.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of SAP Sapphire Now. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for SAP Sapphire Now. Neither SAP nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE