Andy Sitison, the Global Director of Application Sales for EMC, spoke with Wikibon’s Dave Vellante during the recent SAP Week gathering at the company’s Executive Briefing Center (EBC) in Hopkinton, MA.

Sitison is the driving force behind the event. He boasts that this year’s SAP Week was the biggest to date, and the single largest conference ever hosted in the EBC, attracting representatives from 200 enterprise customers. It wasn’t always like this, he recalls: the first SAP Week he hosted over at the company’s Palo Alto offices was centered on virtualization back when the technology still qualified as an emerging trend.

Sitison tells Vellante that the event is meant to serve as a forum where customers can share their experiences and use cases with other members of the ecosystem. Presentations are not allowed, he says, because that’s not what SAP Week is about.

From EMC’s point of view, the conference is important because it gives Sitison and his colleagues an opportunity to sit down with clients and discuss new ideas. This year customers talked about the private cloud, the public cloud, and of course SAP. Some organizations are still in the planning phase, while others are already weighing the risks and benefits of the particular cloud flavor they’re going with.

Vellante brings up Amazon and asks Sitison about EMC’s approach to combating the cloud provider’s growing presence in the enterprise. The executive points to his company’s strong ecosystem, which includes dozens of cloud providers, and adds that the public cloud is not particularly cost-effective for users with multiple petabytes of data.