(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's AWS RE:Invent 2022 Coverage. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Got a great lineup here, Itamar Ankorion SVP Technology Alliance at Qlik and Peter McDonald, vice President, cloud partnerships and business development Snowflake. We're going to talk about bringing SAP data to life, for joint Snowflake, Qlik and AWS Solution. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE Really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, great meeting you John. >> Just to get started, introduce yourselves to the audience, then going to jump into what you guys are doing together, unique relationship here, really compelling solution in cloud. Big story about applications and scale this year. Let's introduce yourselves. Peter, we'll start with you. >> Great. I'm Peter MacDonald. I am vice president of Cloud Partners and business development here at Snowflake. On the Cloud Partner side, that means I manage AWS relationship along with Microsoft and Google Cloud. What we do together in terms of complimentary products, GTM, co-selling, things like that. Importantly, working with other third parties like Qlik for joint solutions. On business development, it's negotiating custom commercial partnerships, large companies like Salesforce and Dell, smaller companies at most for our venture portfolio. >> Thanks Peter and hi John. It's great to be back here. So I'm Itamar Ankorion and I'm the senior vice president responsible for technology alliances here at Qlik. With that, own strategic alliances, including our key partners in the cloud, including Snowflake and AWS. I've been in the data and analytics enterprise software market for 20 plus years, and my main focus is product management, marketing, alliances, and business development. I joined Qlik about three and a half years ago through the acquisition of Attunity, which is now the foundation for Qlik data integration. So again, we focus in my team on creating joint solution alignment with our key partners to provide more value to our customers. >> Great to have both you guys, senior executives in the industry on theCUBE here, talking about data, obviously bringing SAP data to life is the theme of this segment, but this reinvent, it's all about the data, big data end-to-end story, a lot about data being intrinsic as the CEO says on stage around in the organizations in all aspects. Take a minute to explain what you guys are doing as from a company standpoint. Snowflake and Qlik and the solutions, why here at AWS? Peter, we'll start with you at Snowflake, what you guys do as a company, your mission, your focus. >> That was great, John. Yeah, so here at Snowflake, we focus on the data platform and until recently, data platforms required expensive on-prem hardware appliances. And despite all that expense, customers had capacity constraints, inexpensive maintenance, and had limited functionality that all impeded these organizations from reaching their goals. Snowflake is a cloud native SaaS platform, and we've become so successful because we've addressed these pain points and have other new special features. For example, securely sharing data across both the organization and the value chain without copying the data, support for new data types such as JSON and structured data, and also advance in database data governance. Snowflake integrates with complimentary AWS services and other partner products. So we can enable holistic solutions that include, for example, here, both Qlik and AWS SageMaker, and comprehend and bring those to joint customers. Our customers want to convert data into insights along with advanced analytics platforms in AI. That is how they make holistic data-driven solutions that will give them competitive advantage. With Snowflake, our approach is to focus on customer solutions that leverage data from existing systems such as SAP, wherever they are in the cloud or on-premise. And to do this, we leverage partners like Qlik native US to help customers transform their businesses. We provide customers with a premier data analytics platform as a result. Itamar, why don't you talk about Qlik a little bit and then we can dive into the specific SAP solution here and some trends >> Sounds great, Peter. So Qlik provides modern data integration and analytics software used by over 38,000 customers worldwide. Our focus is to help our customers turn data into value and help them close the gap between data all the way through insight and action. We offer click data integration and click data analytics. Click data integration helps to automate the data pipelines to deliver data to where they want to use them in real-time and make the data ready for analytics and then Qlik data analytics is a robust platform for analytics and business intelligence has been a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for over 11 years now in the market. And both of these come together into what we call Qlik Cloud, which is our SaaS based platform. So providing a more seamless way to consume all these services and accelerate time to value with customer solutions. In terms of partnerships, both Snowflake and AWS are very strategic to us here at Qlik, so we have very comprehensive investment to ensure strong joint value proposition to we can bring to our mutual customers, everything from aligning our roadmaps through optimizing and validating integrations, collaborating on best practices, packaging joint solutions like the one we'll talk about today. And with that investment, we are an elite level, top level partner with Snowflake. We fly that our technology is Snowflake-ready across the entire product set and we have hundreds of joint customers together and with AWS we've also partnered for a long time. We're here to reinvent. We've been here with the first reinvent since the inaugural one, so it kind of gives you an idea for how long we've been working with AWS. We provide very comprehensive integration with AWS data analytics services, and we have several competencies ranging from data analytics to migration and modernization. So that's our focus and again, we're excited about working with Snowflake and AWS to bring solutions together to market. >> Well, I'm looking forward to unpacking the solutions specifically, and congratulations on the continued success of both your companies. We've been following them obviously for a very long time and seeing the platform evolve beyond just SaaS and a lot more going on in cloud these days, kind of next generation emerging. You know, we're seeing a lot of macro trends that are going to be powering some of the things we're going to get into real quickly. But before we get into the solution, what are some of those power dynamics in the industry that you're seeing in trends specifically that are impacting your customers that are taking us down this road of getting more out of the data and specifically the SAP, but in general trends and dynamics. What are you hearing from your customers? Why do they care? Why are they going down this road? Peter, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, I'll go ahead and start. Thanks. Yeah, I'd say we continue to see customers being, being very eager to transform their businesses and they know they need to leverage technology and data to do so. They're also increasingly depending upon the cloud to bring that agility, that elasticity, new functionality necessary to react in real-time to every evolving customer needs. You look at what's happened over the last three years, and boy, the macro environment customers, it's all changing so fast. With our partnerships with AWS and Qlik, we've been able to bring to market innovative solutions like the one we're announcing today that spans all three companies. It provides a holistic solution and an integrated solution for our customer. >> Itamar let's get into it, you've been with theCUBE, you've seen the journey, you have your own journey, many, many years, you've seen the waves. What's going on now? I mean, what's the big wave? What's the dynamic powering this trend? >> Yeah, in a nutshell I'll call it, it's all about time. You know, it's time to value and it's about real-time data. I'll kind of talk about that a bit. So, I mean, you hear a lot about the data being the new oil, but it's definitely, we see more and more customers seeing data as their critical enabler for innovation and digital transformation. They look for ways to monetize data. They look as the data as the way in which they can innovate and bring different value to the customers. So we see customers want to use more data so to get more value from data. We definitely see them wanting to do it faster, right, than before. And we definitely see them looking for agility and automation as ways to accelerate time to value, and also reduce overall costs. I did mention real-time data, so we definitely see more and more customers, they want to be able to act and make decisions based on fresh data. So yesterday's data is just not good enough. >> John: Yeah. >> It's got to be down to the hour, down to the minutes and sometimes even lower than that. And then I think we're also seeing customers look to their core business systems where they have a lot of value, like the SAP, like mainframe and thinking, okay, our core data is there, how can we get more value from this data? So that's key things we see all the time with customers. >> Yeah, we did a big editorial segment this year on, we called data as code. Data as code is kind of a riff on infrastructure as code and you start to see data becoming proliferating into all aspects, fresh data. It's not just where you store it, it's how you share it, it's how you turn it into an application intrinsically involved in all aspects. This is the big theme this year and that's driving all the conversations here at RE:Invent. And I'm guaranteeing you, it's going to happen for another five and 10 years. It's not stopping. So I got to get into the solution, you guys mentioned SAP and you've announced the solution by Qlik, Snowflake and AWS for your customers using SAP. Can you share more about this solution? What's unique about it? Why is it important and why now? Peter, Itamar, we'll start with you first. >> Let me jump in, this is really, I'll jump because I'm excited. We're very excited about this solution and it's also a solution by the way and again, we've seen proven customer success with it. So to your point, it's ready to scale, it's starting, I think we're going to see a lot of companies doing this over the next few years. But before we jump to the solution, let me maybe take a few minutes just to clarify the need, why we're seeing, why we're seeing customers jump to do this. So customers that use SAP, they use it to manage the core of their business. So think order processing, management, finance, inventory, supply chain, and so much more. So if you're running SAP in your company, that data creates a great opportunity for you to drive innovation and modernization. So what we see customers want to do, they want to do more with their data and more means they want to take SAP with non-SAP data and use it together to drive new insights. They want to use real-time data to drive real-time analytics, which they couldn't do to date. They want to bring together descriptive with predictive analytics. So adding machine learning in AI to drive more value from the data. And naturally they want to do it faster. So find ways to iterate faster on their solutions, have freedom with the data and agility. And I think this is really where cloud data platforms like Snowflake and AWS, you know, bring that value to be able to drive that. Now to do that you need to unlock the SAP data, which is a lot of also where Qlik comes in because typical challenges these customers run into is the complexity, inherent in SAP data. Tens of thousands of tables, proprietary formats, complex data models, licensing restrictions, and more than, you have performance issues, they usually run into how do we handle the throughput, the volumes while maintaining lower latency and impact. Where do we find knowledge to really understand how to get all this done? So these are the things we've looked at when we came together to create a solution and make it unique. So when you think about its uniqueness, because we put together a lot, and I'll go through three, four key things that come together to make this unique. First is about data delivery. How do you have the SAP data delivery? So how do you get it from ECC, from HANA from S/4HANA, how do you deliver the data and the metadata and how that integration well into Snowflake. And what we've done is we've focused a lot on optimizing that process and the continuous ingestion, so the real-time ingestion of the data in a way that works really well with the Snowflake system, data cloud. Second thing is we looked at SAP data transformation, so once the data arrives at Snowflake, how do we turn it into being analytics ready? So that's where data transformation and data worth automation come in. And these are all elements of this solution. So creating derivative datasets, creating data marts, and all of that is done by again, creating an optimized integration that pushes down SQL based transformations, so they can be processed inside Snowflake, leveraging its powerful engine. And then the third element is bringing together data visualization analytics that can also take all the data now that in organizing inside Snowflake, bring other data in, bring machine learning from SageMaker, and then you go to create a seamless integration to bring analytic applications to life. So these are all things we put together in the solution. And maybe the last point is we actually took the next step with this and we created something we refer to as solution accelerators, which we're really, really keen about. Think about this as prepackaged templates for common business analytic needs like order to cash, finance, inventory. And we can either dig into that a little more later, but this gets the next level of value to the customers all built into this joint solution. >> Yeah, I want to get to the accelerators, but real quick, Peter, your reaction to the solution, what's unique about it? And obviously Snowflake, we've been seeing the progression data applications, more developers developing on top of Snowflake, data as code kind of implies developer ecosystem. This is kind of interesting. I mean, you got partnering with Qlik and AWS, it's kind of a developer-like thinking real solution. What's unique about this SAP solution that's, that's different than what customers can get anywhere else or not? >> Yeah, well listen, I think first of all, you have to start with the idea of the solution. This are three companies coming together to build a holistic solution that is all about, you know, creating a great opportunity to turn SAP data into value this is Itamar was talking about, that's really what we're talking about here and there's a lot of technology underneath it. I'll talk more about the Snowflake technology, what's involved here, and then cover some of the AWS pieces as well. But you know, we're focusing on getting that value out and accelerating time to value for our joint customers. As Itamar was saying, you know, there's a lot of complexity with the SAP data and a lot of value there. How can we manage that in a prepackaged way, bringing together best of breed solutions with proven capabilities and bringing this to market quickly for our joint customers. You know, Snowflake and AWS have been strong partners for a number of years now, and that's not only on how Snowflake runs on top of AWS, but also how we integrate with their complementary analytics and then all products. And so, you know, we want to be able to leverage those in addition to what Qlik is bringing in terms of the data transformations, bringing data out of SAP in the visualization as well. All very critical. And then we want to bring in the predictive analytics, AWS brings and what Sage brings. We'll talk about that a little bit later on. Some of the technologies that we're leveraging are some of our latest cutting edge technologies that really make things easier for both our partners and our customers. For example, Qlik leverages Snowflakes recently released Snowpark for Python functionality to push down those data transformations from clicking the Snowflake that Itamar's mentioning. And while we also leverage Snowpark for integrations with Amazon SageMaker, but there's a lot of great new technology that just makes this easy and compelling for customers. >> I think that's the big word, easy button here for what may look like a complex kind of integration, kind of turnkey, really, really compelling example of the modern era we're living in, as we always say in theCUBE. You mentioned accelerators, SAP accelerators. Can you give an example of how that works with the technology from the third party providers to deliver this business value Itamar, 'cause that was an interesting comment. What's the example? Give an example of this acceleration. >> Yes, certainly. I think this is something that really makes this truly, truly unique in the industry and again, a great opportunity for customers. So we kind talked earlier about there's a lot of things that need to be done with SP data to turn it to value. And these accelerator, as the name suggests, are designed to do just that, to kind of jumpstart the process and reduce the time and the risk involved in such project. So again, these are pre-packaged templates. We basically took a lot of knowledge, and a lot of configurations, best practices about to get things done and we put 'em together. So think about all the steps, it includes things like data extraction, so already knowing which tables, all the relevant tables that you need to get data from in the contexts of the solution you're looking for, say like order to cash, we'll get back to that one. How do you continuously deliver that data into Snowflake in an in efficient manner, handling things like data type mappings, metadata naming conventions and transformations. The data models you build all the way to data mart definitions and all the transformations that the data needs to go through moving through steps until it's fully analytics ready. And then on top of that, even adding a library of comprehensive analytic dashboards and integrations through machine learning and AI and put all of that in a way that's in pre-integrated and tested to work with Snowflake and AWS. So this is where again, you get this entire recipe that's ready. So take for example, I think I mentioned order to cash. So again, all these things I just talked about, I mean, for those who are not familiar, I mean order to cash is a critical business process for every organization. So especially if you're in retail, manufacturing, enterprise, it's a big... This is where, you know, starting with booking a sales order, following by fulfilling the order, billing the customer, then managing the accounts receivable when the customer actually pays, right? So this all process, you got sales order fulfillment and the billing impacts customer satisfaction, you got receivable payments, you know, the impact's working capital, cash liquidity. So again, as a result this order to cash process is a lifeblood for many businesses and it's critical to optimize and understand. So the solution accelerator we created specifically for order to cash takes care of understanding all these aspects and the data that needs to come with it. So everything we outline before to make the data available in Snowflake in a way that's really useful for downstream analytics, along with dashboards that are already common for that, for that use case. So again, this enables customers to gain real-time visibility into their sales orders, fulfillment, accounts receivable performance. That's what the Excel's are all about. And very similarly, we have another one for example, for finance analytics, right? So this will optimize financial data reporting, helps customers get insights into P&L, financial risk of stability or inventory analytics that helps with, you know, improve planning and inventory management, utilization, increased efficiencies, you know, so in supply chain. So again, these accelerators really help customers get a jumpstart and move faster with their solutions. >> Peter, this is the easy button we just talked about, getting things going, you know, get the ball rolling, get some acceleration. Big part of this are the three companies coming together doing this. >> Yeah, and to build on what Itamar just said that the SAP data obviously has tremendous value. Those sales orders, distribution data, financial data, bringing that into Snowflake makes it easily accessible, but also it enables it to be combined with other data too, is one of the things that Snowflake does so well. So you can get a full view of the end-to-end process and the business overall. You know, for example, I'll just take one, you know, one example that, that may not come to mind right away, but you know, looking at the impact of weather conditions on supply chain logistics is relevant and material and have interest to our customers. How do you bring those different data sets together in an easy way, bringing the data out of SAP, bringing maybe other data out of other systems through Qlik or through Snowflake, directly bringing data in from our data marketplace and bring that all together to make it work. You know, fundamentally organizational silos and the data fragmentation exist otherwise make it really difficult to drive modern analytics projects. And that in turn limits the value that our customers are getting from SAP data and these other data sets. We want to enable that and unleash. >> Yeah, time for value. This is great stuff. Itamar final question, you know, what are customers using this? What do you have? I'm sure you have customers examples already using the solution. Can you share kind of what these examples look like in the use cases and the value? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Happy to. We have customers across different, different sectors. You see manufacturing, retail, energy, oil and gas, CPG. So again, customers in those segments, typically sectors typically have SAP. So we have customers in all of them. A great example is like Siemens Energy. Siemens Energy is a global provider of gas par services. You know, over what, 28 billion, 30 billion in revenue. 90,000 employees. They operate globally in over 90 countries. So they've used SAP HANA as a core system, so it's running on premises, multiple locations around the world. And what they were looking for is a way to bring all these data together so they can innovate with it. And the thing is, Peter mentioned earlier, not just the SAP data, but also bring other data from other systems to bring it together for more value. That includes finance data, these logistics data, these customer CRM data. So they bring data from over 20 different SAP systems. Okay, with Qlik data integration, feeding that into Snowflake in under 20 minutes, 24/7, 365, you know, days a year. Okay, they get data from over 20,000 tables, you know, over million, hundreds of millions of records daily going in. So it is a great example of the type of scale, scalability, agility and speed that they can get to drive these kind of innovation. So that's a great example with Siemens. You know, another one comes to mind is a global manufacturer. Very similar scenario, but you know, they're using it for real-time executive reporting. So it's more like feasibility to the production data as well as for financial analytics. So think, think, think about everything from audit to texts to innovate financial intelligence because all the data's coming from SAP. >> It's a great time to be in the data business again. It keeps getting better and better. There's more data coming. It's not stopping, you know, it's growing so fast, it keeps coming. Every year, it's the same story, Peter. It's like, doesn't stop coming. As we wrap up here, let's just get customers some information on how to get started. I mean, obviously you're starting to see the accelerators, it's a great program there. What a great partnership between the two companies and AWS. How can customers get started to learn about the solution and take advantage of it, getting more out of their SAP data, Peter? >> Yeah, I think the first place to go to is talk to Snowflake, talk to AWS, talk to our account executives that are assigned to your account. Reach out to them and they will be able to educate you on the solution. We have packages up very nicely and can be deployed very, very quickly. >> Well gentlemen, thank you so much for coming on. Appreciate the conversation. Great overview of the partnership between, you know, Snowflake and Qlik and AWS on a joint solution. You know, getting more out of the SAP data. It's really kind of a key, key solution, bringing SAP data to life. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you John. >> Okay, this is theCUBE coverage here at RE:Invent 2022. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> You got it, it's theCUBE. We are in Vegas. This is the Cube's live coverage day one of the full event coverage of AWS reInvent '22 from the Venetian Expo Center. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We love being in Vegas, Dave. >> Well, you know, this is where Super Cloud sort of was born. >> It is. >> Last year, just about a year ago. Steve Mullaney, CEO of of Aviatrix, you know, kind of helped us think it through. And we got some fun stories around. It's happening, but... >> It is happening. We're going to be talking about Super Cloud guys. >> I guess I just did the intro, Steve Mullaney >> You did my intro, don't do it again. >> Sorry I stole that from you, yeah. >> Steve Mullaney, joined just once again, one of our alumni. Steve, great to have you back on the program. >> Thanks for having me back. >> Dave: It's happening. >> It is happening. >> Dave: We talked about a year ago. Net Studio was right there. >> That was two years. Was that year ago, that was a year ago. >> Dave: It was last year. >> Yeah, I leaned over >> What's happening? >> so it's happening. It's happening. You know what, the thing I noticed what's happening now is the maturity of the cloud, right? So, if you think about this whole journey to cloud that has been, what, AWS 12 years. But really over the last few years is when enterprises have really kind of joined that journey. And three or four years ago, and this is why I came out of retirement and went to Aviatrix, was they all said, okay, now we're going to do cloud. You fast forward now three, four years from now, all of a sudden those five-year plans of evacuating the data center, they got one year left, two year left, and they're going, oh crap, we don't have five years anymore. We're, now the maturity's starting to say, we're starting to put more apps into the cloud. We're starting to put business critical apps like SAP into the cloud. This is not just like the low-hanging fruit anymore. So what's happening now is the business criticality, the scale, the maturity. And they're all now starting to hit a lot of limits that have been put into the CSPs that you never used to hit when you didn't have business critical and you didn't have that scale. They were always there. The rocks were always there. Just it was, you never hit 'em. People are starting to hit 'em now. So what's happening now is people are realizing, and I'm going to jump the gun, you asked me for my bumper sticker. The bumper sticker for Aviatrix is, "Good enough is no longer good enough." Now it's funny, it came in a keynote today, but what we see from our customers is it's time to upgrade the native constructs of networking and network security to be enterprise-grade now. It's no longer good enough to just use the native constructs because of a lack of visibility, the lack of controls, the lack of troubleshooting capabilities, all these things. "I now need enterprise grade networking." >> Let me ask you a question 'cause you got a good historical perspective on the industry. When you think about when Maritz was running VMWare. He was like any app, he said basically we're building a software mainframe. And they kind of did that, right? But then they, you know, hit the issue with scale, right? And they can't replicate the cloud. Are there things that we can draw from that experience and apply that to the cloud? What's the same, what's different? >> Oh yeah. So, 1992, do you remember what happened in 1992? I do this, weird German software company called SAP >> Yeah, R3. announced a release as R/3. Which was their first three-tier client-server application of SAP. Before that it ran on mainframes, TCP/IP. Remember that Protocol War? Guess what happened post-1992, everybody goes up like this. Infrastructure completely changes. Cisco, EMC, you name it, builds out these PCE client-server architectures. The WAN changes, MPLS, the campus, everything's home running back to that data center running SAP. That was the last 30 years ago. Great transformation of SAP. They've did it again. It's called S/4Hana. And now it's running and people are switching to S/4Hana and they're moving to the cloud. It's just starting. And that is going to alter how you build infrastructure. And so when you have that, being able to troubleshoot in hours versus minutes is a big deal. This is business critical, millions of dollars. This is not fun and games. So again, back to my, what was good enough for the last three or four years for enterprises no longer good enough, now I'm running business critical apps like SAP, and it's going to completely change infrastructure. That's happening in the cloud right now. And that's obviously a significant seismic shift, but what are some of the barriers that customers have been able to eliminate in order to get there? Or is it just good enough isn't good enough anymore? >> Barriers in terms of, well, I mean >> Lisa: The adoption. Yeah well, I mean, I think it's all the things that they go to cloud is, you know, the complexity, really, it's the agility, right? So the barrier that they have to get over is how do I keep the developer happy because the developer went to the cloud in the first place, why? Swipe the credit card because IT wasn't doing their job, 'cause every time I asked them for something, they said no. So I went around 'em. We need that. That's what they have to overcome in the move to the cloud. That is the obstacle is how do I deliver that visibility, that control, the enterprise, great functionality, but yet give the developer what they want. Because the minute I stop giving them that swipe the card operational model, what do you think they're going to do? They're going to go around me again and I can't, and the enterprise can't have that. >> That's a cultural shift. >> That's the main barrier they've got to overcome. >> Let me ask you another question. Is what we think of as mission critical, the definition changing? I mean, you mentioned SAP, obviously that's mission critical for operations, but you're also seeing new applications being developed in the cloud. >> I would say anything that's, I call business critical, same thing, but it's, business critical is internal to me, like SAP, but also anything customer-facing. That's business critical to me. If that app goes down or it has a problem, I'm not collecting revenue. So, you know, back 30 years ago, we didn't have a lot of customer-facing apps, right? It really was just SAP. I mean there wasn't a heck of a lot of cust- There were customer-facing things. But you didn't have all the digitalization that we have now, like the digital economy, where that's where the real explosion has come, is you think about all the customer-facing applications. And now every enterprise is what? A technology, digital company with a customer-facing and you're trying to get closer and closer to who? The consumer. >> Yeah, self-service. >> Self-service, B2C, everybody wants to do that. Get out of the middle man. And those are business critical applications for people. >> So what's needed under the covers to make all this happen? Give us a little double click on where you guys fit. >> You need consistent architecture. Obviously not just for one cloud, but for any cloud. But even within one cloud, forget multicloud, it gets worst with multicloud. You need a consistent architecture, right? That is automated, that is as code. I can't have the human involved. These are all, this is the API generation, you've got to be able to use automation, Terraform. And all the way from the application development platform you know, through Jenkins and all other software, through CICD pipeline and Terraform, when you, when that developer says, I want infrastructure, it has to go build that infrastructure in real time. And then when it says, I don't need it anymore it's got to take it away. And you cannot have a human involved in that process. That's what's completely changed. And that's what's giving the agility. And that's kind of a cloud model, right? Use software. >> Well, okay, so isn't that what serverless does, right? >> That's part of it. Absolutely. >> But I might still want control sometimes over the runtime if I'm running those mission critical applications. Everything in enterprise is a heterogeneous thing. It's like people, people say, well there's going to, the people going to repatriate back to on-prem, they are not repatriating back to on-prem. >> We were just talking about that, I'm like- >> Steve: It's not going to happen, right? >> It's a myth, it's a myth. >> And there's things that maybe shouldn't have ever gone into the cloud, I get that. Look, do people still have mainframes? Of course. There's certain things that you just, doesn't make sense to move to the new generation. There were things, certain applications that are very static, they weren't dynamic. You know what, keeping it on-prem it's, probably makes sense. So some of those things maybe will go back, but they never should have gone. But we are not repatriating ever, you know, that's not going to happen. >> No I agree. I mean, you know, there was an interesting paper by Andreessen, >> Yeah. >> But, I mean- >> Steve: Yeah it was a little self-serving for some company that need more funding, yeah. You look at the numbers. >> Steve: Yeah. >> It tells the story. It's just not happening. >> No. And the reason is, it's that agility, right? And so that's what people, I would say that what you need to do is, and in order to get that agility, you have to have that consistency. You have to have automation, you have to get these people out of the way. You have to use software, right? So it's that you have that swipe the card operational model for the developers. They don't want to hear the word no. >> Lisa: Right. >> What do you think is going to happen with AWS? Because we heard, I don't know if you heard Selipsky's keynote this morning, but you've probably heard the hallway talk. >> Steve: I did, yeah. >> Okay. You did. So, you know, connecting the dots, you know doubling down on all the primitives, that we expected. We kind of expected more of the higher level stuff, which really didn't see much of that, a little bit. >> Steve: Yeah. So, you know, there's a whole thing about, okay, does the cloud get commoditized? Does it not? I think the secret weapon's the ecosystem, right? Because they're able to sell through with guys like you. Make great margins on that. >> Steve: Yeah, well, yeah. >> What are your thoughts though on the future of AWS? >> IAS is going to get commoditized. So this is the fallacy that a lot of the CSPs have, is they thought that they were going to commoditize enterprise. It never happens that way. What's going to happen is infrastructure as a service, the lower level, which is why you see all the CSPs talking about what? Oracle Cloud, industry cloud. >> Well, sure, absolutely, yeah. >> We got to get to the apps, we got to get to SAP, we got to get to all that, because that's not going to get commoditized, right. But all the infrastructural service where AWS is king that is going to get commoditized, absolutely. >> Okay, so, but historically, you know Cisco's still got 60% plus gross margins. EMC always had good margin. How pure is the lone survivor in Flash? They got 70% gross margins. So infrastructure actually has always been a pretty good business. >> Yeah that's true. But it's a hell of a lot easier, particularly with people like Aviatrix and others that are building these common architectural things that create simplicity and abstract the way the complexities of underneath such that we allow your network to run an AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, whatever, exactly the same. So it makes it a hell of a lot easier >> Dave: Super cloud. >> to go move. >> But I want to tap your brain because you have a good perspective of this because servers used to be a great margin business too on-prem and now it's not. It's a low margin business 'cause all the margin went to Intel. >> Yeah. But the cloud guys, you know, AWS in particular, makes a ton of dough on servers, so, or compute. So it's going to be interesting to see over time if that gets com- that's why they're going so hard after silicon. >> I think if they can, I think if you can capture the workload. So AWS and everyone else, as another example, this SAP, they call that a gravity workload. You know what gravity workload is? It's a black hole. It drags everything else with it. If you get SAP or Oracle or a mainframe app, it ain't going anywhere. And then what's going to happen is all your other apps are going to follow it. So that's what they're all going to fight for, is type of app. >> You said something earlier about, forget multicloud, for a moment, but, that idea of the super cloud, this abstraction layer, I mean, is that a real business value for customers other than, oh I got all these clouds, I need 'em to work together. You know, from your perspective from Aviatrix perspective, is it an opportunity for you to build on top of that? Or are you just looking at, look, I'm going to do really good work in AWS, in Azure? Now we're making the same experience. >> I hear this every single day from our customers is they look and they say, good enough isn't good enough. I've now hit the point, I'm hitting route limitations. I'm hitting, I'm doing things manually, and that's fine when I don't have that many applications or I don't have mission critical. The dogs are eating the dog food, we're going into the cloud and they're looking and then saying this is not an operational model for me. I've hit the point where I can't keep doing this, I can't throw bodies at this, I need software. And that's the opportunity for us, is they look and they say, I'm doing it in one cloud, but, and there's zero chance I'm going to be able to figure that out in the two or three other clouds. Every enterprise I talk to says multicloud is inevitable. Whether they're in it now, they all know they're going to go, because it's the business units that demand it. It's not the IT teams that demand it, it's the line of business that says, I like GCP for this reason. >> The driver's functionality that they're getting. >> It's the app teams that say, I have this service and GCP's better at it than AWS. >> Yeah, so it's not so much a cost game or the end all coffee mug, right? >> No, no. >> Google does this better than Microsoft, or better than- >> If you asked an IT person, they would rather not have multicloud. They actually tried to fight it. No, why would you want to support four clouds when you could support one right? That's insane. >> Dave and Lisa: Right. If they didn't have a choice and, and so it, the decision was made without them, and actually they weren't even notified until day before. They said, oh, good news, we're going to GCP tomorrow. Well, why wasn't I notified? Well, we're notifying you now. >> Yeah, you would've said, no. >> Steve: This is cloud bottle, let's go. >> Super cloud again. Did you see the Berkeley paper, sky computing I think they call it? Down at Berkeley, yep Dave Linthicum from Deloitte. He's talking about, I think he calls it meta cloud. It's happening. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> It's happening. >> No, and because customers, customers want that. They... >> And talk about some customer example or two that you think really articulates the value of why it's happening and the outcomes that it's generating. >> I mean, I was just talking to Lamb Weston last night. So we had a reception, Lamb Weston, huge, frozen potatoes. They serve like, I dunno, some ungodly percentage of all the french fries to all the fast food. It's unbelievable what they do. Do you know, they have special chemicals they put on the french fries. So when you get your DoorDash, they stay crispy longer. They've invented that patented it. But anyway, it's all these businesses you've never heard of and they do all the, and again, they're moving to SAP or they're actually SAP in the cloud, they're one of the first ones. They did it through Accenture. They're pulling it back off from Accenture. They're not happy with the service they're getting. They're going to use us for their networking and network security because they're going to get that visibility and control back. And they're going to repatriate it back from a managed service and bring it back and run it in-house. And the SAP basis engineers want it to happen because they see the visibility and control that the infrastructure guy's going to get because of us, which leads to, all they care about is uptime and performance. That's it. And they're going to say the infrastructure team's going to lead to better uptime and better performance if it's running on Aviatrix. >> And business performance and uptime, business critical >> That is the business. That is the business. >> It is. So what are some of the things next coming down the pike from Aviatrix? Any secret sauce you can share? >> Lot of secrets. So, two secrets. One, the next thing people really want to do, embedded network security into the network. We've kind of talked about this. You're going to be seeing some things from us. Where does network security belong? In the network. Embedded in the fabric of the network, not as this dumb device called the next-gen firewall that you steer traffic to. It has to be into the fabric of what we do, what we call airspace. You're going to see us talk about that. And then the next thing, back to the maturity of the cloud, as they build out the core, guess what they're doing? It's this thing called edge, Dave, right? And guess what they're going to do? It's not about connecting the cloud to the edge to the cloud with dumb things like SD-WAN, right? Or SaaS. It's actually the other way around. Go into the cloud, turn around, look out at the edge and say, how do I extend the cloud out to the edge, and make it look like a VPC. That's what people are doing. Why, 'cause I want the operational model. I want all the things that I can do in the cloud out at the edge. And everyone knows it's been in networking. I've been in networking for 37 years. He who wins the core does what? Wins the edge, 'cause that's what happens. You do it first in the core and then you want one architecture, one common architecture, one consistent way of doing everything. And that's going to go out to the edge and it's going to look like a VPC from an operational model. >> And Amazon's going to support that, no doubt. >> Yeah, I mean every, you know, every, and then it's just how do you want to go do that? And us as the networking and network security provider, we're getting dragged to the edge by our customer. Because you're my networking provider. And that means, end to end. And they're trying to drag us into on-prem too, yeah. >> Lot's going on, you're going to have to come back- >> Because they want one networking vendor. >> But wait, and you say what? >> We will never do like switches and any of the keep Arista, the Cisco, and all that kind of stuff. But we will start sucking in net flow. We will start doing, from an operational perspective, we will integrate a lot of the things that are happening in on-prem into our- >> No halfway house. >> Copilot. >> No halfway house, no two architectures. But you'll take the data in. >> You want one architecture. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, totally. >> Right play. >> Amazing stuff. >> And he who wins the core, guess what's more strategic to them? What's more strategic on-prem or cloud? Cloud. >> It flipped three years ago. >> Dave: Yeah. >> So he who wins in the clouds going to win everywhere. >> Got it, We'll keep our eyes on that. >> Steve: Cause and effect. >> Thank you so much for joining us. We've got your bumper sticker already. It's been a great pleasure having you on the program. You got to come back, there's so, we've- >> You posting the bumper sticker somewhere? >> Lisa: It's going to be our Instagram. >> Oh really, okay. >> And an Instagram sto- This is new for you guys. Always coming up with new ideas. >> Raising the bar. >> It is, it is. >> Me advance, I mean, come on. >> I love it. >> All right, for our guest Steve Mullaney and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's AWS RE:Invent 2022 Coverage. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Got a great lineup here, Itamar Ankorion SVP Technology Alliance at Qlik and Peter McDonald, vice President, cloud partnerships and business development Snowflake. We're going to talk about bringing SAP data to life, for joint Snowflake, Qlik and AWS Solution. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE Really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, great meeting you John. >> Just to get started, introduce yourselves to the audience, then going to jump into what you guys are doing together, unique relationship here, really compelling solution in cloud. Big story about applications and scale this year. Let's introduce yourselves. Peter, we'll start with you. >> Great. I'm Peter MacDonald. I am vice president of Cloud Partners and business development here at Snowflake. On the Cloud Partner side, that means I manage AWS relationship along with Microsoft and Google Cloud. What we do together in terms of complimentary products, GTM, co-selling, things like that. Importantly, working with other third parties like Qlik for joint solutions. On business development, it's negotiating custom commercial partnerships, large companies like Salesforce and Dell, smaller companies at most for our venture portfolio. >> Thanks Peter and hi John. It's great to be back here. So I'm Itamar Ankorion and I'm the senior vice president responsible for technology alliances here at Qlik. With that, own strategic alliances, including our key partners in the cloud, including Snowflake and AWS. I've been in the data and analytics enterprise software market for 20 plus years, and my main focus is product management, marketing, alliances, and business development. I joined Qlik about three and a half years ago through the acquisition of Attunity, which is now the foundation for Qlik data integration. So again, we focus in my team on creating joint solution alignment with our key partners to provide more value to our customers. >> Great to have both you guys, senior executives in the industry on theCUBE here, talking about data, obviously bringing SAP data to life is the theme of this segment, but this reinvent, it's all about the data, big data end-to-end story, a lot about data being intrinsic as the CEO says on stage around in the organizations in all aspects. Take a minute to explain what you guys are doing as from a company standpoint. Snowflake and Qlik and the solutions, why here at AWS? Peter, we'll start with you at Snowflake, what you guys do as a company, your mission, your focus. >> That was great, John. Yeah, so here at Snowflake, we focus on the data platform and until recently, data platforms required expensive on-prem hardware appliances. And despite all that expense, customers had capacity constraints, inexpensive maintenance, and had limited functionality that all impeded these organizations from reaching their goals. Snowflake is a cloud native SaaS platform, and we've become so successful because we've addressed these pain points and have other new special features. For example, securely sharing data across both the organization and the value chain without copying the data, support for new data types such as JSON and structured data, and also advance in database data governance. Snowflake integrates with complimentary AWS services and other partner products. So we can enable holistic solutions that include, for example, here, both Qlik and AWS SageMaker, and comprehend and bring those to joint customers. Our customers want to convert data into insights along with advanced analytics platforms in AI. That is how they make holistic data-driven solutions that will give them competitive advantage. With Snowflake, our approach is to focus on customer solutions that leverage data from existing systems such as SAP, wherever they are in the cloud or on-premise. And to do this, we leverage partners like Qlik native US to help customers transform their businesses. We provide customers with a premier data analytics platform as a result. Itamar, why don't you talk about Qlik a little bit and then we can dive into the specific SAP solution here and some trends >> Sounds great, Peter. So Qlik provides modern data integration and analytics software used by over 38,000 customers worldwide. Our focus is to help our customers turn data into value and help them close the gap between data all the way through insight and action. We offer click data integration and click data analytics. Click data integration helps to automate the data pipelines to deliver data to where they want to use them in real-time and make the data ready for analytics and then Qlik data analytics is a robust platform for analytics and business intelligence has been a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for over 11 years now in the market. And both of these come together into what we call Qlik Cloud, which is our SaaS based platform. So providing a more seamless way to consume all these services and accelerate time to value with customer solutions. In terms of partnerships, both Snowflake and AWS are very strategic to us here at Qlik, so we have very comprehensive investment to ensure strong joint value proposition to we can bring to our mutual customers, everything from aligning our roadmaps through optimizing and validating integrations, collaborating on best practices, packaging joint solutions like the one we'll talk about today. And with that investment, we are an elite level, top level partner with Snowflake. We fly that our technology is Snowflake-ready across the entire product set and we have hundreds of joint customers together and with AWS we've also partnered for a long time. We're here to reinvent. We've been here with the first reinvent since the inaugural one, so it kind of gives you an idea for how long we've been working with AWS. We provide very comprehensive integration with AWS data analytics services, and we have several competencies ranging from data analytics to migration and modernization. So that's our focus and again, we're excited about working with Snowflake and AWS to bring solutions together to market. >> Well, I'm looking forward to unpacking the solutions specifically, and congratulations on the continued success of both your companies. We've been following them obviously for a very long time and seeing the platform evolve beyond just SaaS and a lot more going on in cloud these days, kind of next generation emerging. You know, we're seeing a lot of macro trends that are going to be powering some of the things we're going to get into real quickly. But before we get into the solution, what are some of those power dynamics in the industry that you're seeing in trends specifically that are impacting your customers that are taking us down this road of getting more out of the data and specifically the SAP, but in general trends and dynamics. What are you hearing from your customers? Why do they care? Why are they going down this road? Peter, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, I'll go ahead and start. Thanks. Yeah, I'd say we continue to see customers being, being very eager to transform their businesses and they know they need to leverage technology and data to do so. They're also increasingly depending upon the cloud to bring that agility, that elasticity, new functionality necessary to react in real-time to every evolving customer needs. You look at what's happened over the last three years, and boy, the macro environment customers, it's all changing so fast. With our partnerships with AWS and Qlik, we've been able to bring to market innovative solutions like the one we're announcing today that spans all three companies. It provides a holistic solution and an integrated solution for our customer. >> Itamar let's get into it, you've been with theCUBE, you've seen the journey, you have your own journey, many, many years, you've seen the waves. What's going on now? I mean, what's the big wave? What's the dynamic powering this trend? >> Yeah, in a nutshell I'll call it, it's all about time. You know, it's time to value and it's about real-time data. I'll kind of talk about that a bit. So, I mean, you hear a lot about the data being the new oil, but it's definitely, we see more and more customers seeing data as their critical enabler for innovation and digital transformation. They look for ways to monetize data. They look as the data as the way in which they can innovate and bring different value to the customers. So we see customers want to use more data so to get more value from data. We definitely see them wanting to do it faster, right, than before. And we definitely see them looking for agility and automation as ways to accelerate time to value, and also reduce overall costs. I did mention real-time data, so we definitely see more and more customers, they want to be able to act and make decisions based on fresh data. So yesterday's data is just not good enough. >> John: Yeah. >> It's got to be down to the hour, down to the minutes and sometimes even lower than that. And then I think we're also seeing customers look to their core business systems where they have a lot of value, like the SAP, like mainframe and thinking, okay, our core data is there, how can we get more value from this data? So that's key things we see all the time with customers. >> Yeah, we did a big editorial segment this year on, we called data as code. Data as code is kind of a riff on infrastructure as code and you start to see data becoming proliferating into all aspects, fresh data. It's not just where you store it, it's how you share it, it's how you turn it into an application intrinsically involved in all aspects. This is the big theme this year and that's driving all the conversations here at RE:Invent. And I'm guaranteeing you, it's going to happen for another five and 10 years. It's not stopping. So I got to get into the solution, you guys mentioned SAP and you've announced the solution by Qlik, Snowflake and AWS for your customers using SAP. Can you share more about this solution? What's unique about it? Why is it important and why now? Peter, Itamar, we'll start with you first. >> Let me jump in, this is really, I'll jump because I'm excited. We're very excited about this solution and it's also a solution by the way and again, we've seen proven customer success with it. So to your point, it's ready to scale, it's starting, I think we're going to see a lot of companies doing this over the next few years. But before we jump to the solution, let me maybe take a few minutes just to clarify the need, why we're seeing, why we're seeing customers jump to do this. So customers that use SAP, they use it to manage the core of their business. So think order processing, management, finance, inventory, supply chain, and so much more. So if you're running SAP in your company, that data creates a great opportunity for you to drive innovation and modernization. So what we see customers want to do, they want to do more with their data and more means they want to take SAP with non-SAP data and use it together to drive new insights. They want to use real-time data to drive real-time analytics, which they couldn't do to date. They want to bring together descriptive with predictive analytics. So adding machine learning in AI to drive more value from the data. And naturally they want to do it faster. So find ways to iterate faster on their solutions, have freedom with the data and agility. And I think this is really where cloud data platforms like Snowflake and AWS, you know, bring that value to be able to drive that. Now to do that you need to unlock the SAP data, which is a lot of also where Qlik comes in because typical challenges these customers run into is the complexity, inherent in SAP data. Tens of thousands of tables, proprietary formats, complex data models, licensing restrictions, and more than, you have performance issues, they usually run into how do we handle the throughput, the volumes while maintaining lower latency and impact. Where do we find knowledge to really understand how to get all this done? So these are the things we've looked at when we came together to create a solution and make it unique. So when you think about its uniqueness, because we put together a lot, and I'll go through three, four key things that come together to make this unique. First is about data delivery. How do you have the SAP data delivery? So how do you get it from ECC, from HANA from S/4HANA, how do you deliver the data and the metadata and how that integration well into Snowflake. And what we've done is we've focused a lot on optimizing that process and the continuous ingestion, so the real-time ingestion of the data in a way that works really well with the Snowflake system, data cloud. Second thing is we looked at SAP data transformation, so once the data arrives at Snowflake, how do we turn it into being analytics ready? So that's where data transformation and data worth automation come in. And these are all elements of this solution. So creating derivative datasets, creating data marts, and all of that is done by again, creating an optimized integration that pushes down SQL based transformations, so they can be processed inside Snowflake, leveraging its powerful engine. And then the third element is bringing together data visualization analytics that can also take all the data now that in organizing inside Snowflake, bring other data in, bring machine learning from SageMaker, and then you go to create a seamless integration to bring analytic applications to life. So these are all things we put together in the solution. And maybe the last point is we actually took the next step with this and we created something we refer to as solution accelerators, which we're really, really keen about. Think about this as prepackaged templates for common business analytic needs like order to cash, finance, inventory. And we can either dig into that a little more later, but this gets the next level of value to the customers all built into this joint solution. >> Yeah, I want to get to the accelerators, but real quick, Peter, your reaction to the solution, what's unique about it? And obviously Snowflake, we've been seeing the progression data applications, more developers developing on top of Snowflake, data as code kind of implies developer ecosystem. This is kind of interesting. I mean, you got partnering with Qlik and AWS, it's kind of a developer-like thinking real solution. What's unique about this SAP solution that's, that's different than what customers can get anywhere else or not? >> Yeah, well listen, I think first of all, you have to start with the idea of the solution. This are three companies coming together to build a holistic solution that is all about, you know, creating a great opportunity to turn SAP data into value this is Itamar was talking about, that's really what we're talking about here and there's a lot of technology underneath it. I'll talk more about the Snowflake technology, what's involved here, and then cover some of the AWS pieces as well. But you know, we're focusing on getting that value out and accelerating time to value for our joint customers. As Itamar was saying, you know, there's a lot of complexity with the SAP data and a lot of value there. How can we manage that in a prepackaged way, bringing together best of breed solutions with proven capabilities and bringing this to market quickly for our joint customers. You know, Snowflake and AWS have been strong partners for a number of years now, and that's not only on how Snowflake runs on top of AWS, but also how we integrate with their complementary analytics and then all products. And so, you know, we want to be able to leverage those in addition to what Qlik is bringing in terms of the data transformations, bringing data out of SAP in the visualization as well. All very critical. And then we want to bring in the predictive analytics, AWS brings and what Sage brings. We'll talk about that a little bit later on. Some of the technologies that we're leveraging are some of our latest cutting edge technologies that really make things easier for both our partners and our customers. For example, Qlik leverages Snowflakes recently released Snowpark for Python functionality to push down those data transformations from clicking the Snowflake that Itamar's mentioning. And while we also leverage Snowpark for integrations with Amazon SageMaker, but there's a lot of great new technology that just makes this easy and compelling for customers. >> I think that's the big word, easy button here for what may look like a complex kind of integration, kind of turnkey, really, really compelling example of the modern era we're living in, as we always say in theCUBE. You mentioned accelerators, SAP accelerators. Can you give an example of how that works with the technology from the third party providers to deliver this business value Itamar, 'cause that was an interesting comment. What's the example? Give an example of this acceleration. >> Yes, certainly. I think this is something that really makes this truly, truly unique in the industry and again, a great opportunity for customers. So we kind talked earlier about there's a lot of things that need to be done with SP data to turn it to value. And these accelerator, as the name suggests, are designed to do just that, to kind of jumpstart the process and reduce the time and the risk involved in such project. So again, these are pre-packaged templates. We basically took a lot of knowledge, and a lot of configurations, best practices about to get things done and we put 'em together. So think about all the steps, it includes things like data extraction, so already knowing which tables, all the relevant tables that you need to get data from in the contexts of the solution you're looking for, say like order to cash, we'll get back to that one. How do you continuously deliver that data into Snowflake in an in efficient manner, handling things like data type mappings, metadata naming conventions and transformations. The data models you build all the way to data mart definitions and all the transformations that the data needs to go through moving through steps until it's fully analytics ready. And then on top of that, even adding a library of comprehensive analytic dashboards and integrations through machine learning and AI and put all of that in a way that's in pre-integrated and tested to work with Snowflake and AWS. So this is where again, you get this entire recipe that's ready. So take for example, I think I mentioned order to cash. So again, all these things I just talked about, I mean, for those who are not familiar, I mean order to cash is a critical business process for every organization. So especially if you're in retail, manufacturing, enterprise, it's a big... This is where, you know, starting with booking a sales order, following by fulfilling the order, billing the customer, then managing the accounts receivable when the customer actually pays, right? So this all process, you got sales order fulfillment and the billing impacts customer satisfaction, you got receivable payments, you know, the impact's working capital, cash liquidity. So again, as a result this order to cash process is a lifeblood for many businesses and it's critical to optimize and understand. So the solution accelerator we created specifically for order to cash takes care of understanding all these aspects and the data that needs to come with it. So everything we outline before to make the data available in Snowflake in a way that's really useful for downstream analytics, along with dashboards that are already common for that, for that use case. So again, this enables customers to gain real-time visibility into their sales orders, fulfillment, accounts receivable performance. That's what the Excel's are all about. And very similarly, we have another one for example, for finance analytics, right? So this will optimize financial data reporting, helps customers get insights into P&L, financial risk of stability or inventory analytics that helps with, you know, improve planning and inventory management, utilization, increased efficiencies, you know, so in supply chain. So again, these accelerators really help customers get a jumpstart and move faster with their solutions. >> Peter, this is the easy button we just talked about, getting things going, you know, get the ball rolling, get some acceleration. Big part of this are the three companies coming together doing this. >> Yeah, and to build on what Itamar just said that the SAP data obviously has tremendous value. Those sales orders, distribution data, financial data, bringing that into Snowflake makes it easily accessible, but also it enables it to be combined with other data too, is one of the things that Snowflake does so well. So you can get a full view of the end-to-end process and the business overall. You know, for example, I'll just take one, you know, one example that, that may not come to mind right away, but you know, looking at the impact of weather conditions on supply chain logistics is relevant and material and have interest to our customers. How do you bring those different data sets together in an easy way, bringing the data out of SAP, bringing maybe other data out of other systems through Qlik or through Snowflake, directly bringing data in from our data marketplace and bring that all together to make it work. You know, fundamentally organizational silos and the data fragmentation exist otherwise make it really difficult to drive modern analytics projects. And that in turn limits the value that our customers are getting from SAP data and these other data sets. We want to enable that and unleash. >> Yeah, time for value. This is great stuff. Itamar final question, you know, what are customers using this? What do you have? I'm sure you have customers examples already using the solution. Can you share kind of what these examples look like in the use cases and the value? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Happy to. We have customers across different, different sectors. You see manufacturing, retail, energy, oil and gas, CPG. So again, customers in those segments, typically sectors typically have SAP. So we have customers in all of them. A great example is like Siemens Energy. Siemens Energy is a global provider of gas par services. You know, over what, 28 billion, 30 billion in revenue. 90,000 employees. They operate globally in over 90 countries. So they've used SAP HANA as a core system, so it's running on premises, multiple locations around the world. And what they were looking for is a way to bring all these data together so they can innovate with it. And the thing is, Peter mentioned earlier, not just the SAP data, but also bring other data from other systems to bring it together for more value. That includes finance data, these logistics data, these customer CRM data. So they bring data from over 20 different SAP systems. Okay, with Qlik data integration, feeding that into Snowflake in under 20 minutes, 24/7, 365, you know, days a year. Okay, they get data from over 20,000 tables, you know, over million, hundreds of millions of records daily going in. So it is a great example of the type of scale, scalability, agility and speed that they can get to drive these kind of innovation. So that's a great example with Siemens. You know, another one comes to mind is a global manufacturer. Very similar scenario, but you know, they're using it for real-time executive reporting. So it's more like feasibility to the production data as well as for financial analytics. So think, think, think about everything from audit to texts to innovate financial intelligence because all the data's coming from SAP. >> It's a great time to be in the data business again. It keeps getting better and better. There's more data coming. It's not stopping, you know, it's growing so fast, it keeps coming. Every year, it's the same story, Peter. It's like, doesn't stop coming. As we wrap up here, let's just get customers some information on how to get started. I mean, obviously you're starting to see the accelerators, it's a great program there. What a great partnership between the two companies and AWS. How can customers get started to learn about the solution and take advantage of it, getting more out of their SAP data, Peter? >> Yeah, I think the first place to go to is talk to Snowflake, talk to AWS, talk to our account executives that are assigned to your account. Reach out to them and they will be able to educate you on the solution. We have packages up very nicely and can be deployed very, very quickly. >> Well gentlemen, thank you so much for coming on. Appreciate the conversation. Great overview of the partnership between, you know, Snowflake and Qlik and AWS on a joint solution. You know, getting more out of the SAP data. It's really kind of a key, key solution, bringing SAP data to life. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you John. >> Okay, this is theCUBE coverage here at RE:Invent 2022. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> theCUBE Presents UiPath FORWARD 5. Brought to you by UiPath. >> We're back in Las Vegas live. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of FORWARD 5 UiPath's customer event. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with David Nicholson. Our third Dave Espinoza is here, Director of Transformation at Cushman & Wakefield. And Marshall Sied is also here. He's the co-founder of Ashling Partners. Guys, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> We know Cushman & Wakefield, huge real estate firm. We'll come back to that, wanted to dig into some of the industry trends. But Marshall, what is Ashling Partners all about? >> Great question, Dave. So Ashling Partners was founded with modern automation and continuous improvement in mind. So a lot of us used to implement large ERP systems, accounting transaction systems. We viewed RPA and broader intelligent automation as kind of the wave of the future. So everything we do has continuous process improvement and automation in mind together. So we don't want to decouple, we want bring those together in an agile way. >> It's interesting, Rob Enslin this morning on the stage was talking about the waves of industry tech that used ERP was where he started and you know, et cetera, internet and now automation. He's sort of drawing that analogy. It's interesting that you're seeing the same pattern. >> David: Were were you fist bumping in the back of the room? >> Marshall: Absolutely. >> Well, I mean there's a lot of opportunity there. A lot of money to be made on both ends. Dave, talk about your firm. What's going on in the industry specifically? You joined sort of as we're exiting the isolation economy. Right? So what's happening in the industry now? I mean, real estate has been up and down and, you know, wild ride, you know, with COVID. What are the big trends in the industry that are informing your automation strategy. >> And actually I joined probably like right in the middle of the isolation economy. So it was a really interesting time to like to, I'm sure for most people also onboarding into groups. But coming on Cushman, you know, Cushman itself is an organization that formed predominantly through acquisition and through merger, right? So three large companies came together. And so a lot of the times the sort of headaches and the opportunities that we find are probably no different than other legacy organizations have when they're merging three companies together, right? So lots of disparate process, lots of paper, lots of process that isn't really very standardized. And so really it's a lot about us trying to make sure that we're continuing to double down on really that continuous process improvement but also bringing technology, lots of different types of technologies to bear to solve different problems throughout the organization. >> Well is the pandemic a catalyst for the automation initiative? Or actually you guys started before that I think, Marshall started about 2018. But was it like a rocket booster during the pandemic or was it more sort of steady state? >> I think it was actually a little bit of both Dave. 'Cause the reality is there was already top down executive support at Cushman pre-pandemic. So Cushman was already moving on this in a big way and they had executive sponsorship across the C-suite. Pandemic came, never a good time for a pandemic, but it came at a decent time for Cushman because they were prepared. They had the foundation of governance, everything you need in a large enterprise to run a program. They had that in place so they were able to kind of just put kerosene on the fire when the pandemic hit with certain automation candidates. >> Because I often said that pre-pandemic, you know, digital transformation was kind of this buzzword. A lot of firms were sort of giving it lip service. But it sounds like Cushman actually had started down the digital transformation path and then obviously everybody was accelerated. If you weren't digital business, you were out of business. But but how tightly aligned, 'cause we heard this in the keynotes today, I'd like to test it. How tightly aligned is automation and digital transformation at Cushman. >> They're pretty synonymous really for us, right? So like it is really about bringing different types of technologies, whether it's like NLP. The other really interesting thing that we were talking about the keynote, right? There's just so much that is going into the UiPath platform that is enabling us and enabling the things that we want to do across the organization, right? So like natural language processing, document understanding, you know, cloud based items. Like there's just so much that we can leverage and it's really about that continuous process improvement. It's trying to make sure that we're aligning ourselves to the strategy that the organization is absolutely pushing, but making sure that we're doing it in smart ways, right? And that we're empowering our employees as we do it, right? So it's not just very top down from a COE, it's also very bottoms up, very citizen-led throughout the organization. >> So I think of this as a strategic initiative that happens over time. But how does Ashling, and Marshall, how do you engage with Cushman? Do you engage on a project by project basis? Do you have sort of a long term strategic arc that you're working to? >> Absolutely. >> How does that work? >> No, that's a great question. So we started project based, so we were a part of the co-establishment of the intelligent automation COE. So very outcome driven, top down approach as Dave mentioned. But we also had a wider aperture than just RPA. It was broader end to end automation experiences that was project based. We had so much kind of quantifiable evidence at that point that we wanted to go bigger with the program. Over time we matured into more of an agile DevOps methodology with the Cushman team. And Dave should certainly speak about the size of the Cushman team and how that's evolved over time, but- >> Because the two of you are in a partnership in terms of proving out the ROI of what you're doing. >> Oh, absolutely. >> Right? >> Marshall: Every day, every day. We all have numbers we got to hit, right? And that's just the reality of it. But in order to do that, you know, agile DevOps approach where you're, you know, releasing every two weeks into production, you need a dedicated team that has like a longer term roadmap that is coinciding with the Cushman objective. So that's what we have in place today, something we call build as a service and mROC. So kind of think of that as as plan, build, and then run. We're infused. You have to be infused with your clients if you're going to run an agile DevOps program. >> Is automation more self-funding? Marshall, I want to draw on your experience with ERP. Is automation more self-funding than other technology initiatives? And if so, why or if not, why not? >> It is, and it's a double edged sword actually. We talk about this all the time at Ashling. We've never worked in an enterprise technology space where there's more accountability to value delivered because it's so quantifiable and measurable. So every time a transaction runs you can measure- >> Dave: How are we doing? >> Exactly, I mean the ERP days, nobody questioned. They just, they thought we just have to move to S/4HANA, we just have to move to Oracle. >> We'll let you know in a couple years. >> That's it, yeah. >> I mean the stuff that we just saw earlier from Javier Castellanos, right, from Orange. It is very much like each transaction has a value associated to it. Each part of that transaction has a value associated to it. We're constantly monitoring the numbers of looking at our performance, right? There's very real value associated to maintaining business as usual for the 50 plus automations that we have in production, right? So like the business is really counting on us to maintain and to make sure that we're continuing to perform. But also that we're continuing to work with them to find additional value and additional opportunities, right? To make sure that we are saving money and finding dollars- >> But it's dropping hard dollars to the bottom line, right, that are quantifiable to your point. But what's the governor, what's the barrier to your ability to absorb whether it's new automation? Is it just expertise, talent, or you bandwidth? Is it the prioritization exercise and thinking intelligently about, you know not- >> Dave: All of that. >> So how do you, I guess you guys work together, but take us through that a little bit. >> I mean, we're constantly refining our approach. So we were just talking about our DevOps approach. You know, we started with I think maybe five or six different teams based on specific service lines. We modulated that recently to go to two teams, right? One specific to build and one specific to enhance. So we're constantly looking for and building new automations throughout the organization. And then also looking for incremental value to enhance the automations that we've got out there, right? So making them better, faster, making them more resilient so resolving technical debt, doing a lot of different things to make sure that we're as stable as we possibly can be. But it's not only that, it's really like making sure like we're just as pinched by everybody else in terms of like the great resignation and looking for talent. I think everybody here is basically looking for the exact same talent. And so it's really making sure that we have interesting work, we're doing interesting work, we're making people feel valued, and we're bringing value throughout the business. >> So I remember Bobby Patrick called me when he joined UiPath. He goes, "You're not going to believe what I'm doing now. You got to get on this train." And so I started looking to it and we actually downloaded, you know, the package and started playing with it. And we tried to do it with the competitors, we, you know, we couldn't. It was like call for pricing kind of thing. We're like, well that's interesting. But what we saw was my perspective, this bottoms up adoption. And I know there was top down as well. But then, I remember I was in the meeting when they announced the sort of process gold acquisition and then started, I said, "Okay, they're going for platform now." And then Microsoft came into the market like, okay, they got to differentiate there. Now you're seeing everybody, all the software companies think they should own every dollar that's ever spent on software. So SAP's doing it and ServiceNow. And so Marshall, from your perspective, how has this platform evolved? And then Dave, to the extent you can talk about it, how is that platform adoption taking shape within the organization? I mean, platforms are much more complicated than products and they require integration. How is UiPath doing there? >> I think they're doing fantastic in that category. If you think about, and it's been a natural evolution. They're not fighting inertia, they're following challenges of their clients, right? So RPA obviously came onto the scene hot, everybody understands the business rule driven automation value. Easy to, you know, make a quantifiable, tangible evidence with RPA. But exceptions happen in a business and upstream processes break that, you know, cause challenges with downstream automations. So what do you do? You have to go upstream. You have to have more automations, you have to have process discovery, process mining with process gold. You need to have the ability to have a better user experience interface, which we've definitely incorporated into Cushman when we didn't get adoption with certain automations that we like. You build low-code apps. People want that consumerization of technology in the enterprise and that allows them to adopt more of the automation which triggers the robots and then you report analytics on it. So that expansion's been pretty natural with UiPath and I think the next acquisition they just made with Re:infer's really interesting, 'cause now you're going even more upstream with communication mining, turning that into structure data that you potentially could automate or analyze so it's been natural. It's truly the only platform that we've encountered that can do all of this at this point. >> So a couple things there. You know, one is the nuance of adoptions, not just the function of the potential savings or, you know, revenue production or productivity. It's, you know, the experience because you got to have a great UI. And then what are you going to do with Re:infer? I don't know if you guys are adopting Re:infer but what do you see as the potential. Marshall and Dave, if you guys have visibility on it? >> I know we've talked about it Dave so I mean the potential's huge. I think it's going to be more of a question of change management for each organization just to feel comfortable with that. But I mean, think about all of the communication and the semi and unstructured data in an organization that comes, you know, via Slacks, Teams, emails. It's huge and it's significant if you can figure out the right identifiers that you want to trigger for your business. And then figure out is that something downstream we can automate or can we just analyze and make our business more effective, more efficient, or provide a better experience. So I think it's huge. We don't know how big this is yet, but we know that it's something that, I mean, think about Cushman, get brokers all day long that are communicating with clients and third parties. So it could be extremely significant. >> Sounds like a potential to eliminate email hell, but. >> Marshall: Heard those promises before. >> Maybe that's like the paperless office eventually. >> Well in our organizations, like 50, 40 to 50,000 people, you know, globally, right? And there are definitely service lines within our organization where probably it doesn't make sense for us to leverage UiPath and provide them the, you know, studio and low code, no code automation tools. But a lot of this NLP stuff and a lot of the content mining and the communication mining stuff, really has the ability for us to be able to sort of pinpoint opportunities at levels that we couldn't possibly do it before. So it was really very exciting to see the stuff that we were in there. I think when you start your organization, a lot of times you're a hammer looking for a nail, right? And you need to quickly move away from that. And so I think a lot of the stuff that UiPath is introducing, a lot of the stuff that they're bringing into their platform, really helps us to be moving away from that sort of orientation. >> Well when you think of this in terms of CI/CD, you know, people maybe have a better understanding of sort of the life cycles and, you know, the iteration calendar. Can you give us an example of something that went from an idea, something like, "Hey, I think we might be able to automate this process" through "Okay, yeah, let's do it." You try it, at some point there's sort of quality testing involved to make sure that it's achieving that we want to do. Can you give us an example of a process that you've gone through? And then how long do those things usually take? Are we talking weeks, months? What are we talking about from idea to establishing that, "Yeah, this is something we want to keep in place." >> Dave: We always want to make it faster. So we're especially always trying to find ways, especially upfront parts of the process. So a lot of the analysis, requirements gathering, you know, stuff that's not actual building. We want to make sure that we're shrinking that as much as possible, that we're also being comprehensive so that we're not building something that doesn't meet someone's needs, right? Or that just completely misses the mark. But I mean, invoice processing is a good example. We do that internally. Obviously, we have corporate accounting. We also do that on behalf of clients. And so a lot of times, you know, we're bringing some of the internal processes, we're using the technologies for document understanding, optical character reading, and machine learning. And we're doing that on behalf of clients, but we're also doing that internally. So to be able to use some of those processes and automations, sort of client facing plus internally, are big changes. Big changes for us. But I think the other thing too is like, we're always trying to make it faster and better. I think that's one of those also processes where we put something in place and we're constantly looking to enhance it, make it better based on the process that's out here. >> And you're applying automation to that upfront piece, the planning phase? Is that right? Or? >> Yeah, yeah, so a lot of it is about sort of the work that we do on behalf of clients. And there are teams who are specifically tasked to accounts. And so we're looking to find ways to make it easier for those accounts to get their bills paid, to get visibility into, you know, accounts payable, accounts receivable, their full end to end accounts lifecycle. And so yeah, we're doing that directly on behalf of clients and then we're doing that internally. >> How about the why UiPath question. Marshall, I think I heard you say that you're pretty much exclusively UiPath as your automation partner. Why? Why not play the field? Why UiPath? >> So I think it started in like 2017, 2018 for Ashling. We did an analysis of kind of an outside in of what, at that point was the big three of RPA, the vision and the roadmap and the open platform architecture of UiPath and just the self-awareness that, "Hey, we need to operate with other technologies in order for our clients to get the most value from automation." That was really the main reason, outside of the fact that we like working with UiPath, but it was just that complete vision of a platform as opposed to a tool. We felt like everybody else was more of a pointed tool and then UiPath had this platform approach and it was going to be necessary to go end to end like we all are trying to achieve. >> And UiPath continues to deepen that, right? They continues to support us with tons of new technology- >> How so? Can you be specific? >> I mean, when we're talking about document understanding, I mean, we're trying to leverage that for manual handwritten time sheets. We're also using it for, you know, Chronos integration, right? So like there's a lot of stuff that we're using it for and we can go to a single shop, right? To be able to do it, a single platform from a scalability and a supportability perspective, it's also a big game changer for us, right? As you start, you want to be able to scale, but you can't spend a ton of money supporting, you know, a hundred different platforms. You really got to invest and be smart about it. And UiPath for us was a really smart play. >> Are you budget limited relative, you're competing with other initiatives within the organization? Where's the funding come from? Is it from the business? Is it from IT? Is it a combination? >> It had been centrally funded and we are now moving into a different model. So we are constantly looking at, you know, the justification of value, speed to value, and proving it out to our business partners from all service lines and within all different functions of the organization. So we're at an interesting inflection point, but I think we also have a really good background that we're building on. >> I've been saying it all day, I've said it for years, at the UiPath events that they are awesome about putting customers on theCUBE and we love to hear from the customer stories because we get to sort of map what we hear in the keynotes and then test it, right, in the real world. And I also really love the fact that Marshall, UiPath always brings implementation partners so we can get the expertise and you have a wider observation space. So guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and thanks for sharing your stories and good luck in the future. >> Thanks for having us. >> Appreciate it guys. >> Very welcome. >> Thank you. >> All right, keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante live from Las Vegas UiPath FORWARD 5. We'll be right back right after this short break.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, It's theCUBE, with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Today I have a new guest, new to theCUBE, Madhuri Chawla. The Director of Strategic Partnerships for Enterprise Application Services, is joining me. Madhuri, it's nice to have you on the program. >> Thank you Lisa, very excited to be here. And hello everyone. >> So different this year again, virtual like last year, we're going to talk about digital transformation. We saw this huge acceleration in 2020 the massive adoption of SAS applications. We want to to talk though about IBM Managed Services for SAP applications. So before we get into that, I'd love for you to be able to describe what your role is to our audience. >> Absolutely Lisa, so good day everyone, I've been with IBM for over 23 years. And my current role, I run the strategic alliances for IBM basically in the ERP space. SAP being our primary strategic partner. I have a global team of architects and we basically look at market requirements, talk to a lot of customers talk to our business partner SAP obviously, you know try to help them with come up with a solution for their transformation journey to the cloud. And hopefully today, you know we'll elaborate a little bit more on the exact walk that we do in this space. So very happy to be here. Thank you Lucy. >> Sure, so we're going to dissect the IBM SAP relationship. I think you even worked at SAP before your 23-year tenure at IBM. So we'll get to some of that as well, but help us understand, customers have so much choice, each day there's more and more choice. Why should a customer choose IBM as their strategic partner for this digital transformation journey? >> Well, really IBM has been in this SAP business for many, many decades, as you know. We have many, many certified people in SAP, close to 40,000 people actually globally. And we can help the clients in various aspects of their journey. So, you know, the typical cloud journey has four different aspects to it. You will need the advice. So you need basically systems integration services to help customers actually define the scope on you know, what they actually want to either upgrade, bring it to current as well as you know what workloads they want to move to the cloud. We can help customers with our systems integration services called the Global Business Services in IBM. We can help them with their entire planning. We can help them with the actual move to the cloud. So IBM offers a whole different variety of services for migration. Well, not only just the SAP workloads, I mean SAP typically ends up being the heart of the workloads than any of the major customers run, but surrounding SAP there's a lot of other applications so we can help plan that entire journey for advice and then, you know move it as well as in the interim, you know there's also another step which can be some customers that need to build net new, and you know, upgrade their applications to the latest technologies. So we can help them with that. And then once the build and move is over, obviously customers need help with the actual steady state run state environment. That's where this key service that we have Managed Services for SAP applications helps them. So our certifications with SAP and the fact that we have consultants that are certified in all these different aspects of the journey, can really help your clients. The other part I would say that IBM is really a hybrid cloud provider. So obviously we have our cloud service the IBM Cloud, but we can offer this service meeting the customer where they need to be. So we are a client centric service. So if the customer has a choice of AWS or Azure we can meet them there. So this is how, you know we can really help our customers with our expertise. Another data point to note that, you know, 70, 80% of the enterprise customers still have not moved their workloads to the cloud. So this is a space, especially with COVID as you've seen what's happened. You know, customers now are really really looking to accelerate the journey because it's become a necessity. It's no longer something that a CEO and CIO can push to the right, right? This is something they have to act now. So IBM with all these various services specifically geared in the SAP area. And given that we've been managing these production workloads for a lot of these enterprise customers on our cloud services for many, many years we have the experience. We can truly help them with their journey. >> And as you said, that's so critical these days. One of the things that I think we learned in 2020 is there was no time like the present. It really became such a massive shift that for business survival, those that weren't digitized, definitely were in some hot water. But talk to me so you talked about the IBM, SAP relationship being longstanding. Can you talk to me about the different aspects of the alliance and how that helps you guys to meet customers where they are? >> Sure, so SAP and IBM, we've been strategic partners for over 46 years, that's a long time. The partnership obviously has evolved over the years and I'll talk about, you know, a few of the different aspects where we've been partners. You know, the alliance initially obviously started you know, IBM is in multiple businesses as you know, we are one of the largest systems integrators in the world From a global business services point of view. As well as one of the largest application managed services providers. So that's, you know, part of the alliance. Then we have our server groups, the power systems that IBM has. So that's another dimension of the alliance where you know, 5, 6,000 plus SAP clients even today are still running their SAP applications on the power systems, whether it's on-premise or also in some of the cloud deployment models. Historically, we also had obviously the database Db2 alliance, but now with the SAP's move to HANA. That's kind of little bit of a mute point, obviously it still exists but most of the clients are now obviously being encouraged really to adopt SAP's latest S/4HANA. From the services standpoint, the other facet is really around the cloud services. So that's really our topic today, right? In the cloud services area, we have alliances with SAP, very very strong alliances that have existed for you know, almost a decade now. As I said, we've been managing the production workloads for very, very large customers in many different industries, their entire supply chains HR financial systems are running on IBM, either in the old traditional hosting models or also in our cloud models for the past 10 plus years, right, as IBM has evolved. So we have made sure that we do a whole different types of certifications with SAP to stay current. Many of these certifications are done either, you know every two years, some are done every year. And if anyone checks, you know the SAP service marketplace website, which is owned by SAP you can see IBM listed in all these different angles as a certified provider. There isn't another provider that can claim this breadth in terms of certifications that IBM has done. And that's why customers can benefit either from one or two of these services that IBM provides or obviously a combination as a single vendor, if the customer needs. So, you know we have the sets we have the credibility, we have decades of you know, delivery excellence in these areas, servicing these clients. Lots of the Fortune 100 customers actually are running their SAP workloads on the IBM systems, whether in traditional hosting or in a hybrid cloud deployment. some cases we're actually providing services for customers that run their SAP workloads on-premise. So we cater to that, you know, sets of clients as well. And then of course, others that are purely on our cloud, IBM cloud, as well as hyperscalers. Yeah. >> So long list of certifications, that seems to be one of the biggest differentiators that you talked about. Talk to me a little bit about how things have evolved over the last, you know, 12 to 18 months in terms of how has IBM's focus changed for hybrid cloud with SAP? >> Yeah, so the focus changed, you know until last year, we were called the cloud and cognitive company. This year of course the whole company has changed and we're going through a major transformation at the moment. We are the Hybrid Cloud Company now, and that name change means a lot. It means a lot in the sense that it gives choices to the customer. That's what the whole mission is all about. We want to make sure that customers are consuming IBM services and IBM wants to meet them where they want to be. So there's, you know, flexibility of choices in terms of hybrid in a cloud deployment model. So most customers in the SAP area you know, they're looking for either just a pure private cloud deployment or they're looking for a Puppet cloud deployment or a combination. And some are because, you know their SAP's footprint sizes are so large. Think about the multinational global companies, you know and then they operate in so many different regions of the world and their data sizes of their databases are so large. Perhaps you know the public cloud really isn't a good fit. Yet these customers are looking to move some sort of their workloads to the cloud. So that's where this hybrid cloud helps them because customers, you know, 90 plus percent of the clients today are really not choosing one hyperscaler as their deployment option. They're really looking at multiple. So because they're running their workloads not just SAP, but everything else, you know SAP always brings along a whole bunch of other applications like tax applications and other interfaces, homegrown applications analytics that the customers are using. So if you want to take advantage of the true hybrid cloud and the benefits of all the various deployments and hyperscalers available in that region, really the hybrid cloud strategy from IBM is a perfect fit. Because we give them choices of deployment. We're not saying that you have to deploy an IBM cloud. We're saying you can deploy either on-premise, AWS, Azure IBM cloud, really what makes sense, you know, best sense for the types of workloads that the customer is looking at. So that's how the strategy for IBM has completely changed to meet the clients you know, for what they're actually looking for. >> Talk to me a little bit about the go-to-market. So IBM and SAP, long-standing decades-old relationship lot of certifications that you talked about. We're talking about business critical applications. You mentioned supply chain a minute ago and I can't help, but think of how supply chain has been affected in the last year. What is the go-to-market approach with respect to providing consultation services to help customers determine, should we migrate to what hyperscaler and how and when? >> Yeah, so we can help them with that. So hybrid hyperscalers, obviously, you know IBM has been listed for example, as the leader in Gartner 2020. And you know there's lots of other stats that show them that IBM is a leader in application services, in consulting services, application management services as well as managed services. So these are all different, right? And you can see us being listed as a leader either it's in Gartner or IDC or Forrester Wave, and for many reasons. And you know, IBM actually has one series of pinnacle awards from SAP over the years. How this helps the clients really determine is that you know, IBM obviously does a lot of studies externally. We have internal as well as external facing views of comparatives of the various hyperscalers, you know including AWS Azure or GCP and so on. So when a customer comes to us for asking for advice and so on, we basically look at our own intellectual properties all the analysis that has been done. And more importantly, we look at the full scope of services that the customer is doing. What sort of a business are they in? We have industry experts there's ERP strategy folks within IBM. So, you know, they go off for a certain industry. And when they let's say, you know, they've gone off to the oil and gas industry, for example, they will look at multiple customers in that particular space. So based on their experiences, we can actually define the right roadmap for the client to be able to help them to move their workloads to this hybrid cloud strategy that I just mentioned right? So that's how we can help them because we have the expertise in that industry as well. >> And I'm curious, Madhuri in the last year, with so much flux and rapidly changing market conditions did you see any one or two industries in particular really leading the charge here and coming to IBM, SAP for help on this transformation journey which hasn't been accelerated by a couple of years? >> Certainly the retail industry, for sure, right? I mean, in spite of the crisis I think the retail industry did pretty well right? Because people still had to buy stuff. Of course the whole buying behavior changed no question. You and I, don't know about you, Lisa but for me, you know, I was never a major online shopper now I am, you know I buy just about everything. Previously it used to be select things here and there but now it's totally changed, right? So that industry certainly has accelerated no question. We've had a lot of those coming. The other industries that I've seen the change in the last 12, 18 months is really for for example you know the banking industry and so on. IBM basically, you know launched a lot of services in the financial services sector for this reason. So those are of course transforming very fast to keep up with the market. And I'm sure there's others, right. But these are the two that come to mind yeah. >> Yeah, two that have been most affected and needed to pivot so quickly in addition to healthcare. Let me ask you one final question here, before we wrap. Talk to me about the advantages of using the PMC Partner Managed Cloud SAP License resell model the advantages of using that and the benefits. >> Sure, so you know so far our discussion was really focused around, you know the various service capabilities that IBM has in terms of our capabilities for helping clients with hyperscalers and hybrid cloud. We also need to spend a little bit of time, you know talking about the operations model, right? So when they're running their production workloads on IBM PMC is yet another dimension. So what PMC, Partner Managed Cloud is really some very limited partnerships that SAP does. And IBM is the lead on that one. In this space, what SAP allows is the partner, which in this case is IBM to resell the SAP software license to a customer. So IBM has the rights globally to resell the license. And why is that beneficial to the client? Because now IBM can actually turn around the SAP license and have the customer pay us in a SAS model. So it basically is now an OPEX model where the customer is basically paying, you know a monthly fee as an example. So there's no upfront cost to the client and they basically pay IBM and then IBM pays SAP. So IBM is kind of holding the risk, if you will, on behalf of the customer it gives customers more choices, more flexibilities better pricing approach. So if the customer wants as an example to buy everything the full package, including systems implementation services, deployment models, with choices you know, on a cloud, whether it's IBM cloud or others as well as the license itself IBM has this end-to-end capability today. We've been selling it to several clients for a few years in several geographies right? So that's really the advantage behind it. >> Got it, excellent, thanks for breaking that down Madhuri. And joining me today, talking about what's new with IBM and SAP, the opportunities for customers to accelerate their digital transformation. We appreciate you stopping by. >> Thank you very much Lisa, I truly enjoyed it, thank you. >> Good me too. For Madhuri Chawla, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're coming to you from our Palo Alto studios today with our ongoing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. It's a virtual event, like all the events in 2020, but we've been going there since 2013. We're happy to be back this year and we're excited to have for the first time on theCUBE, our next guest, she's Kelly Herod the US SAP Offering Leader for Deloitte Consulting. Kelly, great to see you. >> Great to see you as well, Jeff, thanks so much for having me. >> Absolutely, so first time on, on theCUBE, you guys have a really interesting concept at Deloitte, you call it the Kinetic Enterprise. What is the Kinetic Enterprise all about? >> Yes. So if you think about the past, organizations built their technology infrastructures to be what we would call built to last, the future though is all about built to evolve. And that's exactly what the Kinetic Enterprise is. It's really how we're helping our clients create the right technology infrastructures that evolve with their business. And Kinetic Enterprise is focused on four key pillars. The first, that we're building a technology solution that's clean. That means we want to have reduced amount of custom code or things that we may have built that really rack up your technical debt. The second pillar is that it's intelligent. So we're leveraging all of the technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning, to really automate and change the way in which an organization runs their business. The third pillar is that it's responsive, and that means it's on the cloud and this is where AWS comes in. And then the last pillar is that it's inclusive. So it uses all of the technologies and microservices available to really optimize and achieve a company's business value objectives. >> So that is a great summary, and I've got the list of the four pillars. It's just interesting you lead with clean. You know, there's a lot of conversation about digital transformation and move fast and be dynamic, you know, would be kind of an opposite to static. But clean, interesting choice of words. It runs with core... Core clean ERP with minimum technical debt. Why clean is such an important thing? I get kind of intelligent and responsive, but clean is an interesting attribute to pick. >> Absolutely, so if you take a step back and think... (Kelly hangs) when comes to ERPs, when ERPs came out, there was... (Kelly hangs) how you're going to run your entire organization on this one solution. What we've found is that as companies have put ERPs, they've gone through and created so much customization, that it's that which makes it very difficult to be able to keep up with technology changes or actually migrate to the next versions. So the concept here is if you're going to go in and put in brand new ERP, such as an SAP S/4HANA, this time around in order to achieve the promise of ERPs, let's make it clean. Let's stick to as much standard functionality as possible within the core, and then we innovate on the edges. And so that will allow us in the future to maintain that flexibility or dynamicism of a Kinetic Enterprise. >> Right. So I have to tease you Kelly 'cause SAP R/3 and ERP is not necessarily synonymous with digital transformation, speed, agility, and embracing change. So you've been involved in Deloitte's SAP practice for a long time. Why should people start to rethink about SAP in terms of being responsive, in terms of being able to change quickly and to your vocabulary, more kinetic? >> And you're right. You know, I've been doing SAP for 20 years. So I actually did start back in the R/3 days. And, you know, I would just say that things are changing, is evolving. You know, SAP themselves has been going through a transformation, a revolution. You look at the ERP landscape as a whole, all of the ERP players are moving to the cloud. The technology is the backbones are changing. Now the reality is, you know, going in and actually changing out your ERP, no matter what solution you're using, it's a big endeavor or undertaking. The goal here, and why we're partnering with SAP, partnering with AWS is really focused on how can we make this more efficient for our clients? More importantly, I like to think about it as how can we make this less of a one and done, and more of a let's keep transforming the technologies and the business as things are changing in the market, along the way. And using technologies to even change how we implement, allows us to do that. >> So, Kelly, another thing a lot of people probably don't think of is SAP and AWS, together in the same sentence. So I'm sure there's a lot of people that are much more intelligent about this, but for those that aren't as familiar, tell us a little bit about the relationship with SAP and AWS and then how you guys are leveraging that at Deloitte. >> Absolutely. So when you... There's a couple of things that I would bring up. One is SAP S/4HANA solutions, in particular, but any SAP environment that you're running on, one of the objectives most of our clients are focused on is how to move to the cloud, and that's where AWS comes in. You can absolutely run any of your SAP solutions on AWS. And what that brings you with is more flexibility, so that you can actually scale or contract your infrastructure that you're running SAP on based on your business needs. The second thing that we've been partnering with AWS to do is a little bit of what I just mentioned, which was a teaser around, how do you change the way you even go about implementing an SAP solution or start to migrate your business? So one of the things we asked ourselves was, could we radically change how you jumpstart an S/4 implementation? And what we decided to do is team up with AWS and leveraging machine learning, artificial intelligence, most importantly, standing up an environment on AWS. We actually created what we call Kinetic Finance Startup. Many of our clients are choosing to start with finance and specifically SAP central finance to begin their journey to the new S/4HANA environment. And what we've been able to do is create a touchless build solution, so over a weekend, we can actually connect to your existing ERP solution. Majority of those is starting with an ECC environment. We can extract the data, we can use harmonization rules to actually change and modify your data and optimize it for the future. And then we actually through completely touchless built-in automation, stand up a brand new AWS environment with S/4HANA on it and actually automate the configuration and testing of the basic financial transactions. So when you come in the next week and we start the conversation with the client, we're actually looking at a real life S/4HANA system on AWS with their mas... >> Oh, that's... >> So the whole concept is to change how we engage. >> Right. So again, I don't know that I were to think of finance as kind of a lead application, to start this journey. I mean, I can see on one hand, it is the system of record and it, you know, it has a lot of very important information that's got to eventually get into finance. On the other hand, it seems like there's less critical, maybe lower hanging fruit that's less risky. Is it because you can run it kind of in a parallel path for some period of time, but it strikes me that finance might not be the first place you go to look for some early wins. >> It's actually what you just said about the parallelism. So the reason we've seen that finance actually was one of the starting points is even if you look at the history of SAP's S/4HANA solution, way back before we got to that, it started with a concept called smart accounting or simple finance. And the theory here is, you could actually... If a company has, let's say multiple ERPs, as most do, you can actually grab the financial information, bring it into a new S/4 or central finance environment, and actually combine or merge the accounting information to get improved reporting, optimize a shared service organization. So it's actually a lower risk way to start the journey before going and touching the heart of the business or core operations, or manufacturing, for example, >> That's pretty interesting. So you run it in parallel for a while and then eventually does, is the plan that it takes over, from the old. So it is effectively kind of, I guess, a slightly delayed lift and shift, or maybe it's a reassemble and then a flip. I don't know how you would describe it because it's not really lift and shift. >> It's not really lift and shift actually, you have two options. You can either over time pull all of your business processes out of the underlying ERP solutions and bring them into the S/4HANA environment or multiple S/4HANA environments. Or some companies may choose to continue to... (Kelly hangs) Especially if you're in an industry where you do a lot of acquisitions or divestitures, you may not have an intention of ever combining all of your ERPs, but you may want to change each of them to S/4HANA underneath, and then have one environment in which you're pulling your data together to really consolidate your financial reporting. >> That's great. I want to follow up on something that you mentioned, which is the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence. And we talk a lot about, right? Those are hot buzzwords all over the place, but, you know, I'm pretty vehement in that, you know, general purpose AI and ML is kind of interesting, but where the real interesting stuff ends is where the rubber hits the road, is in applied. And it sounds like you've got a pretty interesting application where you're applying this technology to help make this move to cloud go a little bit smoother. >> Yes. One of the areas, you know, since we've been talking a bit about finance then I'll use it as an example. Is if you think about it, whenever we go in and we're typically working with... (Kelly hangs) especially in finance, you know, one of the topics is, how to optimize a chart of accounts? So over time we've done this hundreds of times, if we can look at different sectors, different industries, we can use benchmark chart of accounts. So instead of making this a paper-based exercise that individuals are doing, why not take that and actually use artificial intelligence machine learning to create data harmonization rules, so that technologies can actually do that same work. And so that's been one of the things we've been working on that I personally find very interesting just in my finance background. >> Right. And is this a relatively new thing, or have you guys been doing this for a while? >> Actually, it's something that over the last 12 months, we've been focused on building out in partnership with AWS. So it's fairly new. >> That's great. I want... I'd love to shift gears a little bit, and talk about COVID, and the impact of COVID on your business. Clearly in March, right? It was the light switch moment and everybody had to work from home and it was a quick rush to make sure that everybody was safe and we could support our remote workers, that said, can't help with the ba... All the bad stuff that's happening in hospitality and travel, and a whole lot of other industries. So that aside and that's bad stuff. In the tech industry, we were able to make the move, but now we know we're six, seven, eight months into this thing, and it's clear that, you know, we're going to have many elements of this going forward for a while. So I'm curious just from your business and your customer point of view, if you can share, you know, kind of the contrast of what happened in March and April to what you're seeing now and how this new reality, whatever this new reality is going to be, as we, you know, continue to evolve is impacting this digital transformation conversations? >> It is interesting. So if I pivot back to March, when this all occurred, you know, it truly did feel an instant going from in-person. And as consultants we travel and typically have a Monday through Thursday, or Monday through Friday type of travel schedule to an instant working from home overnight. And, you know, I'm really proud of our teams and how they seamlessly made that transition. Many, including myself, were actually leading clients through final cut overs in parallel to this happening. And we were able to really pivot and make those shifts, and I was reflecting with one of the executives I worked with, you know, she and I, you know, six months later, we're looking back at how we did that and how impressed we were with what the team pulled off. And since then, they've been able to do several other go lives, which is great. But I think that it was something we had to do quickly. I think many would have said it couldn't have been done that you would see the whole world move to a working from home environment, but we did. What it tells me is it gives me a lot of hope for a lot of the things that businesses can do in the future. In the past we used to constrain ourselves of, Oh, there's no way we could ever get XYZ done, or we can't make this type of change in the world, but we can. If I flash forward to now, I think we're very settled in kind of this new way of working, but I'm also hopeful for what the future is going to look like. I don't believe it will be a pivot all the way back to... Especially for consultants traveling on a regular basis of Monday through Friday. Instead, I think we're going to create models that give people and organizations the flexibility they need to really balance some of their personal responsibilities along with their work responsibilities. My hope and expectations is that also opens up options so that all organizations have access to more talent that they may not have had before. And I think that also means global talent. I think we're showing we can work as global teams, which means, you know, I could now have members from Japan joining, you know, my permanent leadership team in ways that I maybe never have thought of before. Those are just some examples of what I expect and hope for all of us that we'll see coming out of this. >> Hopefully and I know... Like you said, you've been a consultant for years and years and years, and you guys spend lots of time on airplanes, and hopefully you don't have to spend quite so much time on airplanes because you don't necessarily have to be there all the time. But you talked about an interesting thing and that's talent and opening up the opportunity to get more talent that maybe you wouldn't have ever considered. And along those same lines, right? Is the move in diversity and inclusion. And I just watched a show that you did a few months ago, called the... "A Chance for Change: Accelerating Business Recovery, Through Gender Diversity," on a Facebook interview, very cool panel, really enjoyed it. And I want to follow up on some of those things, 'cause you've made some really simple and poignant points. And one of the things that you said definitively, go back to the wide diverse talent and perspective equals winning in business, period. I love that. You know, we hear this all the time that, you know, not only is it the right thing to do, but it's also good for business. And isn't it nice when those two things can actually line up. And you just talked about, you know, in more of a generic sense, the ability to open up your talent window when there's a worldwide talent shortage, both for geography, but also the work in diversity and inclusion and to continue to hold the momentum that continues to build in this area. I wonder if you could, you know, kind of share your thoughts on that, and your position and what's going on with Deloitte. >> Absolutely. You know, I do think this is one of those key pivotal moments for all of us, and I believe we have, coming out of this an option to really move the needle on our diversity and inclusion, and equality efforts. You know, one example I think about women, women in leadership positions. You know, being in consulting, you know, one of the challenges has always been that we do travel a lot, and it can be difficult to balance all the responsibilities, professional and personally. I think with a move to more flexible work arrangements, less travel, or travel for purpose is what I would highlight for the future. I think it opens the door to many more women being able to have careers in consulting, if that's what they, you know, had desired. I also think it allows them to have... You know, spend their entire careers in consulting and in ways we never saw before. And that means you'll see as significant movement and women in leadership positions. I also think this applies to underrepresented minorities. I hope that from all of this, instead of there may be companies that focus on recruiting from, you know, schools that are local to them or within their surrounding areas. I think this gives us an opportunity to really open that aperture up and look at talent from any school or university, or geography, and being able to get the right skill sets in the door and the right talent. Therefore you can actually see movement and diversity within teams, as well as at the leadership levels for URMs. >> Right. Right. And really managing to the right things too. I think that's the other thing that's coming out of this, and we've had a lot of conversations on work from home or work from anywhere. You guys are a little bit different than the consultant 'cause your team is there, usually local at the client site for some period of time. But for a lot of people, it's the first time they are not sitting across from a desk or, you know, within close proximity. Now you too, in your teams. And so, the shift changes that now you have to judge output, (Jeff chuckles) and not activity. And you would think that that would be a great and easy thing to execute, but we're hearing more and more that it's not necessarily. And you really highlighted, I think, three leadership traits that are always important, but more important now than ever before in that other interview. And I just want to call them out 'cause I thought it was worth calling out. You know, empathy has never been more important. Resilience, and my favorite one you said at the end, calm in the storm. I just wonder again, if you could share, you know, kind of, as you've gone through it, both, you know, as somebody at Deloitte within the greater Deloitte group, but then also in managing your own teams, to maintain that calm in the storm and to maintain, you know, empathetic leadership, because I think you've said it before, right? This is a personal challenge that we're all going through. We all have different things going on at home, whether it's the spouses working, the kids are doing homeschool. People are taking care of older parents, this and that. It's a real personal thing, and so these leadership characteristics, these softer leadership characteristics have never been more important >> That's so true. And, you know, when I think about the empathy part, right now what we're going through is also about how is each of us as leaders also sharing a bit more about how we're experiencing this? I think the sharing of stories is what also helps many on the teams adapt, adjust. The reality is when you're working on camera all day and, you know, in the past, imagine that you maybe were having a tough day or you weren't feeling that great, you weren't on camera all day with every one of your coworkers. You we're actually, you know, sitting in an office, you may have to go to the conference room to do some meetings, but you didn't look... (Kelly hangs) like someone was kind of staring at you all day long. Now, when we're working from home virtually and we're on Zoom or Skype or WebEx, et cetera, all day, it does feel like you're under the lights when you're on camera. And there's a lot of pressure and people are trying to figure out how to manage their own emotions while doing that. And, you know, my message would say as an empathetic leader, it's okay for you to also share when you might be having a tough go that day. Maybe one of your children has been kind of acting out and they didn't really want to do the virtual school. It's okay to share in that because everyone's going through it, and it makes us all more human. >> Right. >> And it makes us all more connected. >> Right. Well, I will share with you a pro tip, we've done a few of these interviews and it is okay to let people turn off the camera. And I think as a manager, I think it's actually an okay thing to say, okay, everyone, let's just turn off our cameras and get a break from that camera that's got that eye on you all the time, because it is just another, you know, kind of a factor that we have to deal with. Well, go ahead. >> And I was going to ask, what do you actually, you know, I don't know what one of your techniques is, but I know mine is some of the meetings, it's actually just go back to traditional telephone calls (Jeff chuckles) and actually even just being on your cell, put on your air, you know, your earbuds, or your headphones and even walk. >> Right. >> So I think the other thing we're all missing is actually that movement, the steps to go to the coffee maker and back, or to lunch and back, we don't have them anymore. So you've got to work extra hard, actually getting those extra steps in calories and just mental breaks at times. >> Yeah, well then there's a whole another tranche on walking during meetings. And I used have a boss that I would only do one-on-ones while we took a walk. He always says, I get in there... 'Cause then there's, you know, you're not necessarily looking at each other. And if there's some sensitive things or tough conversations, sometimes it's easier if you're not just looking across the table at one another with all the silence. So there's a lot to be said for that as well. Well, Kelly, I really enjoyed this conversation and getting to meet you for the first time. It sounds like you're doing a lot of cool and exciting things and, you know, exciting speed and innovation with SAP, that's noble work and I'm sure a lot of people are really happy to have you help them out there. So thank you very much for your time and to have a great AWS re:Invent. >> Thanks, Jeff. It was great to discuss this with you. >> Absolutely. All right. She's Kelly, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE's ongoing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE's studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> You know, businesses have a staggering number of options today to support mission-critical applications. And much of the world's mission-critical data happens to live on converged infrastructure. Converged infrastructure is really designed to support the most demanding workloads. Words like resilience, performance, scalability, recoverability, et cetera. Those are the attributes that define converged infrastructure. Now with COVID-19 the digital transformation mandate, as we all know has been accelerated and buyers are demanding more from their infrastructure, and in particular converged infrastructure. Hi everybody this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this power panel where we're going to explore converged infrastructure, look at its past, its present and its future. And we're going to explore several things. The origins of converged infrastructure, why CI even came about. And what's its historic role been in terms of supporting mission-critical applications. We're going to look at modernizing workloads. What are the opportunities and the risks and what's converged infrastructures role in that regard. How has converged infrastructure evolved? And how will it support cloud and multicloud? And ultimately what's the future of converged infrastructure look like? And to examine these issues, we have three great guests, Trey Layton is here. He is the senior vice president for converged infrastructure and software engineering and architecture at Dell Technologies. And he's joined by Joakim Zetterblad. Who's the director of the SAP practice for EMEA at Dell technologies. And our very own Stu Miniman. Stu is a senior analyst at Wikibon. Guys, great to see you all welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Great. >> Trey, I'm going to start with you. Take us back to the early days of converged infrastructure. Why was it even formed? Why was it created? >> Well, if you look back just over a decade ago, a lot of organizations were deploying virtualized environments. Everyone was consolidated on virtualization. A lot of technologies were emerging to enhance that virtualization outcome, meaning acceleration capabilities and storage arrays, networking. And there was a lot of complexity in integrating all of those underlying infrastructure technologies into a solution that would work reliably. You almost had to have a PhD and all of the best practices of many different companies integrations. And so we decided as Dell EMC, Dell Technologies to invest heavily in this area of manufacturing best practices and packaging them so that customers could acquire those technologies and already integrated fully regression tested architecture that could sustain virtually any type of workload that a company would run. And candidly that packaging, that rigor around testing produced a highly reliable product that customers now rely on heavily to operationalize greater efficiencies and run their most critical applications that power their business and ultimately the world economy. >> Now Stu, cause you were there. I was as well at the early days of the original announcement of CI. Looking back and sort of bringing it forward Stu, what was the business impact of converged infrastructure? >> Well, Dave as Trey was talking about it was that wave of virtualization had gone from, you know, just supporting many applications to being able to support all of your applications. And especially if you talk about those high value, you know business mission, critical applications, you want to make sure that you've got a reliable foundation. What the Dell tech team has done for years is make sure that they fully understand, you know the life cycle of testing that needs to happen. And you don't need to worry about, you know, what integration testing you need to do, looking at support major CS and doing a lot of your own sandbox testing, which for the most part was what enterprises needed to do. You said, okay, you know, I get the gear, I load the virtualization and then I have to see, you know, tweak everything to figure out how my application works. The business impact Dave, is you want to spend more time focusing on the business, not having to turn all the dials and worry about, do I get the performance I need? Does it have the reliability uptime that we need? And especially if we're talking about those business critical applications, of course, these are the ones that are running 24 by seven and if they go down, my business goes down with it. >> Yeah, and of course, you know, one of the other major themes we saw with conversion infrastructure was really attacking the IT labor problem. You had separate compute or server teams, storage teams, networking teams, they oftentimes weren't talking together. So there was a lot of inefficiency that converged infrastructure was designed to attack. But I want to come to the SAP expert. Joakim, that's really your wheelhouse. What is it about converged infrastructure that makes it suitable for SAP application specifically? >> You know, if you look at a classic SAP client today, there's really three major transformational waves that all SAP customers are faced with today, it's the move to S/4HANA, the introduction of this new platform, which needs to happen before 2027. It's the introduction of a multicloud cloud or operating model. And last but not least, it is the introduction of new digitization or intelligent technologies such as IOT, machine learning or artificial intelligence. And that drove to the need of a platform that could address all these three transformational waves. It came with a lot of complexity, increased costs, increased risk. And what CI did so uniquely was to provide that Edge to Core to Cloud strategy. Fully certified for both HANA, non HANA workloads for the classical analytical and transactional workloads, as well as the new modernization technologies such as IOT, machine learning, big data and analytics. And that created a huge momentum for converged in our SAP accounts. >> So Trey, I want to go to you cause you're the deep technical expert here. Joakim just mentioned uniqueness. So what are the unique characteristics of converged infrastructure that really make it suitable for handling the most demanding workloads? >> Well, converged infrastructure by definition is the integration of an external storage array with a highly optimized compute platform. And when we build best practices around integrating those technologies together, we essentially package optimizations that allow a customer to increase the quantity of users that are accessing those workloads or the applications that are driving database access in such a way where you can predictably understand consumption and utilization in your environment. Those packaged integrations are kind of like. You know, I have a friend that owns a race car shop and he has all kinds of expertise to build cars, but he has a vehicle that he buys is his daily driver. The customization that they've created to build race cars are great for the race cars that go on the track, but he's building a car on his own, it didn't make any sense. And so what customers found was the ability to acquire a packaged infrastructure with all these infrastructure optimizations, where we package these best practices that gave customers a reliable, predictable, and fully supported integration, so they didn't have to spend 20 hour support calls trying to discover and figure out what particular customization that they had employed for their application, that had some issue that they needed to troubleshoot and solve. This became a standard out of the box integration that the best and the brightest package so that customers can consume it at scale. >> So Joakim, I want to ask you let's take the sort of application view. Let's sort of flip the picture a little bit and come at it from that prism. How, if you think about like core business applications, how have they evolved over the better part of the last decade and specifically with regard to the mission-critical processes? >> So what we're seeing in the process industry and in the industry of mission-critical applications is that they have gone from being very monolithic systems where we literally saw a single ERP components such as all three or UCC. Whereas today customers are faced with a landscape of multiple components. Many of them working both on and off premise, there are multicloud strategies in place. And as we mentioned before, with the introduction of new IOT technologies, we see that there is a flow of information of data that requires a whole new set of infrastructure of components of tools to make these new processes happen. And of course, the focus in the end of the day is all on business outcomes. So what industries and companies doesn't want to do is to focus all their time in making sure that these new technologies are working together, but really focusing on how can I make an impact? How can I start to work in a better way with my clients? So the focus on business outcome, the focus on integrating multiple systems into a single consolidated approach has become so much more important, which is why the modernization of the underlying infrastructure is absolutely key. Without consolidation, without a simplification of the management and orchestration. And without the cloud enabled platform, you won't get there. >> So Stu that's key, what Joakim just said in terms of modernizing the application as being able to manage them, not as one big monolith, but integration with other key systems. So what are the options? Wikibon has done some research on this, but what are the options for modernizing workloads, whether it's on-Prem or off-prem and what are some of the trade offs there? >> Yeah, so Dave, first of all, you know, one of the biggest challenges out there is you don't just want to, you know, lift and shift. If anybody's read research for it from Wikibon, Dave, for a day, for the 10 years, I've been part of it talks about the challenges, if you just talk about migrating, because while it sounds simple, we understand that there are individual customizations that every customer's made. So you might get part of the way there, but there's often the challenges that will get in the way that could cause failure. And as we talked about for you, especially your mission-critical applications, those are the ones that you can't have downtime. So absolutely customers are reevaluating their application portfolio. You know, there are a lot of things to look at. First of all, if you can, certain things can be moved to SaaS. You've seen certain segments of the market. Absolutely SaaS can be preferred methodology, if you can go there. One of the biggest hurdles for SaaS of course, is there's retraining of the workforce. Certain applications they will embracing of that because they can take advantage of new features, get to be able to use that wherever they are. But in other cases, there are the SaaS doesn't have the capability or it doesn't fit into the workflow of the business. The cloud operating model is something we've been talking about it with you Dave, for many years. When you've seen rapid maturation of what originally was called "private cloud", but really was just virtualization plus with a little bit of a management layer on top. But now much of the automation that you build in AI technologies, you know, Trey's got a whole team working on things that if you talk to his team, it sounds very similar to what you had the same conversation should have with cloud providers. So "cloud" as an operating model, not a destination is what we're going for and being able to take advantage of automation and the like. So where your application sits, absolutely some consideration. And what we've talked about Dave, you know, the governance, the security, the reliability, the performance are all reasons why being able to keep things, you know, under my environment with an infrastructure that I have control over is absolutely one of the reasons why I might keep things more along a converged infrastructure, rather than just saying to go through the challenge of migration and optimizing and changing to something in a more of a cloud native methodology. >> What about technical debt? Trey, people talk about technical debt as a bad thing, what is technical debt? Why do I want to avoid it? And how can I avoid it? And specifically, I know, Trey, I've thrown a lot of questions at you yet, but what is it about converged infrastructure and its capabilities that helped me avoid that technical debt? >> Well, it's an interesting thing, when you deploy an environment to support a mission-critical application, you have to make a lot of implementation decisions. Some of those decisions may take you down a path that may have a finite life. And that once you reached the life expectancy of that particular configuration, you now have debt that you have to reconcile. You have to change that architecture, that configuration. And so what we do with converged infrastructure is we dedicate a team of product management, an entire product management organization, a team of engineers that treat the integrations of the architecture as a releases. And we think long range about how do we avoid not having to change the underlying architecture. And one of the greatest testaments to this is in our conversion infrastructure products over the last 11 years, we've only saw two major architectural changes while supporting generational changes in underlying infrastructure capabilities well beyond when we first started. So converged infrastructure approach is about how do we build an architecture that allows you to avoid those dead-end pathways in those integration decisions that you would normally have to make on your own. >> Joakim, I wanted to ask you, you've mentioned monolithic applications before. That's sort of, we're evolving beyond that with application architectures, but there's still a lot of monoliths out there so. And a lot of customers want to modernize those application and workloads. What, in your view, what are you seeing as the best path and the best practice for modernizing some of those monolithic workloads? >> Yeah, so Dave, as clients today are trying to build a new intelligent enterprise, which is one of SAP's leading a guidance today. They needed to start to look at how to integrate all these different systems and applications that we talked about before into the common business process framework that they have. So consolidating workloads from big data to HANA, non HANA systems, cloud, non-cloud applications into a single framework is an absolute key to that modernization strategy. The second thing which I also mentioned before is to take a new grip around orchestration and management. We know that as customers seek this intelligent approach with both analytical data, as well as experience and transactional data, we must look for new ways to orchestrate and manage those application workloads and data flows. And this is where we slowly, slowly enter into the world of a enterprise data strategy. And that's again, where converged as a very important part to play in order to build these next generation platforms that can both consolidate, simplify. And at the same time enable us to work in a cloud enabled fashion with our cloud operating model that most of our clients seek today. >> So Stu, why can't I just shove all this stuff into the public cloud and call it a day? >> Yeah, well, Dave, we've seen some people that, you know, I have a cloud first strategy and often those are the same companies that are quickly doing what we call "repatriation". I bristle a little bit when I hear these, because often it's, I've gone to the cloud without understanding how I take advantage of it, not understanding the full financial ramifications what I'm going to need to do. And therefore they quickly go back to a world that they understand. So, cloud is not a silver bullet. We understand in technology, Dave, you know, things are complicated. There's all the organizational operational pieces they do. There are excellent cloud services and it's really it's innovation. You know, how do I take advantage of the data that I have, how I allow my application to move forward and respond to the business. And really that is not something that only happens in the public clouds. If I can take advantage of infrastructure that gets me along that journey to more of a cloud model, I get the business results. So, you know, automation and APIs and everything and the Ops movement are not something that are only in the public clouds, but something that we should be embracing holistically. And absolutely, that ties into where today and tomorrow's converge infrastructure are going. >> Yeah, and to me, it comes down to the business case too. I mean, you have to look at the risk-reward. The risk of changing something that's actually working for your business versus what the payback is going to be. You know, if it ain't broken, don't fix it, but you may want to update it, change the oil every now and then, you know, maybe prune some deadwood and modernize it. But Trey, I want to come back to you. Let's take a look at some of the options that customers have. And there are a lot of options, as I said at the top. You've got do it yourself, you got a hyper-converged infrastructure, of course, converged infrastructure. What are you seeing as the use case for each of these deployment options? >> So, build your own. We're really talking about an organization that has the expertise in-house to understand the integration standards that they need to deploy to support their environment. And candidly, there are a lot of customers that have very unique application requirements that have very much customized to their environment. And they've invested in the expertise to be able to sustain that on an ongoing basis. And build your own is great for those folks. The next in converged infrastructure, where we're really talking about an external storage array with applications that need to use data services native to a storage array. And self-select compute for scaling that compute for their particular need, and owning that three tiers architecture and its associated integration, but not having to sustain it because it's converged. There are enormous number of applications out there that benefit from that. I think the third one was, you talked about hyper-converged. I'll go back to when we first introduced our hyper-converged product to the market. Which is now leading the industry for quite some time, VxRail. We had always said that customers will consume hyper-converged and converged for different use cases and different applications. The maturity of hyper-converged has come to the point where you can run virtually any application that you would like on it. And this comes down to really two vectors of consideration. One, am I going to run hyper-converged versus converged based on my operational preference? You know, hyper-converged incorporates software defined storage, predominantly a compute operating plane. Converge as mentioned previously uses that external storage array has some type of systems fabric and dedicated compute resources with access into those your operational preference is one aspect of it. And then having applications that need the data services of an external storage, primary storage array are the other aspect of deciding whether those two things are needed in your particular environment. We find more and more customers out there that have an investment of both, not one versus the other. That's not to say that there aren't customers that only have one, they exist, but a majority of customers have both. >> So Joakim, I want to come back to the sort of attributes from the application requirements perspective. When you think about mission-critical, you think about availability, scale, recoverability, data protection. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about those attributes. And again, what is it about converged infrastructure that that is the best fit and the right strategic fit for supporting those demanding applications and workloads? >> Now, when it comes to SAP, we're talking about clients and customers, most mission-critical data and information and applications. And hence the requirements on the underlying infrastructure is absolutely on the very top of what the IT organization needs to deliver. This is why, when we talk about SAP, the requirements for high availability protection disaster recovery is very, very high. And it doesn't only involve a single system. As mentioned before, SAP is not a standalone application, but rather a landscape of systems that needs to be kept consistent. And that's what a CI platform does so well. It can consolidate workloads, whether it's big data or the transactional standard workloads of SAP, ERP or UCC. The converged platforms are able to put the very highest of availability protection standards into this whole landscape and making a really unique platform for CI workloads. And at the same time, it enables our customers to accelerate those modernization journeys into things such as ML, AI, IOT, even blockchain scenarios, where we've built out our capabilities to accelerate these implementations with the help of the underlying CI platforms and the rest of the SAP environment. >> Got it. Stu, I want to go to you. You had mentioned before the cloud operating model and something that we've been talking about for a long time and Wikibon. So can converged infrastructure substantially mimic that cloud operating model and how so? What are the key ingredients of being able to create that experience on-prem? >> Yeah, well, Dave as, we've watched for more than the last decade, the cloud has looked more and more like some of the traditional enterprise things that we would look for and the infrastructure in private clouds have gone more and more cloud-like and embrace that model. So, you know, I got, I think back to the early days, Dave, we talked about how cloud was supposed to just be, you know, "simple". If you look at deploying in the cloud today, it is not simple at all that. There are so many choices out there, you know, way more than I had an initial data center. In the same way, you know, I think, you know, the original converged infrastructure from Dell, if you look at the feedback, the criticism was, you know, oh, you can have it in any color you want, as long as black, just like the Ford model T. But it was that simplicity and consistency that helped build out most of what we were talking about the cloud models I wanted to know that I had a reliable substrate platform to build on top of it. But if you talk about Dave today and in the future, what do we want? First of all, I need that operating model in a multicloud world. So, you know, we look at the environments that can spread, but beyond just a single cloud, because customers today have multiple environments, absolutely hybrid is a big piece of that. We look at what VMware's doing, look at Microsoft, Red Hat, even Amazon are extended beyond just a cloud and going into hybrid and multicloud models. Automation, a critical piece of that. And we've seen, you know, great leaps and bounds in the last couple of generations of what's happening in CI to take advantage of automation. Because we know we've gone beyond what humans can just manage themselves and therefore, you know, true automation is helping along those environments. So yes, absolutely, Dave. You know, that the lines are blurred between what the private cloud and the public cloud. And it's just that overall cloud operating model and helping customers to deal with their data and their applications, regardless of where it lives. >> Well, you know, Trey in the early days of cloud and conversion infrastructure, that homogeneity that Stu was talking about any color, as long as it's black. That was actually an advantage to removing labor costs, that consistency and that standardization. But I'm interested in how CI has evolved, its, you know, added in optionality. I mean Joakim was just talking about blockchain, so all kinds of new services. But how has CCI evolved in the better part of the last decade and what are some of the most recent innovations that people should be thinking about or aware of? >> So I think the underlying experience of CI has remained relatively constant. And we talk about the experience that customers get. So if you just look at the data that we've analyzed for over a decade now, you know, one of the data points that I love is 99% of our customers who buy CI say they have virtually no downtime anymore. And, that's a great testament. 84% of our customers say that they have that their IT operations run more efficiently. The reality around how we delivered that in the past was through services and humans performing these integrations and the upkeep associated with the sustaining of the architecture. What we've focused on at Dell Technologies is really bringing technologies that allow us to automate those human integrations and best practices. In such a way where they can become more repeatable and consumable by more customers. We don't have to have as many services folks deploying these systems as we did in the past. Because we're using software intelligence to embed that human knowledge that we used to rely on individuals exclusively for. So that's one of the aspects of the architecture. And then just taking advantage of all the new technologies that we've seen introduce over the last several years from all flash architectures and NVMe on the horizon, NVMe over fabric. All of these things as we orchestrate them in software will enable them to be more consumable by the average everyday customer. Therefore it becomes more economical for them to deploy infrastructure on premises to support mission-critical applications. >> So Stu, what about cloud and multicloud, how does CI support that? Where do those fit in? Are they relevant? >> Yeah, Dave, so absolutely. As I was talking about before, you know, customers have hybrid and multicloud environments and managing across these environments are pretty important. If I look at the Dell family, obviously they're leveraging heavily VMware as the virtualization layer. And VMware has been moving heavily as to how support containerized and incubates these environments and extend their management to not only what's happening in the data center, but into the cloud environment with VMware cloud. So, you know, management in a multicloud world Dave, is one of those areas that we definitely have some work to do. Something we've looked at Wikibon for the last few years. Is how will multicloud be different than multi-vendor? Because that was not something that the industry had done a great job of solving in the past. But you know, customers are looking to take advantage of the innovation, where it is in the services. And you know, the data first architecture is something that we see and therefore that will bring them to many services and many places. >> Oh yeah, I was talking before about in the early days of CI and even a lot of organizations, some organizations, anyway, there's still these sort of silos of, you know, storage, networking, compute resources. And you think about DevOps, where does DevOps fit into this whole equation? Maybe Stu you could take a stab at it and anybody else who wants to chime in. >> Yeah, so Dave, great, great point there. So, you know, when we talk about those silos, DevOps is one of those movements to really help the unifying force to help customers move faster. And so therefore the development team and the operations team are working together. Things like security are not a bolt-in but something that can happen along the entire path. A more recent addition to the DevOps movement also is something like FinOps. So, you know, how do we make sure that we're not just having finance sign off on things and look back every quarter, but in real time, understand how we're architecting things, especially in the cloud so that we remain responsible for that model. So, you know, speed is, you know, one of the most important pieces for business and therefore the DevOps movement, helping customers move faster and, you know, leverage and get value out of their infrastructure, their applications and their data. >> Yeah, I would add to this that I think the big transition for organizations, cause I've seen it in developing my own organization, is getting IT operators to think programmatically instead of configuration based. Use the tool to configure a device. Think about how do we create programmatic instruction to interacts with all of the devices that creates that cloud-like adaptation. Feeds in application level signaling to adapt and change the underlying configuration about that infrastructure to better run the application without relying upon an IT operator, a human to make a change. This, sort of thinking programmatically is I think one of the biggest obstacles that the industry face. And I feel really good about how we've attacked it, but there is a transformation within that dialogue that every organization is going to navigate through at their own pace. >> Yeah, infrastructure is code automation, this a fundamental to digital transformation. Joakim, I wonder if you could give us some insight as you talk to SAP customers, you know, in Europe, across the EMEA, how does the pandemic change this? >> I think the pandemic has accelerated some of the movements that we already saw in the SAP world. There is obviously a force for making sure that we get our financial budgets in shape and that we don't over spend on our cost levels. And therefore it's going to be very important to see how we can manage all these new revenue generating projects that IT organizations and business organizations have planned around new customer experience initiatives, new supply chain optimization. They know that they need to invest in these projects to stay competitive and to gain new competitive edge. And where CI plays an important part is in order to, first of all, keep costs down in all of these projects, make sure to deliver a standardized common platform upon which all these projects can be introduced. And then of course, making sure that availability and risks are kept high versus at a minimum, right? Risk low and availability at a record high, because we need to stay on with our clients and their demands. So I think again, CI is going to play a very important role. As we see customers go through this pandemic situation and needing to put pressure on both innovation and cost control at the same time. And this is where also our new upcoming data strategies will play a really important part as we need to leverage the data we have better, smarter and more efficient way. >> Got it. Okay guys, we're running out of time, but Trey, I wonder if you could, you know break out your telescope or your crystal ball, give us some visibility into the futures of converged infrastructure. What should we be expecting? >> So if you look at the last release of this last technology that we released in power one, it was all about automation. We'll build on that platform to integrate other converged capability. So if you look at the converged systems market hyper-converged is very much an element of that. And I think that we're trending to is recognizing that we can deliver an architecture that has hyper-converged and converged attributes all in a single architecture and then dial up the degrees of automation to create more adaptations for different type of application workloads, not just your traditional three tier application workloads, but also those microservices based applications that one may historically think, maybe it's best to that off premises. We feel very confident that we are delivering platforms out there today that can run more economically on premises, provide better security, better data governance, and a lot of the adaptations, the enhancements, the optimizations that we'll deliver in our converged platforms of the future about colliding new infrastructure models together, and introducing more levels of automation to have greater adaptations for applications that are running on it. >> Got it. Trey, we're going to give you the last word. You know, if you're an architect of a large organization, you've got some mission-critical workloads that, you know, you're really trying to protect. What's the takeaway? What's really the advice that you would give those folks thinking about the sort of near and midterm and even longterm? >> My advice is to understand that there are many options. We sell a lot of independent component technologies and data centers that run every organization's environment around the world. We sell packaged outcomes and hyper-converged and converged. And a lot of companies buy a little bit of build your own, they buy some converged, they buy some hyper-converged. I would employ everyone, especially in this climate to really evaluate the packaged offerings and understand how they can benefit their environment. And we recognize that everything that there's not one hammer and everything is a nail. That's why we have this broad portfolio of products that are designed to be utilized in the most efficient manners for those customers who are consuming our technologies. And converged and hyper-converge are merely another way to simplify the ongoing challenges that organizations have in managing their data estate and all of the technologies they're consuming at a rapid pace in concert with the investments that they're also making off premises. So this is very much the technologies that we talked today are very much things that organizations should research, investigate and utilize where they best fit in their organization. >> Awesome guys, and of course there's a lot of information at dell.com about that. Wikibon.com has written a lot about this and the many, many sources of information out there. Trey, Joakim, Stu thanks so much for the conversation. Really meaty, a lot of substance, really appreciate your time, thank you. >> Thank you guys. >> Thank you Dave. >> Thanks Dave. >> And everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE's studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> You know, businesses have a staggering number of options today to support mission-critical applications. And much of the world's mission-critical data happens to live on converged infrastructure. Converged infrastructure is really designed to support the most demanding workloads. Words like resilience, performance, scalability, recoverability, et cetera. Those are the attributes that define converged infrastructure. Now with COVID-19 the digital transformation mandate, as we all know has been accelerated and buyers are demanding more from their infrastructure, and in particular converged infrastructure. Hi everybody this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this power panel where we're going to explore converged infrastructure, look at its past, its present and its future. And we're going to explore several things. The origins of converged infrastructure, why CI even came about. And what's its historic role been in terms of supporting mission-critical applications. We're going to look at modernizing workloads. What are the opportunities and the risks and what's converged infrastructures role in that regard. How has converged infrastructure evolved? And how will it support cloud and multicloud? And ultimately what's the future of converged infrastructure look like? And to examine these issues, we have three great guests, Trey Layton is here. He is the senior vice president for converged infrastructure and software engineering and architecture at Dell Technologies. And he's joined by Joakim Zetterblad. Who's the director of the SAP practice for EMEA at Dell technologies. And our very own Stu Miniman. Stu is a senior analyst at Wikibon. Guys, great to see you all welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Great. >> Trey, I'm going to start with you. Take us back to the early days of converged infrastructure. Why was it even formed? Why was it created? >> Well, if you look back just over a decade ago, a lot of organizations were deploying virtualized environments. Everyone was consolidated on virtualization. A lot of technologies were emerging to enhance that virtualization outcome, meaning acceleration capabilities and storage arrays, networking. And there was a lot of complexity in integrating all of those underlying infrastructure technologies into a solution that would work reliably. You almost had to have a PhD and all of the best practices of many different companies integrations. And so we decided as Dell EMC, Dell Technologies to invest heavily in this area of manufacturing best practices and packaging them so that customers could acquire those technologies and already integrated fully regression tested architecture that could sustain virtually any type of workload that a company would run. And candidly that packaging, that rigor around testing produced a highly reliable product that customers now rely on heavily to operationalize greater efficiencies and run their most critical applications that power their business and ultimately the world economy. >> Now Stu, cause you were there. I was as well at the early days of the original announcement of CI. Looking back and sort of bringing it forward Stu, what was the business impact of converged infrastructure? >> Well, Dave as Trey was talking about it was that wave of virtualization had gone from, you know, just supporting many applications to being able to support all of your applications. And especially if you talk about those high value, you know business mission, critical applications, you want to make sure that you've got a reliable foundation. What the Dell tech team has done for years is make sure that they fully understand, you know the life cycle of testing that needs to happen. And you don't need to worry about, you know, what integration testing you need to do, looking at support major CS and doing a lot of your own sandbox testing, which for the most part was what enterprises needed to do. You said, okay, you know, I get the gear, I load the virtualization and then I have to see, you know, tweak everything to figure out how my application works. The business impact Dave, is you want to spend more time focusing on the business, not having to turn all the dials and worry about, do I get the performance I need? Does it have the reliability uptime that we need? And especially if we're talking about those business critical applications, of course, these are the ones that are running 24 by seven and if they go down, my business goes down with it. >> Yeah, and of course, you know, one of the other major themes we saw with conversion infrastructure was really attacking the IT labor problem. You had separate compute or server teams, storage teams, networking teams, they oftentimes weren't talking together. So there was a lot of inefficiency that converged infrastructure was designed to attack. But I want to come to the SAP expert. Joakim, that's really your wheelhouse. What is it about converged infrastructure that makes it suitable for SAP application specifically? >> You know, if you look at a classic SAP client today, there's really three major transformational waves that all SAP customers are faced with today, it's the move to S/4HANA, the introduction of this new platform, which needs to happen before 2027. It's the introduction of a multicloud cloud or operating model. And last but not least, it is the introduction of new digitization or intelligent technologies such as IOT, machine learning or artificial intelligence. And that drove to the need of a platform that could address all these three transformational waves. It came with a lot of complexity, increased costs, increased risk. And what CI did so uniquely was to provide that Edge to Core to Cloud strategy. Fully certified for both HANA, non HANA workloads for the classical analytical and transactional workloads, as well as the new modernization technologies such as IOT, machine learning, big data and analytics. And that created a huge momentum for converged in our SAP accounts. >> So Trey, I want to go to you cause you're the deep technical expert here. Joakim just mentioned uniqueness. So what are the unique characteristics of converged infrastructure that really make it suitable for handling the most demanding workloads? >> Well, converged infrastructure by definition is the integration of an external storage array with a highly optimized compute platform. And when we build best practices around integrating those technologies together, we essentially package optimizations that allow a customer to increase the quantity of users that are accessing those workloads or the applications that are driving database access in such a way where you can predictably understand consumption and utilization in your environment. Those packaged integrations are kind of like. You know, I have a friend that owns a race car shop and he has all kinds of expertise to build cars, but he has a vehicle that he buys is his daily driver. The customization that they've created to build race cars are great for the race cars that go on the track, but he's building a car on his own, it didn't make any sense. And so what customers found was the ability to acquire a packaged infrastructure with all these infrastructure optimizations, where we package these best practices that gave customers a reliable, predictable, and fully supported integration, so they didn't have to spend 20 hour support calls trying to discover and figure out what particular customization that they had employed for their application, that had some issue that they needed to troubleshoot and solve. This became a standard out of the box integration that the best and the brightest package so that customers can consume it at scale. >> So Joakim, I want to ask you let's take the sort of application view. Let's sort of flip the picture a little bit and come at it from that prism. How, if you think about like core business applications, how have they evolved over the better part of the last decade and specifically with regard to the mission-critical processes? >> So what we're seeing in the process industry and in the industry of mission-critical applications is that they have gone from being very monolithic systems where we literally saw a single ERP components such as all three or UCC. Whereas today customers are faced with a landscape of multiple components. Many of them working both on and off premise, there are multicloud strategies in place. And as we mentioned before, with the introduction of new IOT technologies, we see that there is a flow of information of data that requires a whole new set of infrastructure of components of tools to make these new processes happen. And of course, the focus in the end of the day is all on business outcomes. So what industries and companies doesn't want to do is to focus all their time in making sure that these new technologies are working together, but really focusing on how can I make an impact? How can I start to work in a better way with my clients? So the focus on business outcome, the focus on integrating multiple systems into a single consolidated approach has become so much more important, which is why the modernization of the underlying infrastructure is absolutely key. Without consolidation, without a simplification of the management and orchestration. And without the cloud enabled platform, you won't get there. >> So Stu that's key, what Joakim just said in terms of modernizing the application as being able to manage them, not as one big monolith, but integration with other key systems. So what are the options? Wikibon has done some research on this, but what are the options for modernizing workloads, whether it's on-Prem or off-prem and what are some of the trade offs there? >> Yeah, so Dave, first of all, you know, one of the biggest challenges out there is you don't just want to, you know, lift and shift. If anybody's read research for it from Wikibon, Dave, for a day, for the 10 years, I've been part of it talks about the challenges, if you just talk about migrating, because while it sounds simple, we understand that there are individual customizations that every customer's made. So you might get part of the way there, but there's often the challenges that will get in the way that could cause failure. And as we talked about for you, especially your mission-critical applications, those are the ones that you can't have downtime. So absolutely customers are reevaluating their application portfolio. You know, there are a lot of things to look at. First of all, if you can, certain things can be moved to SAS. You've seen certain segments of the market. Absolutely SAS can be preferred methodology, if you can go there. One of the biggest hurdles for SAS of course, is there's retraining of the workforce. Certain applications they will embracing of that because they can take advantage of new features, get to be able to use that wherever they are. But in other cases, there are the SAS doesn't have the capability or it doesn't fit into the workflow of the business. The cloud operating model is something we've been talking about it with you Dave, for many years. When you've seen rapid maturation of what originally was called "private cloud", but really was just virtualization plus with a little bit of a management layer on top. But now much of the automation that you build in AI technologies, you know, Trey's got a whole team working on things that if you talk to his team, it sounds very similar to what you had the same conversation should have with cloud providers. So "cloud" as an operating model, not a destination is what we're going for and being able to take advantage of automation and the like. So where your application sits, absolutely some consideration. And what we've talked about Dave, you know, the governance, the security, the reliability, the performance are all reasons why being able to keep things, you know, under my environment with an infrastructure that I have control over is absolutely one of the reasons why am I keep things more along a converged infrastructure, rather than just saying to go through the challenge of migration and optimizing and changing to something in a more of a cloud native methodology. >> What about technical debt? Trey, people talk about technical debt as a bad thing, what is technical debt? Why do I want to avoid it? And how can I avoid it? And specifically, I know, Trey, I've thrown a lot of questions at you yet, but what is it about converged infrastructure and its capabilities that helped me avoid that technical debt? >> Well, it's an interesting thing, when you deploy an environment to support a mission-critical application, you have to make a lot of implementation decisions. Some of those decisions may take you down a path that may have a finite life. And that once you reached the life expectancy of that particular configuration, you now have debt that you have to reconcile. You have to change that architecture, that configuration. And so what we do with converged infrastructure is we dedicate a team of product management, an entire product management organization, a team of engineers that treat the integrations of the architecture as a releases. And we think long range about how do we avoid not having to change the underlying architecture. And one of the greatest testaments to this is in our conversion infrastructure products over the last 11 years, we've only saw two major architectural changes while supporting generational changes in underlying infrastructure capabilities well beyond when we first started. So converged infrastructure approach is about how do we build an architecture that allows you to avoid those dead-end pathways in those integration decisions that you would normally have to make on your own. >> Joakim, I wanted to ask you, you've mentioned monolithic applications before. That's sort of, we're evolving beyond that with application architectures, but there's still a lot of monoliths out there so. And a lot of customers want to modernize those application and workloads. What, in your view, what are you seeing as the best path and the best practice for modernizing some of those monolithic workloads? >> Yeah, so Dave, as clients today are trying to build a new intelligent enterprise, which is one of SAP's leading a guidance today. They needed to start to look at how to integrate all these different systems and applications that we talked about before into the common business process framework that they have. So consolidating workloads from big data to HANA, non HANA systems, cloud, non-cloud applications into a single framework is an absolute key to that modernization strategy. The second thing which I also mentioned before is to take a new grip around orchestration and management. We know that as customers seek this intelligent approach with both analytical data, as well as experience and transactional data, we must look for new ways to orchestrate and manage those application workloads and data flows. And this is where we slowly, slowly enter into the world of a enterprise data strategy. And that's again, where converged as a very important part to play in order to build these next generation platforms that can both consolidate, simplify. And at the same time enable us to work in a cloud enabled fashion with our cloud operating model that most of our clients seek today. >> So Stu, why can't I just shove all this stuff into the public cloud and call it a day? >> Yeah, well, Dave, we've seen some people that, you know, I have a cloud first strategy and often those are the same companies that are quickly doing what we call "repatriation". I bristle a little bit when I hear these, because often it's, I've gone to the cloud without understanding how I take advantage of it, not understanding the full financial ramifications what I'm going to need to do. And therefore they quickly go back to a world that they understand. So, cloud is not a silver bullet. We understand in technology, Dave, you know, things are complicated. There's all the organizational operational pieces they do. There are excellent cloud services and it's really it's innovation. You know, how do I take advantage of the data that I have, how I allow my application to move forward and respond to the business. And really that is not something that only happens in the public clouds. If I can take advantage of infrastructure that gets me along that journey to more of a cloud model, I get the business results. So, you know, automation and APIs and everything and the Ops movement are not something that are only in the public clouds, but something that we should be embracing holistically. And absolutely, that ties into where today and tomorrow's converge infrastructure are going. >> Yeah, and to me, it comes down to the business case too. I mean, you have to look at the risk-reward. The risk of changing something that's actually working for your business versus what the payback is going to be. You know, if it ain't broken, don't fix it, but you may want to update it, change the oil every now and then, you know, maybe prune some deadwood and modernize it. But Trey, I want to come back to you. Let's take a look at some of the options that customers have. And there are a lot of options, as I said at the top. You've got do it yourself, you got a hyper-converged infrastructure, of course, converged infrastructure. What are you seeing as the use case for each of these deployment options? >> So, build your own. We're really talking about an organization that has the expertise in-house to understand the integration standards that they need to deploy to support their environment. And candidly, there are a lot of customers that have very unique application requirements that have very much customized to their environment. And they've invested in the expertise to be able to sustain that on an ongoing basis. And build your own is great for those folks. The next in converged infrastructure, where we're really talking about an external storage array with applications that need to use data services native to a storage array. And self-select compute for scaling that compute for their particular need, and owning that three tiers architecture and its associated integration, but not having to sustain it because it's converged. There are enormous number of applications out there that benefit from that. I think the third one was, you talked about hyper-converged. I'll go back to when we first introduced our hyper-converged product to the market. Which is now leading the industry for quite some time, VxRail. We had always said that customers will consume hyper-converged and converged for different use cases and different applications. The maturity of hyper-converged has come to the point where you can run virtually any application that you would like on it. And this comes down to really two vectors of consideration. One, am I going to run hyper-converged versus converged based on my operational preference? You know, hyper-converged incorporates software defined storage, predominantly a compute operating plane. Converge as mentioned previously uses that external storage array has some type of systems fabric and dedicated compute resources with access into those your operational preference is one aspect of it. And then having applications that need the data services of an external storage, primary storage array are the other aspect of deciding whether those two things are needed in your particular environment. We find more and more customers out there that have an investment of both, not one versus the other. That's not to say that there aren't customers that only have one, they exist, but a majority of customers have both. >> So Joakim, I want to come back to the sort of attributes from the application requirements perspective. When you think about mission-critical, you think about availability, scale, recoverability, data protection. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about those attributes. And again, what is it about converged infrastructure that that is the best fit and the right strategic fit for supporting those demanding applications and workloads? >> Now, when it comes to SAP, we're talking about clients and customers, most mission-critical data and information and applications. And hence the requirements on the underlying infrastructure is absolutely on the very top of what the IT organization needs to deliver. This is why, when we talk about SAP, the requirements for high availability protection disaster recovery is very, very high. And it doesn't only involve a single system. As mentioned before, SAP is not a standalone application, but rather a landscape of systems that needs to be kept consistent. And that's what a CI platform does so well. It can consolidate workloads, whether it's big data or the transactional standard workloads of SAP, ERP or UCC. The converged platforms are able to put the very highest of availability protection standards into this whole landscape and making a really unique platform for CI workloads. And at the same time, it enables our customers to accelerate those modernization journeys into things such as ML, AI, IOT, even blockchain scenarios, where we've built out our capabilities to accelerate these implementations with the help of the underlying CI platforms and the rest of the SAP environment. >> Got it. Stu, I want to go to you. You had mentioned before the cloud operating model and something that we've been talking about for a long time and Wikibon. So can converged infrastructure substantially mimic that cloud operating model and how so? What are the key ingredients of being able to create that experience on-prem? >> Yeah, well, Dave is, we've watched for more than the last decade, the cloud has looked more and more like some of the traditional enterprise things that we would look for and the infrastructure in private clouds have gone more and more cloud-like and embrace that model. So, you know, I got, I think back to the early days, Dave, we talked about how cloud was supposed to just be, you know, "simple". If you look at deploying in the cloud today, it is not simple at all that. There are so many choices out there, you know, way more than I had an initial data center. In the same way, you know, I think, you know, the original converged infrastructure from Dell, if you look at the feedback, the criticism was, you know, oh, you can have it in any color you want, as long as black, just like the Ford model T. But it was that simplicity and consistency that helped build out most of what we were talking about the cloud models I wanted to know that I had a reliable substrate platform to build on top of it. But if you talk about Dave today and in the future, what do we want? First of all, I need that operating model in a multicloud world. So, you know, we look at the environments that can spread, but beyond just a single cloud, because customers today have multiple environments, absolutely hybrid is a big piece of that. We look at what VMware's doing, look at Microsoft, Red Hat, even Amazon are extended beyond just a cloud and going into hybrid and multicloud models. Automation, a critical piece of that. And we've seen, you know, great leaps and bounds in the last couple of generations of what's happening in CI to take advantage of automation. Because we know we've gone beyond what humans can just manage themselves and therefore, you know, true automation is helping along those environments. So yes, absolutely, Dave. You know, that the lines are blurred between what the private cloud and the public cloud. And it's just that overall cloud operating model and helping customers to deal with their data and their applications, regardless of where it is. >> Well, you know, Trey in the early days of cloud and conversion infrastructure, that homogeneity that Stu was talking about any color, as long as it's black. That was actually an advantage to removing labor costs, that consistency and that standardization. But I'm interested in how CI has evolved, its, you know, added in optionality. I mean Joakim was just talking about blockchain, so all kinds of new services. But how has CCI evolved in the better part of the last decade and what are some of the most recent innovations that people should be thinking about or aware of? >> So I think the underlying experience of CI has remained relatively constant. And we talk about the experience that customers get. So if you just look at the data that we've analyzed for over a decade now, you know, one of the data points that I love is 99% of our customers who buy CI say they have virtually no downtime anymore. And, that's a great testament. 84% of our customers say that they have that their IT operations run more efficiently. The reality around how we delivered that in the past was through services and humans performing these integrations and the upkeep associated with the sustaining of the architecture. What we've focused on at Dell Technologies is really bringing technologies that allow us to automate those human integrations and best practices. In such a way where they can become more repeatable and consumable by more customers. We don't have to have as many services folks deploying these systems as we did in the past. Because we're using software intelligence to embed that human knowledge that we used to rely on individuals exclusively for. So that's one of the aspects of the architecture. And then just taking advantage of all the new technologies that we've seen introduce over the last several years from all flash architectures and NVMe on the horizon, NVMe over fabric. All of these things as we orchestrate them in software will enable them to be more consumable by the average everyday customer. Therefore it becomes more economical for them to deploy infrastructure on premises to support mission-critical applications. >> So Stu, what about cloud and multicloud, how does CI support that? Where do those fit in? Are they relevant? >> Yeah, Dave, so absolutely. As I was talking about before, you know, customers have hybrid and multicloud environments and managing across these environments are pretty important. If I look at the Dell family, obviously they're leveraging heavily VMware as the virtualization layer. And VMware has been moving heavily as to how support containerized and incubates these environments and extend their management to not only what's happening in the data center, but into the cloud environment with VMware cloud. So, you know, management in a multicloud world Dave, is one of those areas that we definitely have some work to do. Something we've looked at Wikibon for the last few years. Is how will multicloud be different than multi-vendor? Because that was not something that the industry had done a great job of solving in the past. But you know, customers are looking to take advantage of the innovation, where it is in the services. And you know, the data first architecture is something that we see and therefore that will bring them to many services and many places. >> Oh yeah, I was talking before about in the early days of CI and even a lot of organizations, some organizations, anyway, there's still these sort of silos of, you know, storage, networking, compute resources. And you think about DevOps, where does DevOps fit into this whole equation? Maybe Stu you could take a stab at it and anybody else who wants to chime in. >> Yeah, so Dave, great, great point there. So, you know, when we talk about those silos, DevOps is one of those movements to really help the unifying force to help customers move faster. And so therefore the development team and the operations team are working together. Things like security are not a built-in but something that can happen along the entire path. A more recent addition to the DevOps movement also is something like FinOps. So, you know, how do we make sure that we're not just having finance sign off on things and look back every quarter, but in real time, understand how we're architecting things, especially in the cloud so that we remain responsible for that model. So, you know, speed is, you know, one of the most important pieces for business and therefore the DevOps movement, helping customers move faster and, you know, leverage and get value out of their infrastructure, their applications and their data. >> Yeah, I would add to this that I think the big transition for organizations, cause I've seen it in developing my own organization, is getting IT operators to think programmatically instead of configuration based. Use the tool to configure a device. Think about how do we create programmatic instruction to interacts with all of the devices that creates that cloud-like adaptation. Feeds in application level signaling to adapt and change the underlying configuration about that infrastructure to better run the application without relying upon an IT operator, a human to make a change. This, sort of thinking programmatically is I think one of the biggest obstacles that the industry face. And I feel really good about how we've attacked it, but there is a transformation within that dialogue that every organization is going to navigate through at their own pace. >> Yeah, infrastructure is code automation, this a fundamental to digital transformation. Joakim, I wonder if you could give us some insight as you talk to SAP customers, you know, in Europe, across the EMEA, how does the pandemic change this? >> I think the pandemic has accelerated some of the movements that we already saw in the SAP world. There is obviously a force for making sure that we get our financial budgets in shape and that we don't over spend on our cost levels. And therefore it's going to be very important to see how we can manage all these new revenue generating projects that IT organizations and business organizations have planned around new customer experience initiatives, new supply chain optimization. They know that they need to invest in these projects to stay competitive and to gain new competitive edge. And where CI plays an important part is in order to, first of all, keep costs down in all of these projects, make sure to deliver a standardized common platform upon which all these projects can be introduced. And then of course, making sure that availability and risks are kept high versus at a minimum, right? Risk low and availability at a record high, because we need to stay on with our clients and their demands. So I think again, CI is going to play a very important role. As we see customers go through this pandemic situation and needing to put pressure on both innovation and cost control at the same time. And this is where also our new upcoming data strategies will play a really important part as we need to leverage the data we have better, smarter and more efficient way. >> Got it. Okay guys, we're running out of time, but Trey, I wonder if you could, you know break out your telescope or your crystal ball, give us some visibility into the futures of converged infrastructure. What should we be expecting? So if you look at the last release of this last technology that we released in power one, it was all about automation. We'll build on that platform to integrate other converged capability. So if you look at the converged systems market hyper-converged is very much an element of that. And I think that we're trending to is recognizing that we can deliver an architecture that has hyper-converged and converged attributes all in a single architecture and then dial up the degrees of automation to create more adaptations for different type of application workloads, not just your traditional three tier application workloads, but also those microservices based applications that one may historically think, maybe it's best to that off premises. We feel very confident that we are delivering platforms out there today that can run more economically on premises, provide better security, better data governance, and a lot of the adaptations, the enhancements, the optimizations that we'll deliver in our converged platforms of the future about colliding new infrastructure models together, and introducing more levels of automation to have greater adaptations for applications that are running on it. >> Got it. Trey, we're going to give you the last word. You know, if you're an architect of a large organization, you've got some mission-critical workloads that, you know, you're really trying to protect. What's the takeaway? What's really the advice that you would give those folks thinking about the sort of near and midterm and even longterm? >> My advice is to understand that there are many options. We sell a lot of independent component technologies and data centers that run every organization's environment around the world. We sell packaged outcomes and hyper-converged and converged. And a lot of companies buy a little bit of build your own, they buy some converged, they buy some hyper-converged. I would employ everyone, especially in this climate to really evaluate the packaged offerings and understand how they can benefit their environment. And we recognize that everything that there's not one hammer and everything is a nail. That's why we have this broad portfolio of products that are designed to be utilized in the most efficient manners for those customers who are consuming our technologies. And converged and hyper-converge are merely another way to simplify the ongoing challenges that organizations have in managing their data estate and all of the technologies they're consuming at a rapid pace in concert with the investments that they're also making off premises. So this is very much the technologies that we talked today are very much things that organizations should research, investigate and utilize where they best fit in their organization. >> Awesome guys, and of course there's a lot of information at dell.com about that. Wikibon.com has written a lot about this and the many, many sources of information out there. Trey, Joakim, Stu thanks so much for the conversation. Really meaty, a lot of substance, really appreciate your time, thank you. >> Thank you guys. >> Thank you Dave. >> Thanks Dave. >> And everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering IBM Think 2019. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hey, welcome back everyone, we're here live with theCUBE's coverage in San Francisco, the Moscone Center for IBM Think 2019. I'm John Furrier, my co-host David Vellante. Dave, we've been doing theCUBE 10 years, our second ever CUBE event was SAP SAPPHIRE, so going back into the archives. >> Great memories. >> SAP, we've been watching the SAP evolve, we've got two guests from SAP. Scot Henney, Global VP of SAP Customer Experience CX and Marcus Venth, who's a Global VP of S/4HANA, Business and Market Development, talking about enterprise, intelligence, making data, making it reason. We've been covering you guys and I got to say, Bill McDermott has always been on the front wave of all the big waves. He was talking about data and iPads right at the beginning. And the things he was talking about in 2012, 2013 is what everyone is doing today. >> Yes. >> This has been a big part of SAP, not new to you this transformation, how's the journey going? How's the partnership going with IBM? >> So, the relationship that we have with IBM is, I guess, about 40 years old and we're not even halfway done yet. You know, we're still working together and successfully delivering great business outcomes for our customers, and I think that's because not only do you have great global reach and scale, but you also understand how data and business processes impact business outcomes. Both in the back office and also in the front office too. So you were mentioning Bill McDermott. We have a phrase with inside SAP CX called, "Be Bold." Right, it's really taken in on the mantra for us and we're making some really bold acquisitions with inside the front office space. So, one of the ones he's done recently that's really focused on data is around Qualtrics. >> Yeah Huge, huge acquisition for us about experiential data and how we bring that back to organizations and we're really keen to work with IBM on that too. >> He said that was a game changer on his press conference. I watched that, I was really interesting acquisition. >> Yeah, bold move. >> Because you bring in real time data, you bring in real telemetry, real analytics, all this stuff together in a kind of new powerful way, with an existing system that SAP has been powering business software, in all these apps, what does it mean? Does this make this enterprise more intelligent, is that where is connects? What's some of the key things there? >> So, that's a really good question. So, if you can connect the back office to the front office and then create trusted relationships, then you're going to deliver a better customer experience. And that has a huge impact on shareholder value. Specifically around Qualtrics. That enables to move that next level on into what we call the experience economy. So, not only do we understand implicit data and explicit data like you were just saying before, how many people have just seen that mail, but also how they react to you. But we could also say, "What do they feel about you? "What else would they like you to do?" "What relationship do they currently have with you "and what would they like to see improve?" >> This is interesting, one of the things we talk about all the time at theCUBE is, you know, 'cause we're in the information business, we're a media company. Information's everywhere. >> Yeah >> It's knowledge and experience is the new thread. >> Totally. >> So the outcome is the word you used to use but now you're thinking, okay, if experience and presence and knowledge, this is a new kind of user experience. Is that what the intelligent enterprise is? I mean, what is the intelligent enterprise? Give us the definition. >> Right, so I think I can take that one. So, simplistically it's about taking data that you've referenced earlier on and applying new technologies to ultimately make business processes or optimize business process or come up with entirely new business models. You know, we talk about Uber and Airbnb and all these but the reality is that there are new business models being enacted within certain industries. Whether it's direct to consumer type changes or changes moving from a productized, or selling products to selling services. And so when we look at intelligent enterprise it's about taking your business partners, which are the stakeholders that make you as a company successful, that would be your customers, your suppliers, your employees and connecting them. And then ultimately leveraging the data that you're collecting as part of those business processes, applying machine learning technology, and then looking at how can we make that more efficient, or how can we now leverage that data to create new insights that then tie in to the customer experience side of things. >> You know it's interesting, John, you talk about McDermott during the big data craze. Bill McDermott never really used that term, at least not that much, but he did talk about the importance of fast data being able to respond quickly. Obviously SAP customers have a lot of data. And so you've got this platform now, this sort of data platform. How are customers making investments to, sort of, alter or modernize that data platform for this purpose? >> So, the digital platform is really interesting because what we're looking for if we look at the sort of components of an intelligent enterprise is three components. There's the intelligence suite which includes the digital core, then there's the platform, and then we have the intelligent technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence wrapped around all of that. The platform is really helping our customers get to a more standardized approach. Where it's helping them integrate the applications within the suite. It's also a platform with which they can then implement these machine learning scenarios. It's a platform which with they can innovate and build new applications and allowing them to do that means that they can keep their core standard. And that's the key now as customers are thinking more and more about moving to the cloud, it's all about how do I keep my core clean and standard and allow myself to take advantage of those innovations and then move some of those customer specific innovations to the platform and then layer a UI on top of that, that basically means the end user doesn't know which system they're in, they're just leveraging an integrated suite. >> Substracting all the complexities and all that intelligence out. >> Yeah >> What are the obstacles for, it sounds easy, but it's not, it's hard. What are the obstacles, what's it take? Culture, we always talk about cultural sift. >> I mean, the easy, easy one is the organizational challenges, right? We see that the executive support, the charter, having clearly defined objectives and having the talent in-house that has the courage and the skillset to implement those changes. But I think one of the biggest challenges we see touches on what I was saying before where we have a highly customized environment with lots of disparate applications that really are poorly integrated and then trying to get the customers to then move that to a new platform is very difficult. So, with that, they need the courage, in many cases, to leave that stuff behind, right? >> Completely, and I completely concur. So that's the same challenge that we find in the front office. So, we aim to create a phenomenal experience platform for our clients, but unless they're reorganized internally, to remove those siloed thinking around what do sales do, what does marketing do, then they're not going to be able to fully utilize the tools and platforms that we deliver. So, it's actually about a mind shift change and about focusing on the customer. >> I'd like to get your perspective, since you're here, 'cause we go to a lot of events, we go to 120 events last year. We go to CloudNative, Computing Foundation, AWS re:Invent, we're here at IBM Think, we used to go to SAP Sapphire, but that's a different story. But one of the things we hear about is we see new trends like Kubernetes and containers. People are doing it, but they're doing it kind of like in an experimental way, or doing it, you guys are actually implementing technology with customers. >> Yes >> Integrating it in, like, mission critical kind of integrations. You're not standing up to Kubernetes, saying, "Hey we've got a Kubernetes cluster, look at this." In one or two apps, what's your experience with it 'round the integration? Because putting these piece parts together is hard. What are some of the trends that your customers are doing around really standing up cloud-native, intelligent enterprise, apps, what is some of the real use cases that our people are doing? >> I guess first of all, if we're dealing with the SAP portfolio, we're delivering a lot of those integration points out of the box, so that sort of takes away a lot of the guesswork when we talk about integrating sort of disparate applications. And I think one of the key aspects of that is just having, the plumbing is not good enough. You really need to have a data strategy around that where our data hub is then able to provide a consistent master record strategy. Where these systems can then seamlessly talk to each other. 'Cause one of the biggest problems in integrations is not the plumbing, it's actually having these systems being able to talk to each other and rationalize this information. >> Can we, maybe, do a before and after example? I mean, take a supply chain example. So, what's the before look like? What's the after, ideal after state look like, or the sort of outcome that you're looking for? >> So let's take an example, right? Let's say you're buying goods from a supplier and you now want to be connected to that supplier so that you can see where those goods are in transit. And then you want to be notified when there's a delay in those goods so that they can then adjust your production plan to make sure you're still accommodating a customer's order cycle. Now let's say, for instance, that we start recognizing a pattern, or the system starts recognizing a pattern, that every February we seem to see a five day delay, for whatever reason. Now the system can automatically start applying an additional lead time and accommodating for those changes automatically. So, that's what we think of when we think about an intelligent enterprise. It's about an enterprise that live and able to adjust and therefore able to build the trust with the customers in order to fulfill their expectations. >> I think that's a really, really important point. Can I answer that from a customer perspective? >> Yeah, please. >> Please. >> Because we're all consumers as well, of services, and also within our business lives. I think what you want, as a customer, after you've used our services and our systems, is you want to be treated like a person, right? And you want to feel like your data has been treated with some respect, yeah? And then you want to feel that promise that customer has, sorry, that business offered you is being kept. So, you want to be treated like a person, I wasn't just a transaction to you. You understand what I needed, right? And then, you treated my data appropriately. I can trust you with our relationship and I know that you're going to fill in the promise. That's what our platform delivers >> Yeah, 100%, I mean-- >> Yeah >> I ordered something, I want to know if it's not here when you said it was going to be here? I want you to either tell me, tell me why, or do something about it, not force me to call you and find out. I mean that's, it's proactive, it's anticipatory. Not reactive, or no active. >> You got it and that can only be done if you integrate the front office to the back office. And that's what IBM and SAP are working on right now. >> That's great, I mean, that's the greatest segue into my question, which is, here in San Francisco IBM Think 2019, moved from Vegas, now they're doing so, so great. Great venue 30,000 people. What kind of conversations were you guys having here at the show? Take us through a kind of day in the life. What kind of meetings did you have, what were people talking about, what's on the top of minds of meetings, your customers, and your partners at IBM? >> Well, from my perspective, there's a lot of discussion around how to move toward the cloud and what tools we have available, and so with the collaboration with IBM, they've made a tremendous investment in SAP and SAP technologies. They've built the impact assessment tools to help customers evaluate the value and the cost of making that move. And they've also invested in the impact solution, which is the content and pre-configuration to help accelerate implementations and move towards that standard. So, a lot of the discussions I'm having with customers are taking mission critical applications and moving them to the cloud. with the support of partners like that, yeah. >> And at a speed What kind of speed? It used to be weeks, months, days, now what? Cycle time for moving. >> If you go to some of those presentations there's 12, 16 week implementations out there, right? >> And when you say moving to the cloud one could infer actually moving but it may not be moving, it may be bringing the cloud model or operating model to the data, is that fair? >> Absolutely So, when we're looking at the cloud, it's not necessarily a wholesale shift. It could be a hybrid model where we're bringing subsidiaries up on the cloud and looking at more of a two tier deployment model where we're looking at an on-prem for the core business and cloud models for subsidiaries. >> It's funny the apps are driving dictating workloads or dictating what resources and architecture to it. >> So, I've had some really exciting conversations here. I was really really impressed with the conversations I had with the IX teams in IBM but also with the GBS teams. >> What's the IX teams? >> They're a-- >> Experience. >> Okay, okay. >> VR, ART, cool stuff. >> That's it, really, really cool, forward-thinking group of design-thinking experts focused on customer experience. So, the total adjustable market opportunity for CX, commerce, marketing, sales, service is over 30 billion per year. So, I don't have to come in and tell anyone what the size of the market opportunity is, the question is, where do we begin, because there is so much opportunity ahead of us. All of our market is investing around, how do I deliver better customer experience, and that's because it has a really tangible business impact. I mean, I guess, 80% of consumers have said that they have changed brands because of poor customer experience. That's a huge financial cost. And organizations that deliver better customer experience have over 200% more shareholder value delivered back. So, we've got a great business case\ and a great platform, where do we point the gun? >> You know, they bring up a good point, I want to hear your thoughts. Dave and I, internally our research team, had looked at all the successful companies that we cover. >> Yeah >> And look at the successful ones, and, you know, the not so successful ones, and look at why they are successful. And the winners, at the top of the heap, have design thinking in all of their methodologies. >> Yes >> We just had Accenture's Innovation kickoff last week. Design thinking is at the core of this. Can you give us your view on why that's the case? I mean, I'll see, I'm thinking design, is that just customer experience? Is having more or other impacts in terms of other aspects of tech, why is design thinking such a critical component, design thinking a critical component, of these new innovations? >> 'Cause I think people are, okay. So I think thinking is the operative word there. You've got to think about your customer and what they want from you. And what you've got to think about is how do I deliver a service that is compelling to you, rather than a product you may want through a channel you may choose to buy on? So, if you look at all of those organizations, they've gone through that process of thinking, "How does digital improve my customer relationship?" Because ultimately, if you don't own your customer, then you're out of business really soon. >> Marcus, bring intelligent enterprise now in context to that. Does that close the loop on intelligent enterprise equals customer relationships and impact on outcome? Am I, how does that-- >> Intelligent enterprise definitely plays a part in that, right? So I mean, when we're looking at the intelligent enterprise, especially the intelligent suite, we're really tying all the interim components together. Whether it's dealing with your employees, your suppliers, or your customers, right? So, it's really about the full end-to-end process. My particular area is around the digital core, so that's order to cash, procure to pay, order fulfillment, revenue, these are mission critical applications, right? So, when it comes to making that transformation this is not just some thing that you want to take lightly. That's where the partnership with IBM and SAP really counts. 'Cause those are the sort of partners that you want with that kind of transformation. >> You know what's interesting John? I'll make an observation. If we go back to the early days of ERP >> Yeah >> It wasn't clear that SAP was going to win. It was hard to squint through. But if you could've bet on the companies, invested in the companies who adopted ERP early, despite its complexity and the time it took, you actually could have made a lot of money. Because those companies won in the end. And I feel like you guys are on the cusp of the intelligent enterprise narrative of the next wave of competitive advantage. >> If you combine experiential data with operational data, we're going to blow past the competition and create a whole new market category. Thanks for that observation. I completely agree. >> Yeah, and it's back to your front office back office qualigers and that's why McDermott was all giddy about the acquisition. He was like a kid in a candy store. >> We're all in. >> A spring in his step. >> We're all in. >> We don't want Billy, he's already cool. >> Be bold, be bold >> Yeah. He must do a lot of handshakes. Guys, thanks for coming on theCube. Thanks for sharing that insight. Thanks for clarifying the SAP position. Great innovation. Love following you guys, we think highly of the company. Been following you guys for 10 years and look forward to continuing to track it. SAP here on theCUBE talking about innovation, design thinking, customer experience, and intelligent enterprise. theCUBE is bringing all that intelligent data to you live here in Moscone. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (techno music)

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We are just wrapping up day two at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018. Keith, this event is enormous. We were just comparing our step goals. This event size is 16 American football fields. Enormous, 20,000 people. I think, combined, we have around 15,000 steps today. >> That sounds about right. >> Quite a few of them go to your longer legs than mine but this event is really been incredible, the energy that SAP's CEO Bill McDermott kicked off with yesterday morning has really been carried through this event and with our guests on the show for the last two days. >> No, we did 23, 24 interviews and every last one of them was high-energy. The guests were extremely excited about the products, the solutions, and the problems they're solving for, not just enterprise, but for society. I thought that was a really great theme of the guests today specifically. >> It's amazing, and you talk about, you know, the impact on society and SAP wants to be one of the top world's most valuable brands like Apple, Google, Coca Cola, who are all customers of SAP's and who all sell products that we can interact with, that we can taste, you know, Mercedes Benz, we can drive. They've got this invisible software product. They've been around for 46 years. And to your point, the stories that we have heard about how these invisible product, products, are transforming industries, are saving lives, was really something that I did not expect. >> Well when you make a great product that impact lives or... I compare it to making great content. theCUBE makes great content, that content would be found, people would take notice, you make a great product that impacts people's lives. It's no wonder that SAP is near the top of that brand recognition, brand value, 17th on the list. If they continue to do that, if they become the product, the ERP solution that you can talk to and you can ask a question, you know, not just business questions of what were the numbers the last quarter for Chicago, but you can ask a question, you know what, where is the best place to take my family to live in Eastern Europe during the summer months? That becomes value-add that people wouldn't be able to ignore. >> They've done a tremendous job building this partner ecosystem. There were hundreds of partner sessions alone. We've heard from a lot of their partners. We're in the NetApp booth, thanks to NetApp for having theCUBE here. NetApp is a customer and a partner of SAP and we heard a lot about how SAP is transforming to the cloud dramatically with the help of this massive partner ecosystem. >> You know what, we've had Microsoft, Fujitsu, SAP, NetApp, Nvidia, the list goes on and on of customers and partnerships of examples of companies that have come together and they've been consistent. In some areas, obviously Microsoft competes with SAP. In some areas, Microsoft competes with NetApp. But they recognize that without these alliances, without these partnerships, they can't solve these large, complex problems of ridding parts of Africa with mosquitoes. SAP can't do that by themselves. Microsoft can't do that by themselves. And this week was a great acknowledgement and a example of how the ecosystem works. >> They also talked a lot at this event about the intelligent enterprise where it's, you know, it's not just about digital transformation as table stakes. Companies that do it well have, or are working towards getting, this true 360-degree view of the customer which is essential. They talked about enabling that via certain things that they're leading in, or pioneering, which is connecting the demand chain and the supply chain. They really talked about enabling this new, this current SAP that's built for this fourth generation customer experience. Our lives as consumers have dramatically influenced business. We expect to have the ability to, you know, try and buy an app if we want it, right? And they're using that model very well to give customers in many industries, they have 390,000 customers, choice and flexibility. And the partner ecosystem is just part of that flexibility that they have to give. And they do a great job of listening to their customers who really are helping with a lot of the co-development in a very symbiotic way. >> Yeah, SAP is reentering this people-centric view of ERP, CRM, of data, saying that their relationship is about people. Bill McDermott spent a lot of time talking about trust. One of the reasons why people trust the brand of theCUBE is because we're on the ground, we're talking to the users, we're talking to the people. People can reach out and touch and feel you, there's a personal relationship between that brand and the community. The same thing with, got the same feel for what SAP is trying to do of, you know, obviously with over 20,000 people, I dunno if the number is 21,000, 22,000, but more than 20,000 people, a million people online watching the event, SAP the serious about this C/4HANA move, of being able to say, you know what, we are going to create a ecosystem of trust. We talked about trust with the app center and being able to validate applications on the platform. SAP has long been one of those companies that's serious about their partnerships and validation and certification of platforms. So whether it's HCI, storage with NetApp, the deep relationship with NetApp, SAP is going to put its brand upfront and say that if you're going to engage with one of our partnerships, there's a transient trust that goes from SAP to their partners. >> And we talked with a number of folks working in different groups within SAP focused on the customer. This morning we had on their Chief Customer, a guy from their Chief Customer Office who talked about these, kinda top 100 strategic accounts that they partner with who then also they take that information, those learnings and don't just improve the technologies but they also use them to influence much greater than a hundred customers. They're strategically utilizing that data. We talked yesterday with one of the gentlemen running the SAP four, S/4HANA community rather, and the Leonardo community and the amount of engagement that they have in that community, especially in Leonardo which has only been around for a year. The customer engagement is key but also their reaction to it, and I would say even, I think we heard a lot of how they're being proactive with creating content and enabling their customers to be able to learn at the same time as they're learning from their customers. >> Yeah some hero numbers that we heard this week: 6,000 people in that HANA, the S/4HANA community. While the Customer Success Group focuses on the top 100 customers, there were, I think 38,000 people following the Twitter account, so there's obviously outreached stretch. The Leonardo and S/4 communities have created a thousand videos on how-to. So obviously the impact of and the reach of SAP has ambitions of not just raising brand awareness and getting into that Top 10 with Apple and Google, they also have the ambitions of becoming a platform, a ecosystem. You know, we look at Microsoft as kinda one of the ultimate platform companies. Microsoft partners make more money off of Windows than Microsoft makes off of Windows. SAP seems to have the same goal of their partners, there's a hundred partners on the show floor, that should generate more revenue than SAP which would be impressive. SAP, I looked the other day, $136 billion market capital, not a small company at all. >> So you have an interesting perspective, for many reasons, but one you've run large SAP infrastructures before. And here you are now at SAPPHIRE from the press and media, the analyst perspective. What are some of the things that really surprised you in all of your experience as a user of SAP to now covering it from this angle. >> You know what, I don't know if it was a year ago. It was not even a full year, my anniversary for running my company is August. So less than a year ago I ran SAP for a large pharmaceutical. And we're in the throes of selecting where our next platform was gonna be hosted. Cloud was a possibility and it is amazing how the conversations have changed from my peers a year ago, or a year and a half or even a year ago, to now to how readily acceptable customers are of running mission-critical, the core of the business, 77% of the world's transactions, we heard today, goes through SAP, how willing customers are at running those work goals in the cloud. Second piece, which was probably a proof point, how much SAP has improved SAP in the cloud. SAP has marketed SAP HANA and SAP as cloud-ready applications, it was more of something that you... I took legacy application, I installed it on VMs in the cloud, cloud-ready. No we've given examples from the hyperscalers, specifically Google, of how, and Microsoft of how, customers are coming whipping their credit card up, spinning up instances of HANA, spinning them down. Google talked about how you can migrate your whole ECC on HANA to the cloud within 30 minutes to two hours, amazing movement in cloud. I think it's by far my biggest surprise coming to this show. I didn't expect SAP to accelerate their cloud adoption as fast as they have. >> I'm curious to your thoughts too about simplicity, simplicity of message, you know, what's their best-run businesses campaign? Best-run businesses run on SAP. Simplicity has long been part of their messaging. As we look at the SAP cloud platform and some of the announcements there today and you look at, they've got Ariba, and Concur, and Fieldglass, and SuccessFactors, with the C/4 announcement from yesterday, what is your impression on, have they been able to sort of simplify and kind of reduce customer confusion in terms of this breadth of products and technologies that SAP now delivers? >> You know, SAP is a big company and they have a lot of products. They've been around for 46 years. You know, we didn't talk about any legacy database stuff. They still own Siebel so they still own a traditional database company. It's easier said than done to simplify the message. When you come to... You know, we talked to interviewee after interviewee, customers are still overwhelmed when they look at a overall problem. They can even identify SAP as the potential partner to solve it, but 300 products is still 300 products. It's very... You can help simplify the message by throwing those products in categories, sales force, which product you lead with, so new customers, you know, sales force will help you with that. Traditional customers that don't have deep relationships with their sales force and solution providers, maybe, I think there's still a little difficulty around understanding the messaging around all of 300 products. I mean, it's 300 products. >> Well, there's always work to be done and well we have... There was a lot of product announcements, a lot of energy, and evangelicalism that you and I heard consistently throughout the event and on-set here. A third area that I think really struck me is, SAP has been very vocal about having an initiative to raise the profile of women in technology. They did an excellent job of getting women onstage during both keynote sessions, yesterday and today. From their CMO, Alicia Tillman, to Lindsey Vonn and a whole suite of women Olympic athletes that were yesterday in the general session, to some of the women that were doing some of these outstanding demos and I, I really tip my hat to SAP because for being as large and as lengthy of an incumbent as they are, they're really able to focus on some of these key areas and we at theCUBE love to cover that because it's something that really needs consistent awareness. >> Well, I dunno if people would notice but we probably, both of us, are very vested in diversity and Silicon Valley, in general, is always appreciated when companies go, not just acknowledge the challenge of diversity, it is a very, very difficult problem. It's probably one of the most difficult problems in our industry. So to actually put some meat on a bone, announce the problem, announce the challenge, and go forth and put, you know, obviously, extremely capable women and minorities in the forefront. >> Yeah. Well Keith, always a pleasure hosting with you. Thanks so much for working with me the last couple of days, it's been-- >> I always enjoy it. >> I do too. It's really been a really fun, energetic show so thanks for all of your help. >> Thank you. >> Keith and I wanna thank you for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin for Keith Townsend, we're from SAP SAPPHIRE 2018. Thanks for watching. (energetic music)

>> From Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018, brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we are in Orlando at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. This is a huge event. Not just 20,000 people here but there's about a million people SAP SAS are going to engage with their life and on-demand video experiences for Sapphire, amazing. We are excited to welcome for the first time to theCUBE Jinesh Jain the VP of Global Delivery at CenturyLink. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you guys for having me here. >> The theme in this event is really around what SAP is doing to enable the intelligent enterprise. This is really beyond digital transformation where customers have to have a customer centric view. It's about infusing and embedding emerging and advanced technologies, AI machine learning into business processes. How is CenturyLink helping customers on that transformation journey? >> I think that's a great question. Let me give you a little bit of background behind what CenturyLink is all about because this is all SAP here in this event right? CenturyLink is all about connecting customers in the in the digital world. And we recently acquired Level 3, and with that Level 3 acquisition we became now, we provide trusted connections to all the connected world, you know all the network world. So you can imagine in a digital transformation you need a very strong foundation when it comes to connectivity, network, infrastructure and security behind that and that's what CenturyLink does. That's our core business and with that journey as we started the journey, we have 60 plus datacenters as part of CenturyLink core strategic assets. We have around 500K miles of fiber optics, which is one of the, we are the second largest in the United States when it comes to network connectivity and redundancy across. And in 60 plus countries, I think all this strategic assets mix provides us very strong foundation for any customers who is embarking this digital journey. It reminds me of one of those recent survey done by McKinsey Global Institute, where they said that they figured out that digitization index for Europe was 12% and for North America was little better around 18%. But look at the gap, how much of gap is there in terms of exploring the full potential of digitization. So I think our journey in terms of giving the digital transformation starts from our strong foundation of our strategic assets of data centers network and security, along with that as you mentioned about the intelligent enterprise, we have a very strong practice in terms of not just descriptive analytics, but we do prescriptive analytics. We do machine learning. We have IOT and we do big data analysis as well. So all these things combined together provides a complete end-to-end solution. And of course SAP plays a big play here and we can talk about that in terms of what we do on the SAP side as well. >> So let's add some more color to that. When I think of CenturyLink, I think about the 60 data centers. Even when I think about SAP what I normally consider CenturyLink's role traditionally in a SAP relationship is that you know what CenturyLink to get me better either closer to my customers so that data injection can happen faster with lower latency. When I think of CenturyLink, I think of lower latency to hyper scale cloud providers so that if I have hold on applications I can get closer to my core SAP data, but what I'm hearing is that CenturyLink has greater SAP capability outside of that. Tell us about the SAP practice at CenturyLink. >> I'm glad you asked that because everybody is wondering about CenturyLink and SAP relationship. In fact let me go back in time here. Six years, few years back I would say six, five years back, CenturyLink acquired Cognilytics. Cognilytics was all about deep HANA expertise, deep analytics and all about BI strategy. And then recently a couple of years back, they acquired SEAL Consulting. So these two organizations which CenturyLink acquired, that gave us deep roots into SAP ecosystem in terms of what CenturyLink and SAP can work together. So now let's look at Cognilytics. They were all about HANA, core HANA expertise. They co-innovated with SAP in terms of that HANA analytics. They came out with number of used cases symptoms of predictive science and then when they acquired SEAL Consulting, it was all about yes for HANA transformation, which is absolutely the theme across this Sapphire and for all the SAP customers globally. From SEAL perspective, which is now of course part of CenturyLink, but now we can provide infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, OSDB as a service, which is already part of CenturyLink. Now with SEAL and Cognilytics coming into play, we are end-to-end sharp in terms of SAP strategy, digital transformation strategy, using SAP tools and products, implementation upgrades, application management services, and continual improvement as part of the digital transformation every customer is looking for. I think that's how we are using the strategic assets of CenturyLink as part of with the SAP expertise coming into play. >> So every customer, digital transformation to any business is just, it's you got to do it right or you will lose relevance and go out of business and we've seen a lot of incumbent retailers for example go away because they haven't been able to transform digitally. I read a stat recently that said 70% of siloed digital transformation projects fail. So how does CenturyLink and your expertise with SAP as for with HANA, how do you help customers be successful? Do you come in and see these siloed projects that you know maybe shadow IT had evolved and helped them to break down those silos, so that they can actually facilitate what it is that they need which is that that 360-degree view of their customers. What they want, when they want it, to be able to predict what they're gonna want next. How do you help break down those silos? >> Right, now I think is a known problem, known challenge across all of the customers who are embarking this journey. I'll tell you what. I'll give you a simple, the way we work, our digital strategy is very much aligned with our customer's business and IT goals. So what we do first and foremost is we want to align ourselves with what the business and IT goals are. Let's double click on that right. So if I look at the business goals, so most of the customers today, A, they want to make sure they want to protect the revenue stream right? B, they want to make sure they have real-time position, no latency in terms of their business decision making. And C, they want to make sure that they go into the new markets. They just can't stay silent to same market there. Plus know the unfamiliar competition, which comes up many times. So that's the business aspect of the goals. We want to look at that and make sure that we align our implementation, our strategy to those business goals. If you look at IT side of that, and I tell you what, these are the things which are being missed out with most of the partners in this ecosystem. If I look at the IT side of it, first and foremost we want to make sure that IT think goals are, it's all about innovation. They want to be innovative. They want to have minimal shelf wear so that they can innovate all the time. They want to evolve the resources so they are aligned with the lines of business all the way and that way everybody has a career path, and they are evolving to the market needs. And then lastly it's all about making sure that all the mundane tasks you know if I look at they need to focus on core competency and offload all the routine tasks. And we very much aligned as part of the journey to those business and IT goals. So if you look at our mission, we won't just look at our mission in terms of overall CenturyLink for SAP customers. We want to provide them a private managed secured cloud, which is scalable, which can be commissioned in a week's time with full automation, completely secure, data protected and an uptime of 99.99% and take care of all the lights on kind of routine tasks, so they can focus on their main core competency about business decision, new business, business process design and things like that which are being lagging behind. So that's our key theme in terms of how we drive all the SAP information. >> There's a lot of complexity behind getting this much value out of any platform, whether it's complexity at the data analytics layer, whether it's the networking that needs to be done, the design and deployment of NetApp stack. We're in a conference where all the hyper scalers are here. >> Yes. >> The company smaller than CenturyLink provides larger than CenturyLink. How is CenturyLink uniquely positioned to basically go to whether it's a Fortune 100 customer or someone down level to basically add value where these other providers potentially will trouble at. >> Alright, no I think it's very true, we need to be nimble. I mean you know we can be a big ship, but should not take time to turn. And I completely agree with that. I think what we do is I'll tell you, one of the unique position we have in this market space is you know we can proudly say that we are, we don't need to go to any third party when it comes to data center locations. We have our own 500k lines of fiberoptics. So network is where we provide, we can provide minimal latency from network perspective. We are all over the, we are 60 plus countries. We are into 350 metros. We can do a metro tier. I think if you look at our network, our hosting capabilities our infrastructure capabilities, we are uniquely positioned compared what the customers need today as a one-stop shop or a one hand to shake to make things happen for them. At the same time, we are very nimble for many customers because that's how CenturyLink has grown up. They acquired us, and we were 800 people company. So was other acquisition as well. We can very easily adapt, innovate, comprehend and adapt to the needs of the customers based on our core competency, our solutions which are available, and strategy which is very much fitting most of our customers in the retail space, in CPG space, in manufacturing space, in healthcare, and in life sciences. We have some designated industry solutions as well, which can help us drive those values quicker. At the same time measurable. >> Being nimble I think of you know being adaptive and being flexible but adaptive struck a big, actually Hasso Plattner this morning in his keynote talked about SAP being adaptive in the context, I think he was talking about intelligence. And everybody wants to paint intelligence all over everything and they talked about SAP being adaptive. That kind of aligns with something I read recently that Bill McDermott said, which is where SAP was the last to accept the status quo. I think he was talking about in relation to CRM specifically but the first to change it. So with that spirit of being nimble, being adaptive how are you helping customers adapt to needing to bring on you know edge core millions of devices or customers that go you know what I want to be able to use advanced technologies like AI to make you know my manufacturing smarter or to be able start connecting my supply chain with demand chain? How are you harnessing that, your adaptability to meet their needs on some of those emerging trends? >> Absolutely, this can be very overwhelming and if you really look at what everybody's talking about, where do you start with and I think we have been doing this for last six years, even before the keynote announcement to be honest to you guys. We have documented 60 to 70 used cases in this case. So what we do is when we approach a customer or a prospect, we come out with some specific used case for their line of business. It can be in a marketing campaign. It can be in a supply chain. It can be in financials. It can be in insurance. So depending on what the needs are, we have those documented used cases, so what we do is for each of these used cases, we break it down in terms of what problem are we gonna to solve, what is the problem definition. And for that problem definition, what's my used case, how do I solve this, what are the alternatives, and how do I reach to my measurable value of that solution. And then we have built-in data models ready to go for each of these used cases behind the scene. So that helps us build something which is nimble, because the data is available. We just need to customize to 20% of what the customer needs are, and then provide that value right away. And once that pilot goes live for a small segment of user community, then we expand that to the larger audience to see the value of whether this is a predictive science machine learning or just pure KPI driven analytics. So we do that and then we expand that. This is what we have done with number of Fortune 500 companies and we're really proud of what we do in terms of being big, but being nimble. >> So speaking of being big, talk about customer engagement, not necessarily the actual customer conversations, but how do customers engage with CenturyLink. One of the simple things that you look at the hyperscalers, I can go to the website, and when I have a question, I can type it in and I'll get a script that answers me in an hour or so. What is the engagement model for interacting with CenturyLink for new customers? >> I think, actually let me go back on this one. I was reading a survey in a CIO magazine. Actually this is a recent survey last year it was, that around thousand-plus CIO's who were interviewed and most of the CIO's, all the CIO's had SAP systems in their companies. And 40% of them said they want to move from on-premise to cloud. Right there that's our engagement strategy there. That we come as a one-stop shop for all these customers who are planning to move from on-premise to cloud. Why? Because number one, they want to reduce their CAPEX, upfront reduction in your cost. They want to make sure that their steady-state cost for keeping the lights on is bare minimal. So whatever budget is left out they can focus more on innovation. We take the sliver line of keeping the lights on and moving them from on-premise to cloud as part of our engagement strategy to start with number one. As we do that, they realize, customer realize that we are not just hosting partners. We just don't provide scalable private managed security cloud for our customers, but we can also do SAP implementation end-to-end, which is whether this is ECC upgrade to S/4HANA or this is a digital strategy for S/4HANA going forward, or just HANA as a pure analytics tool. Or the different SAP suite of products, whether this is Hybris, whether this is Ariba or other suite of products which are very much in a SAS model aspect of SAP, we support that end to end. Our support model is based out of the United States. We have offshore centers in India. So globally follow the same kind of approach. We do this between our number of you know units here in US and in India. That's our engagement strategy across. >> So last question is we're now in our booth here at SAPPHIRE NOW. Tell us about what CenturyLink, NetApp, SAP are doing within the context of automation. >> Wonderful yeah great. That's important actually because I think if you really look at the pace of what customer needs today, the pace is changing so fast. In a typical SAP landscape, you want to commission a system, a development system or a production system within weeks or within days. Gone are other days where you need two months and three months. I mean you miss the business goals for doing all these things. So what we have done is we want to get into the automation mode, and we are heavily investing in that part with help of Cisco, UCSKS. NetApp plays a very big role here in terms of providing their data-driven strategy, their hyper-converged infrastructure as part of the storage system and working with another partner Vnomic to make sure that entire, all these gears behind the scene have a very good orchestration layer to automate the whole process of building the infrastructure, building the application, building all the services and handing it over to our, to the customer team for them to start the journey. So that whole cycle can be reduced by the automation. So I would say NetApp plays a big role there, no doubt about that because most of the IT organizations are data driven today. The SAP workloads are changing and you can't wait for those change manually to be operated. So these are all application driven workloads which changes you know, which can adapt to all these changing workloads and this is where we are going right now in terms of automation. >> Well thanks so much Jinesh for stopping by. I wish we had more time but talking to us about what CenturyLink is doing with SAP, with NetApp for example to help customers on this arduous digital transformation journey. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much I mean this is great, thank you, enjoy rest of the day. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAP Sapphire 2018. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin, with Keith Townsend, and we are in Orlando at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. We're in the NetApp booth, and we are excited to welcome to theCUBE, Ray Russ from Fujitsu, the Senior Director of SAP Solutions. Ray, this is your 21st SAPPHIRE. >> That's correct. >> This event is enormous. There's upwards of 20,000 people here, in Orlando, but what Bill McDermott, their CEO, said in his key note, is they're expecting about a million people to engage. For a software company, that sells an invisible product, that's really incredible. You've been involved, you've been at Fujitsu for a few years, but you've been involved with SAP for a long time. Talk to us about your, kind of the history that you've seen with SAP, and now what you're doing with them at Fujitsu. >> Yeah, so you know I go back 20, 22 years ago as an end-user. Started in the manufacturing space, a company that was implementing SAP for the first time, and then my second end-user, before I got into consulting. I'd seen a lot of change in the companies I worked for and wanted to go and help other companies go through the transition. I really got involved right before Y2K, and if you think about digital transformation, I kind of think of it that way. Digital transformation, when talks about it, is like this new buzz word, but as an SAP expert and as a company, we've been doing digital transformation for years, we just didn't quite call it that, right? To the point where CIO's say, "Stop calling it digital, just tell me how I'm gonna, "fix my business, "or help me become more efficient in my business." So I've seen it change quite a bit. One of the, you know, some of the big things that have changed now is technology that's allowing companies to actually get out outside their four walls, and extend that enterprise, to supply chains, or assets. So that's something that we focus on at Fujitsu. You know, my background has been in manufacturing, and while Fujitsu focused on a lot of different industries, a big part of our business is in the manufacturing space. We're a manufacturer, we run SAP in our own plants, as well as 84% of our customers globally are in the manufacturing space. So we work very closely with companies in this particular space, helping them understand the journey for S/4HANA, what does that mean for them? Would there be operational efficiency? But also extended beyond their enterprise. Some of the challenges that we see with companies right now is that over the years, they've continued to upgrade their SAP systems. My first implementation was 3.1I, I believe, and now it's ECC 6.0, before S/4HANA. They've continued to upgrade, and maybe not take advantage of new functionality, and the new version of SAP, the enhancement packs, and that. So they've kinda still got some custom code going on, and now they are asking SAP, and partners like us, okay, S/4HANA, we really wanna see the value, not just an IT business case, but what is the business to the company's and organization's strategic goals. So part of our job, and part of our role is to go and help these companies understand the business value, whether it be reduction in closing the books, or overall equipment effectiveness in their plant, right? You see, those overall outcomes to the business and help them define the business case, and when the move to S/4HANA would come. The other area of expertise for us, Industrial IoT. We've been doing this, we've been really one of the global leaders in SAP, in what they call digital manufacturing, which is now part of the Leonardo family. We've been doing Leonardo IoT for years, we just, no one called it that, okay, right? (laughs) And that's one of the things we're showcasing here. We work very closely with SAP's Leonardo team, that's in the digital manufacturing space. Some of the solutions customers might know is MII or ME. We're doing co development with our customers, I'm sorry with SAP, as well as our customers as well, in innovation projects, and seeing what they can get out of Industrial IoT for their projects. We were here, at the Leonardo event on Monday. Some of the things we're showcasing in our booth this week, and talking to customers about, is something we call our Smart Factory. Many times we've seen IT-led IoT projects, whether it be a shop-floor application, or something at a plant-level, and I said it last year, I spoke in SAPPHIRE last year, and I said it, I go, "I hear from CIOs all the time, "If we're going to fail, fail fast." And I really believe now that, why fail at all? And actually, talking to Gartner this week, as well, he said the same thing, C-level executives don't wanna hear that anymore. They wanna understand the roadmap, and there was this concept of throwing a project to a developer, having them develop something without the business, and then taking that down to a plant, or something to a user, they were like, this is not exactly what we wanted, we don't see the business outcome. So what we do now in our framework is actually help these companies build their long-term roadmaps. So going in and talking to the C-level executives in the business side and saying, what are your expected outcomes? Let's start with the outcome, not the technology, right? Whether it be reduction of labor, improve quality, again, overall equipment effectiveness, and help them understand what their strategic goals are, and then work with the business units, and the users as well to help define what their needs are, at the plant level or at the corporate level. And part of our methodology and approach is build a maturity model, where they sit at that time, and then also using a result chain process to actually build in every initiative or IoT project, with the business cases, or where is the real value, right? And then making sure there's outcome based approach to this, and build that long-term roadmap. >> So yesterday on stage, Bill McDermott talked about the value of augmenting people with technology, but the importance of process. So Fujitsu, obviously, big manufacturing and operations, outside of servers and IT equipment, there's always been this battle, traditionally, between what we call OT, traditional manufacturing operations, and IT. Obviously, as part of this transformation, organizations need to go through CIOs, plant managers, that traditional line of business has to have this new way of working together. Can you shed light on how that's changed within Fujitsu, and then with customers? >> You hit it right on the head, and IT-OT integration has been a challenge for a lot of companies over the years. In fact, I think one of the biggest challenges CIOs have had with shadow IT is at the plant level, right? Because maybe the IoT projects weren't being rolled out fast enough as corporate was trying to focus on the ERP application. I think the plants didn't think of SAP as an OT-type application. >> And so there are a lot of challenges, next thing you know you had major companies, with multiples plants, having multiple different applications, but none of them rolled up, so a COO could actually see the operations of all of his plants, right? With this, some of the acquisitions SAP's done and some of the development they've done, and the advances in IoT, now when I talked about some of those problems with the CIOs, trying to, failing fast, what we do is go and work with these companies, and actually go down to the plant level and work with them. So we talk to them, what you are your business process like? When you got a developer up in corporate, trying to design something for a plant operator, or a plant manager and doesn't know the process, you're never gonna give them what they need, or what they want. >> You can't automate a process that doesn't exist. >> Exactly, exactly. So working with them, we helped define what those processes are and then actually build applications that fits their needs. Whether it be condition-based maintenance applications, which you need to do before you can do predictive analytics. Some of the innovative things we're doing, and we're showing today, are we've augmented a HoloLens, into the process where, for example, even in our own plant, down at Richardson, Texas, we make network communication equipment, which is a complex assembly, and an operator has to look at a manual sheet, and actually look at the numbers and figure out what slot it goes in. With the HoloLens augmented reality, I can see a digital overlay, and pick up a part and plug it right in, it tells them, and we've been able to reduce cycle time on that assembly by 42%. So, I mean, that's huge. >> That is huge. So you mentioned business outcomes a number of times, and you're talking to the C-Suite, and the CDO who needs to drive digital transformation, and cultural change, and the CMO who needs technology to drive marketing and align it to sales. Give us an example of one that you think really articulates what Fujitsu and SAP are delivering, that's impacting a customer's business, whether it's developing a new product, increasing revenue, increasing profits. >> So good point. So a good example of one we've just done recently, and I actually spoke on this recently, the four major outcomes this customer is looking for in this roadmap was reduction in labor hours, right? Reduction of machine time, right? The big two areas for them was improvement in quality. So, by being able to monitor and get real time information, on our application for the plant, we're getting information to plant managers real time, it's not the next shift or the next day, right? We were able to actually improve quality in a lot of our customers' plants by anywhere between 30 to 40%. And then customer satisfaction is huge as well. You mentioned customer again. One of the things we're doing too, now, is actually being able to, servitization is kind of a new buzzword, it's been around for awhile actually, right, but as companies are looking, in the manufacturing area, how do we create new routes to market, right? There's a customer of ours, we actually put sensors in some of their high-end assets, they sell to their customers as well, we're able to get that information now, and actually help them monitor their equipment. And we can actually help them, then, reduce their customers' maintenance costs and so forth, and that's adding value to not only our customer, but our customer's customer. Those are some of the big things we're seeing in manufacture right now. >> So, talk about the value of partnerships, especially with a company like, we're in a NetApp booth, so NetApp would be a great example. When we're talking edge, which is where all IoT data is happening, industrial data happens at the edge, core, where some of that data needs to be processed, and then back to cloud. How does Fujitsu partner with SAP, NetApp, the customer, to bring value from all three of those end-points? >> You got it, and you know, it's interesting, over the years, somebody asked me the other day if I ever worked, I never worked for SAP, but I've been in the ecosystem forever. I get accused, if you caught me I'd bleed blue, and I've found over the years is that every company is realizing they can't do it all. You gotta do what you do well, right? And so, SAP realizes that we work, and NetApp's been a strong partner of ours for a long time, right? So you know, I talk about Smart Factory framework, one of the things we try to do when we go in is actually look at the business outcomes and then the domain areas, line of business we're gonna focus on and that, but then we look at the technology. And if it's technology that's not our core competency, we want to make sure we bring in the right partner. NetApp's one of those partner, SAP is one of those partners, and we have a group of partners that we bring in, to make sure we're bringing the best solution to our customer, right? If we can't do it well, then we're gonna make sure we work with a partner that has strength in that area. >> I may expect that choice, that, flexibility, right? That word is used, flexibility, agility, at every, you can't go to a trade show without hearing those at least 50 times each, but it's really the customers that are driving that, and their needs. We've heard a lot of that in the last day and a half that we've been here, a lot of that value articulated through the customer, as well as the importance, and it sounds like SAP does this well, of listening to the customer. What are you needing that we're not doing? Who should we be partnering with, to be able to deliver this solution that you need, to your point, that's going to drive these business outcomes, because that's where the conversation, this day and age, needs to be. >> Exactly, yep. >> Well Russ, Ray. Ray Russ. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing what you're doing with Fujitsu. Fujitsu and SAP have been partners for 40 years, you've got 8,000 plus customer and counting, and I imagine that you're going to carry the momentum forward that you're feeling here at SAPPHIRE, and your 22nd SAPPHIRE next year. >> Absolutely, I appreciate it. Have a great show guys, thank you very much. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you so much. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, we are at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW, in the NetApp booth in Orlando. Lisa Martin, Keith Townsend, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018, brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I am Lisa Martin, with Keith Townsend. We have been here all day at SAP Sapphire 2018. Keith, this venue in Orlando is so huge. It's the equivalent of 16 American football fields. >> Yeah, probably should not have worn a pair of new shoes. >> No, but you did close your rings, so it's a trade-off, right? >> It's a trade-off, yeah. >> So, the keynote this morning started out with a bang. Bill McDermott, the CEO of SAP, is probably the most energetic, evangelical, C-level I've ever seen on stage. You really could feel the excitement, the momentum. They also followed that with some great announcements. You know, they've been saying for awhile, being pretty bullish about wanting to not just disrupt the Sierra market, but wanting to become one of the world's most valuable brands. They wanna be up there with the Apples, and the Googles, and Coca-Cola and Mercedes-Benz, who all have products that we all see, and touch, and feel, and buy. And they announced that the brands e-rankings just came out the other day, that they're number 17, up four spots from last year. So, their momentum is, they're really putting their money where their mouth is. >> Yeah, so SAP is the cash register of the world. 70% of the world's transactions go through SAP, but most of us don't see it. So, it's amazing to see that they're ranked number 17 on those brands that are very, you know, if you told somebody you worked for SAP, they'd be like, oh, okay, I think I might have heard of that. >> Right. >> Or, I've heard that that was the reason why manufacturing is down, because the SAP system was down. So, it is a bold statement to say that you're gonna go from that, to a household name. Interestingly enough, part of that is becoming an ecosystem. So, becoming a platform. What we've heard today was a lot of talk about how SAP is transforming from a product company. You know, a point-of-sale system is one thing, but to say that you've built a ecosystem, and a platform around that, is the goal that I think I heard today from the stage floor. >> And you're right, you talk about, you know, them becoming a household name, with a product that's basically invisible to most people who probably use it. They have amassed 390,000 customers in 46 years. They've been around for a long time. This event, though, is massive. The partner area alone is huge. There's probably more than 20,000 people not just that are here, in Orlando, but, he said, Bill McDermott, a million people engaging with SAP Sapphire via the online experience. That's enormous. But to your point, it's all really fundamentally due to the partnerships, the systems integrators, the technology partners and more who have helped them on their transformation. >> Yeah, we had KPIT on, they said the guest has been on 20 Sapphires for 20 years, the event has gone on for 25 years in some form. He remembered, initially, they might have had one or two sessions. They have 12, KPIT has 12 sessions this year at the Sapphire 2018. There's a huge ecosystem of partners, here on the show floor. Over 500, I think, sessions in general. We had the VP of Community for S/4. They have 1,000 how-to videos on how to just do basic things in S/4. Huge community, huge event. SAP is starting to make end rolls and becoming, again, not just a products company, but an ecosystem company, I think. Sapphire in Orlando is a great example of how they're expanding the brand. >> Yes, and in fact, on the brand part, you know, that's one of the things that their CMO, Alicia Tillman, who was on main stage this morning, that's something that I've heard her talk about before. She's been the CMO for about nine months now, and she said, you know, and marketers will know, campaigns and messaging will change every quarter, six months, and that is fine. It's the brand narrative that they really started to work on at SAP. So, you're seeing this "Best-run companies run on SAP", it's sharing the value of what SAP can deliver with their partner ecosystem, in terms of how it's helping customers transform their businesses, transform industries, save lives. They've done a very focused job on showing how this invisible technology is really revolutionizing the world. They're now going, you know, full-force, embedding A.I., and really being quite bold, they're saying. I loved what Bill McDermott had on the slide this morning, of augmented intelligence. And there's always a lot of concern with A.I, right? Jobs being replaced. And he talked about what he, and some of the other world leaders, were talking about. And I liked augmented intelligence, to augment humanity, this connection of humans and machines working together. They're really being quite bold, and focused, in that area. I'm just curious what your take was from an advanced analytics A.I. perspective. >> So, there's a lot of talk around advanced A.I. analytics. At the end of the day, it's about actual business results. We're here in the booth of NetApp, who has done a great job, frankly, of transforming their image from a storage company in the middle of a transformation to being known as a data-driven company. So, NetApp has gone through a similar change that SAP is looking to do, from a brand perspective. Reasonably enough, we had the CIO, Bill, from NetApp, that talked about that transformation, and how data is a key part of their own transformation, internally. And, how SAP could probably hold NetApp up as a great example of a company that's using the predecessor to C/4HANA, which was just announced, on the staged hypers of taking data, analyzing that data, applying A.I, machine learning, more like machine learning in reality. Machine learning to that data, and then getting insights, so that humans can make better decisions. >> Right. You know, on that front, one of the themes I heard today, Keith, from not just Bill Miller, the CIO of NetApp, who was on here with us earlier, but some of their other partners, NetApp and SAP's partners, all talk about their own transformations, internally, as essential for them to become intelligent enterprises, which is a lot of what SAP's talking about. But I also thought that was quite valuable, from an external perspective, to hear NetApp talk so candidly about their transformation, and share that with their customers who are in similar positions. I think, when vendors will, say, drink their own champagne, and there's real proof there in the pudding. I think that's tremendously valuable for these brands. And we've just heard that kind of consistently throughout the day today, of companies that are showing how they're transforming to then help their customers also transform. >> So, one of the things that we like to ask on theCUBE is not just about current customer base, but, what new customers are you attracting? So, one of the interesting conversations is one of the last ones we had with WorkSpan, and how they're a small company, and they started out the gate with SAP, and how the brand has gone beyond this, oh, this is a manufacturing, supply chain, you must be a Fortune 500 company to even consider rolling it out to. You know what? We're a brand new company, providing a data-driven product, and out of the gate, we're selecting a S/4HANA and the platform to create this new product that's consumed by not necessarily technologists, that powers an alliance platform to find and curate business alliances. I thought that was an extremely interesting interview that shows the power of expanding beyond just a focus on traditional enterprise, but the power of data. And once you've become a platform, how you can power your partner ecosystem. >> I thought that was a great example, as well, of a company that's only been in business for three years, less than four years. How they saw this gap in the market, where they said, you know, we're surrounded by alliance partners of SAP's in this 16 football fields location that we're in. And WorkSpan found that 60 to 75% of announced alliances fail. Huge opportunity for them to then get in from a systematic perspective and align, you know, two companies' marketing automation systems, for example, and sales automation systems. And they really saw this big opportunity to, like you were saying, create an entirely new product, and probably create a new market as a result. I thought that was a really modern example of an idea that saw a huge gap, and can be transformative. I asked Ahmed, after we stopped rolling the cameras, all right, so you found 60 to 75% of these announced alliances fail, typically. What does WorkSpan think you can do to bring that number down? And he said, within two years, we wanna get that down to about 30%. >> Wow. That is an amazing stat. So, let's look at the companies that are digitally transforming. So we had two guests that I want to highlight, one with Mike McGivney from SAP SuccessFactors, which is SAP's people-focused cloud, and then Wolfgang Hopfes, the head of SAP Business for EMEA. And they're on a unique challenge. SAP has been around for 46 years, and in IT years, that's like, you know, 1,000. So, there's a lot of technical debt, that companies are now paying for. You know, back in the nineties, early 2000s, customizing SAP was all the rage. Now, customers are faced with, they have to digitally transform their organizations, how do they do so? Well, it's not so easy to move from a customized SAP to S/4. Bill trumpeted the numbers of 1,800 SAP HANA customers, which is great, well over a billion dollars in sales for an in-memory database. However, SAP has over 300,000 customers. So there's a lot of opportunity, but a lot of challenge. So, the ecosystem of partners, Fujitsu, NetApp, other infrastructure companies looking to help simplify the infrastructure so that technologists within these customer organizations can focus on the higher stack of those larger business challenges of basically pulling apart what they've built. Bill from NetApp shared how difficult their transformation was from their CRM to >> Hypers? >> Hypers. He called it painful, a painful six months. And what we saw today, I think, was a reality check. A lot of enterprises have a lot of pain ahead of them. >> Well, it's pain in a number of areas, and one of them is cultural. And I really thought, you know, you say, SAP being 46 years old is like, 1,000 in IT, or dog years. They're like the Gandalf of IT, right? But one of the things that I found quite remarkable is 46 year-old history, 390,000 customers. But clearly, they have been able to evolve their culture to be able to support what their customers need, and go from just being a supply chain procurement-focused type of business. And I thought that was really quite compelling, to see how they must have had to transform their culture, so that they can help businesses transform. They make it look easy, with the messaging and the momentum, but that was something that for a company that's an incumbent like that, is a bit of, you might say, even a model for how to do that right. >> Yeah, we talked to Joe Lazar, he's the SAP VP of Global Technology Partners. He talked about how SAP likes to be pushed to be a little uncomfortable by their partners, and we asked him the tough questions. You know, there's been tweets and there's been announcements from all the ACI vendors. I've talked to customer after customer that says, you know what, S/4HANA on HCI is what we want. A very quotable comment that he made was, we're not doing S/4 on HANA because we want to, we're doing S/4 on HANA because customers demand it. So, SAP is definitely listening to customer demand, S/4 on HANA is one of those things. You know, he tried to stay away from the bad word of certified on 4HANA, and validated, and focused on solutions, but SAP has a little ways to go. And that's kind of a, you talk to any HCI customer, validated and certified 4HANA is a bad word today, but SAP understands it and they're moving to certify the platform for HCI, so I thought that was a great example of them listening to customers and continuing to transform over the years. >> You're absolutely right. In fact, you know, if you look up digital transformation, one of the first pillars that you're gonna see is you gotta become customer-centric. And we really heard that a lot today. Even NetApp, when you were talking with Bill Miller about ONTAP in the cloud, going it's okay guys, maybe we have to listen to our customers. If we don't we won't be in business. That's a hallmark of an enterprise that is digitally transforming. >> Yeah, I'd argue that Dave Hitts was the one who forced that, that kind of cultural change. You had to bring in the founder to talk to the engineers and that had very engineer-driven thinking And I think Dave was very direct, like you know, we have to make the change or we won't be in business. The pendulum has changed to cloud. The SAP, which is not by any stretch of the mind, was never designed to run in the cloud, but they're adopting the technology for what customers are demanding. There's an AWS booth here, Fujitsu was the first one to say that, you know what, if customers need fail-fast environments, that's exactly where they should go, and put S/4 implementations, and then steady states should be moved to RMPRAM or private dating center or hosted solutions. So, the ecosystem seems to be embracing this change. >> Definitely. Anything that you're particularly looking forward to tomorrow for Day 2? >> You know what? I love talking to customers, so I'm looking forward to more customer conversations, talking about how is this being used? We haven't really talked a lot about Leonardo much. So, you know, IoT, A.I., how are these things that get a lot of press being perceived by actual customers? How are they being implemented? What's their true adoption rate? >> Awesome. Well, I look forward to hosting with you tomorrow, Keith. Thanks so much. >> I appreciate it. >> Thanks for watching. Keith and I have been at SAP Sapphire, bringing you some hopefully great informative content. From the NetApp booth, Lisa Martin for Keith Townsend. Thanks for watching.

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We're in Orlando at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. We're in the NetApp booth, and we are now talking to Wolfgang Hopfes, the Head of the SAP Business EMEIA for Fujitsu. Wolfgang, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. >> Great to meet you. So Fujitsu and SAP have been partners, global partners in technology in services and hosting for over 40 years. Fujitsu runs SAP, SAP runs Fujitsu. You guys have about 8,000 joint customers worldwide. We are at an enormous event. This is not just 20-plus thousand people, but this event location is about 16 American football fields. >> Really? >> It's huge. Tell us about what's new with Fujitsu and SAP. What excites you about this longstanding partnership? >> Number one, we are building, or we are trying to build additional business on our strong foundation, which has been growing over 40 years. So we are coming from very early days, where we were named Fujitsu and transformed several times into that. Nevertheless, the customer requirements to a company like us are kind of stay the same and stable. Also, everybody's evolving. So what we are trying to do is, we are trying to accompany our customers in a way where their customer requirements transform quicker than they are able to react, where all the technology is filling in quicker than we can expect, software technologies, artificial intelligence, and we try to be a company that helps the customer managing all these complexities in a really powerful IT world. >> So, let's talk about that from a practical sense. Fujitsu, if the average would think, "Oh, Fujitsu, servers; NetApp, storage; "SAP, software; we understand your relationship." But the relationship is much more complex than that. Fujitsu not only provides the physical infrastructure, but you guys offer services as well. >> What are some of the services that you offer? How does that feed back to the infrastructure? >> So general, and this is really something that at the moment we are trying to fundamentally change, because we are coming this is based on history from a strong technology foundation, yeah? Over the time, we added some system integration and consulting capabilities and skills across Europe, and this is what we are trying to change at the moment. So we tried to make out of at least two to three distinct business areas. We tried to glue them together and start thinking from a customer perspective. So because the customer no longer buys technology, the customer buys the functionality. And look maybe 20 years back. Maybe it's a little bit longer, but when I was young, when I bought my car, I bought a car, and then I started to integrate different things: a stereo, speaker systems, whatsoever kind of fancy things. And you did it by your own. Today, you order a car in a completely different way. You have a configuration tool at your manufacturer of choice, and you say, "I wanna have leather seats, seat heater, "whatsoever kind of things," and then you click, and you get the car which is perfectly designed for you in a different way of standards. And this is exactly my vision of what I wanna achieve in the IT world. So I wanna make the complexity and the technology consumable for the business units and not for IT guys. So that means that we glue together our services capabilities, our technology capabilities, to provide the customer an SAP system for his future needs. That will include all these fancy stuff, like artificial intelligence, blockchain, analytics, big data, all these kind of things are coming together. And we heard an announcement today from SAP, the HANA database management suite, which is, my understanding so far, kind of an umbrella kind of thing gluing different functional building blocks together. And you need more integrating, technology integration, application integration, capabilities in your company, to make your customers landscape-run, and this is what we are trying to achieve. >> So there's two similar, I think, adjacencies to your example. The first, you know, when I got my first car a little bit ago, five years ago I just got my license five years ago. You know, I'm so young. I'd have those challenges. I'd buy a stereo or I'll buy a after-market something to improve or customize my car. However, when it was time to upgrade or do maintenance, I'd take it into the shop, and they'll look at this thing and say, "Oh, it's not standard. "We can't fix it, "because you've modified it in a way that breaks it." One of the challenges with SAP is that customers in the past modified the solution to fit their needs. One of the challenges with SAP and infrastructure in general is that it's very bespoke, and I've designed a server, storage, and compute model that was very bespoke to my business. Talk about how Fujitsu is helping customers, through the relationship with SAP, deal with this modernization of their datasets. >> So there are a couple of different aspects in the whole thing. The first one is, so when we're talking about NetApp and Fujitsu, so, the two companies sat together maybe a year ago, maybe a little bit longer, and came up with the concept that is called NFLEX, which is an integrated system that reduces already this complexity, because it glues the compute and the storage power together. Also, some networking kind of things. And this gives the customer already a ready-to-run platform just from a technical point of view. So if you use this building block and find different and we are working on that on the application side, different building blocks And we're really we can deliver the whole stack that is, the foundation is built on Fujitsu and NetApp compute and storage power. So we are combining the different technology worlds with the special needs for our customers. This is what we are doing. >> So along those lines, I just read that Fujitsu was named the Competitive IT Strategy Company for 2018. So I'm curious, what is it that Fujitsu is driving towards in 2018 to deliver this competitive IT strategy, like what you just talked about. How does that give you a competitive edge? >> Yeah. So first of all, we have and this is based in our headquarters in Japan. We have really a lot of things to talk about when it comes to artificial intelligence, deep learning, blockchain and big data. So the company is investing heavily in these things. And this is what we are trying to tie together, because this gives us a uniqueness in the market. These are elements that everybody needs for the digital transformation. And today, you often hear some sentence like, "It's running on a platform." "It's running on a SAP platform." The reality is that about 90% of today's S/4HANA customers are still running on premise. So we see a move into cloud environments. We see a move into hybrid or multi-cloud engagements in customers, and this is exactly When we just look onto the application or this digital side of the business, we forget that the customer has a business and a technology foundation, too. And this is where we are taking care of. And this gives us this advantage where we think this is needed from the customer. >> So, talking about customer experiences, customer relationships, what are some of the key considerations as customers look at Fujitsu? I will call this infrastructure is Fujitsu's wheelhouse. >> Yeah. >> What are some of the key differentiators customers need to look at as they examine potential infrastructure solutions? >> You need to differentiate and this brings me back to my car comparison. If you wanna have just building blocks, and it's the customer's responsibility to, number one, get them to run, and number two, operate them over a certain period of time with a service level. So within Fujitsu, we are prepackaging and we are taking care of the customer. So, first of all, we are not delivering components. We are delivering an up-and-running platform. And secondly, we are taking the risk away from the customer. So that means we give service levels, we give maintenance, we offer managed services so that the customer can really focus on their business instead of wasting energy on his IT systems, because this is what we are good at, and this is what we are offering to the customer. So this is a really big difference. We are providing a ready-to-run system, and we are taking care on the maintenance, regardless of what components are in the system. So we are also taking care, if we put on NetApp storage and the Fujitsu server together, Fujitsu is taking care on the maintenance issues. Whenever something may go wrong with the system, it's one face to the customer. And this give us a very strong position. >> So for that managing servers, how deep does that stack go? I mean, one of the appeals to customers when it comes to cloud is that, you know what, all the way, to some cases, BASIS is handled by someone else. I'm just laying my application. I'm installing my application. I'm making the modifications that SAP kind of says, "These are the guardrails we'll make." And from every other system, you can count on consistently from SAP platform the SAP platform. How far does Fujitsu go in managing service for SAP? >> So we are offering many services, starting technology foundation, starting going into SAP BASIS, going into the complete application. So we are offering the complete stack also on the managed services side. The customer can start with an easy, just managing his hardware, managing his platform, managing his whole system. So the whole landscape can be under contract of Fujitsu. And it's just a consumption model for the customer. Risk-free, that's all what he needs to take care of. So we are really taking based on customer needs, requirements, and desires, we are taking the risk on the Fujitsu side that the customer has an up-and-running SAP landscape. >> So one of the big challenges that enterprises face when it comes to SAP in general and it's not just SAP, it's all big enterprise apps. On the stage floor, Bill McDermott said this morning and I was taken aback, I don't know if this is, in my experience, it hasn't been quite the experience that he had a customer from discussion to implementation to all business processes, six weeks to implement S/4. That was a bit of a dream. >> Absolutely. >> Not typical of the experience, but even, let's say, a lot less complex than just raising a developing environment, where customers just want to experiment, they wanna fail fast, they wanna take a copy of production, put it into development, create an application, see if it works. How does Fujitsu help speed agility of customers who just simply wanna get up a faster-running development environment? >> So, in this case, we'd definitely recommend. So these are use cases where we would recommend going into a cloud-like environment. So, easy. In an Amazon or other world, you get one-terabyte HANA system within 24 hours later. So you just need a credit card; that's all you need. The interesting part starts when you exactly go through this exercise, and did your experience, and then you wanna take whatever you experienced back into your production system, because then, the complexity for the customer starts. Because what you get in these hyperscaler clouds isn't platform. But you're not getting service to get your results back onto your production system. And this is where are taking care on. So we are going beyond this "just a platform" or "just a device" or "just a server," because the agility to get a platform is not necessary. You can have this everywhere. The luxury to get your results, your data, back and forth from your production system, make a copy, move them, transform them into an Amazon and back again, after you've made your four-weeks development cycle, that's something where the value for our customer is in. So sometimes, it's not only about the speed and the time and the agility. Sometimes it's about the completeness of getting the whole thing back again so that you can use your results, use your experience that you made over this short period of time, and bring it into your production system. That's a key message. >> Yeah, well I'm glad you answered I think that's legitimately how customers look at it. The cloud is for a short burst, I need to get it up and ready and quick. Steady state, SAP HANA, SAP in the cloud, and especially hyperscaler specifically, probably doesn't make any sense because those are known steady workloads that are probably best suited for the private data center. >> Not only that, so it's about the stability. So my experiences in talking to customers and I know at least two, and both are in the Middle East. Two customers who decided to go out of the cloud again because of, it does not make sense for them. So cloud is especially for this use case, try something, start something, four weeks, collapse it and do something else again. The important part is, normally customers wanna be sure of where their data is. This is a big issue at these times, especially GDPR, especially in Europe. So I've seen customers asking me somewhere in Russia or the Middle East, "Can you ensure that my data "is stored in Western Europe? "Or, even better, in Germany?" So, yes we can, with our concept. And most of these customers are likely to wanna have control over their production systems. So the core, where the customers' data are located, they wanna have this somewhere where they can go and feel and touch it. So this is important for them. Everything else can be in the cloud. So that means two-third of today's SAP landscapes have the ability to be moved in a cloud. But the stable core, which is S/4HANA core business, should be somewhere where the customer can get feel it again. >> Get their hands on it. Wolfgang, thanks so much for stopping by and sharing with us what's new with Fujitsu and SAP, and we appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. >> We wanna thank you for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from Orlando at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Thanks for watching.

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE. I am Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, and we are live in the NetApp booth at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018. We are joined by Robert Stumpf, Senior Director of IT, Enterprise Solutions Delivery. Welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you, thank you. >> So we're here in the NetApp booth at SAPPHIRE NOW. As they said in the keynote this morning, they're expecting a million people to engage with SAP SAPPHIRE this week. >> Yes. >> Think, I've heard rumblings there's about 20+ thousand people here in attendance. >> Yeah. >> Huge event, huge show, lots of announcements. Let's talk about NetApp and SAP as partners. Specifically in the context of the Next-Gen Data Center, bringing cloud-ready solutions to business application. What are you guys doing there with SAP? >> Sure, I can talk a little bit about that. The NetApp solutions fit into the Next-Generation Data Center in a variety of different ways. We have the All FAS Flash that really is the core of our product base and is really the workhorse of all the hardcore applications, gives you really a strong performance in the storage area. Then we have the Cloud Volumes with when you want to scale out to hyper scaler, and you can use the Cloud Volumes abilities there. And then when you look at our HCI components, it is capable of giving you a lot more of the container-based compute power, so we fit into a variety of different components there. >> So, Robert, we're at SAP. And SAP hasn't been traditionally known as a cloud-aware application. Tell us, from the NetApp perspective, what's changed with SAP over the years that now, you can comfortably talk about SAP as a cloud-aware application? >> So SAP's moving a long way in that direction. You saw it this morning in the keynote that they were talking about the C4, their customer-focused applications. That's really kind of putting a framework on top of all of the customer engagements, and making the customer the center of everything. So they're moving a lot in that direction. We at NetApp have implemented their Hybris platform, their cloud for customer application. We just went live with that last year, so we're on that journey with SAP as well. >> So, as we talk about that, what makes the application, or what make applications in general cloud-aware? >> Okay, when you look at making something cloud-aware, you want to really look at the architecture that you have underneath it. So you'll build something that has a lot more automation in it, a lot more scalable, where you don't have to, the scalability's built into the framework, like you're leveraging. In the case of our NetApp support site, which we just completely re-architected and went live last month, we have built that on what's called a MEAN stack, so that's where the Mongo database and the back-end that's a NoSQL database, and then on top of an Angular node.js, which gives you much more robust framework for you to be able to scale-out your application. So with it being a website, and your volume can go up and down, so you want to be able to scale the application without needing people to get involved in that scaling, so they will just fire up new containers as needed as the volume increases, and it's a lot more robust in architecture. >> So if we look at Hybris and we look at NetApp products and solutions, that framework and architecture. Can you paint a picture for us what NetApp solutions and products are cloud-aware? >> Sure, the cloud-aware applications, really you need to look at the complete stack of the Next-Generation Data Center, which is really embodying the on-prem data center, your hyperscaler cloud data centers, and then a private cloud if you so wish to build one. So the Next-Generation Data Center takes advantage of the All FAS Flash on your on-prem solution, so you've got your performance, high-performance scalability. Then your Cloud Volumes allows you to move your data between your on-prem out to the hyperscaler as you need to, and the HCI component gives you that container-based compute array that allows the applications to scale. Also, you can leverage StorageGRID, which is much more of an object-based data base, which is something that you'll use extensively on cloud-aware applications. >> So, thanks Keith. So one of the things that was announced this morning, you mentioned C/4HANA where Bill McDermott was sort-of expected to announce what SAP was going to be doing that's gonna help differentiate them. They want more share from Salesforce and Oracle. He made kind of some aloof references to that, but one of the things that he talked about was: companies need, in this day and age, speed obviously, but to move away from a 360-degree view of sales automation to an actual 360-degree view of the customer. I'd love to get your insight on NetApp and SAP as partners together. Are you seeing any particular industries leading here? We think of manufacturing, maybe automotive oil and gas, but I'm just wondering from NetApp's perspective, are you seeing any industries that are really leading-edge here in evolving to a Next-Gen Data Center that enables this 360-degree view? >> There's a variety of different industries that are doing that. If you take a look at applications like Netflix and Amazon Prime, those applications are architectured to be scalable and to be much more robust, and they are much more focused on the customer. And because you don't have outages, right? They don't take the system offline when they're doing an upgrade to their capabilities. When was the last time you heard of Netflix going offline for twelve hours to do an upgrade? So, these applications are built much more robustly around that, and that's what one thing that we are looking to do at NetApp with the Hybris implementation that we did with SAP, and we're also upgrading our back office CRM system to their CRM on HANA on-prem, and we're gonna be taking advantage of the Hybris capabilities there to give that full picture of the customer. We'll be heavily engaged with SAP on their C4 journey and making sure that we are a part of that as well. >> So it's great that you brought up Netflix as an example that continues to be operating an environment that has this huge back-end automated with technology. SAP traditionally hasn't been considered a technology that you could upgrade on the fly. I've managed an SAP environment where we can only take twelve hours of downtime a year because mission critical, it's very difficult to get that time. >> Yes. >> How has the NetApp data fabric story played into making that a possibility in your own environment and customers' environments? >> Okay, we leverage a lot of the NetApp storage on our on-prem system. I'm in the exact place, same situation as you were talking about. We have a lot of mission critical customers that are on our support application. I have to give 90-days notice to take the system down for any longer than four hours at a time, so I'm in that very similar situation. So we leverage a lot of the NetApp technologies to make sure that the applications are available when I'm doing the upgrades, and we can do rapid copies of the data that's in there, make sure it's all robust. Our data, failover database, failover systems, are set up that way so that they take advantage of the snapshots that we got from the application, and we're working with SAP. The SAP Hybris application is actually built on top of NetApp storage, and we're working very closely with SAP to re-architect our applications, to take advantage of the capabilities that NetApp storage brings to the equation. >> So none of this coming into its own in this hybrid cloud model that's been around 26 years, right, long time. But now, it's everything you see. You mentioned Netflix, and I don't know anybody on the planet that would survive if Netflix went down for an hour, let alone twelve. So speed, access to data, but this evolution of NetApp, I'm interested, and you know now again in this hybrid cloud model, you guys made your name from building network attached to storage on-prem data centers, the announcement with Google Platform just last week. Talk to us about some of the evolution from NetApp, from your perspective, from the storage perspective, into really facilitating this hybrid cloud model. >> Sure, we are really at the forefront of that because at the end of the day, it's all about the data. Right, your application can run wherever you want, but wherever your data is is really the key. And that's the framework that we're putting in place is to make your data a lot more mobile. So if you want to keep the data on-premise, then you can keep it on-premise. If you want to move it out next to the hyperscaler, you can burst it out, you can use the Cloud Volumes and migrate the data. So the NetApp picture, the story is really in making your data much more mobile and moving it to the location of choice for any particular workload that you're looking for. >> So, we can't have a discussion in 2018 about data without talking about privacy and security. What's the relationship in ensuring that NetApp and SAP is one, media requirements in GDPR, we have to talk about GDPR, we have to talk about security. How is NetApp securing data and ensuring that in-users' and organizations' data stay private? >> That's a very good question, right? It's definitely a challenge that a lot of companies are struggling with, and the tools that NetApp provides with our storage systems are paramount, security is paramount, and that's something that we're very much focused on in making sure that your data is your data, and the specific components of the data that you want to keep on-premise, which you want to keep as much more secure, then you can keep that on the NetApp All FAS Flash storage systems, and then you protect it as if it's in your own kingdom. But then the data that's a little bit more lax on the security sites, then you can push that out onto the hyperscalers and use the NetApp Cloud Volumes to have it outside of your on-premise. You know, it's like your own firewall. >> So one of the basic things as a ONTAP customer that ONTAP customers depend on and the private data centers, this ability to encrypt data on the fly. Now that we look at, you know we see ONTAP in the cloud, do we get that same basic capability to encrypt data on the fly or encrypt data while it's in transit? How do I know my data is protected from an encryption perspective? >> You get the same capabilities when you're using the on-cloud tools that we provide, so there's no real difference in that, and that's the beauty behind that. You're using the same storage management tools for your Cloud Volumes as you would be for your on-premise systems. >> I want to ask a question on competition. There's a lot of co-opetition that's going on just at SAPPHIRE alone. With what you talked about about how NetApp is leveraging Hybris, you mentioned, to really kind of get towards that model of connecting supply chain with demand, getting that full view of customers, SAP partners with probably all of your competitors. So how is what NetApp is doing internally to digitally transform, how do you see it as giving NetApp that competitive edge against the other guys? >> Okay, the way that we look at our competitive edge at NetApp from an application standpoint is really focusing on keeping our core capabilities very, very vanilla. So in the implementation with Hybris, we were very much focused on not customizing the application. But because at the end of the day, you sell stuff, you build stuff, you manufacture it, and you support it. So those are the core capabilities, and we've kept that very vanilla as much as possible within the implementation. Where we differentiate, that's where we customize. So our application landscape is much more focused on customizing for the differentiating capabilities, and that's the component that's specific to NetApp and how we do business. And that's the way that we go about differentiating ourselves from our competitors. So we use the core capabilities of all the enterprise applications that we have, that we purchase such as Hybris, and then we go build our custom solutions that are differentiated, that really searches our ASUP, AutoSupport system, that gets what's embedded right from day one, that's a custom-built application, it's very proprietary, it's really the keys to the kingdom for our organization. And that's something that's very, very integral as part of the NetApp culture. >> So, let's talk about some lessons learned from that. One of the pain points for many SAP customers is they look at capability like ECC on HANA, really want it, but they've customized their environment too much, so making that switch is extremely difficult for them. What have you learned as a team that says, you know what, the best way to stay in line with SAP and follow that roadmap for mission critical applications that are both stable and differentiating, you should follow these basic policies from a hygiene perspective. >> Sure, we actually went through that last year with our project where we replaced our Sales Force Automation system, and we implemented C4, C4C Hybris. So the key to that is really getting the executive sponsorship bought-in to making sure that you're adhering to the vanilla applications and not customizing it. So we were very fortunate where we had Henri Richard and Bill Miller, our CIO. They were the executive sponsors of the project, and they were adamant that we would not customize the application, and we went through, it took us six months to replace our CRM system for an office CRM system. Very proud of that project. It was an incredible painful journey to go through, but the benefits that we got out of the end of it are phenomenal because we were in that situation where we had an overly-custom SAS application that was running our sales organization that really wasn't meeting the needs of the business. Now we have a much more agile implementation that's on top of SAP's Hybris platform, and we're taking advantage of the new capabilities they introduce, rather than focusing on our own customizations. >> That's a great summary. I think you articulated very well what, one of the themes was from Bill McDermott's keynote this morning, is making things simple, is not an easy thing to do, but it's critical. There are so many-- >> It's totally critical. >> business outcomes that come out of that, not just stream-learning processes, improving sales and marketing and connecting them together, but really affecting revenue, profit, share, et cetera. So Robert, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and chatting with Keith and me today about what you guys are doing with SAP. >> Great, thank you, thank you for your time. >> We want to thank you. You're watching theCUBE: Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAP SAPPHIRE 2018, thanks for watching! (light percussive music)

>> Announcer: It's The Cube covering SAPPHIRE NOW 2017. Brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube with ongoing coverage of SAP SAPPHIRE 2017 in Orlando. And we're excited to have Floyd Strimling on the phone, he is the global vice president SAP Cloud Platform and he is running around the Orange County Convention Center. So, Floyd, how you doing today? >> I'm doing great, thanks for having me, and I hope you can hear me as it's quite loud in the convention center. >> I can hear you perfectly. So, first off, we actually were just doing a kind of a keynote analysis of Hasso today. You know, we see a lot of keynotes, we go to a ton of conferences, and I thought he was just spectacular. Touched on so many topics and really seems to be on his game. >> And you know what if you go to Sapphire, unless you attend the Hasso Plattner keynote, you never know what's going to be on the agenda. You never know which way he's going to take it, but I thought today he hit all the big points. I mean, whoever thought you would see Hasso doing a lecture on DBUs and core conversion as far as what's going on in computing? So I thought he hit all the great topics, talked about what the class was doing, what were doing with S/4HANA Cloud, how we're really taking the company to the next level, and his honesty is always so refreshing when you look at people up there on stage talking. >> Absolutely, 'cause on of his quotes, and I was live-tweeting during the keynote, was you know, "We want to get as fast to the cloud as possible," and you guys are backing that up with action with all the announcements with AWS and Google Cloud Platform. I think you have Azure underway, so you're offering your customers a bunch of public cloud choices. And then you've rebranded and now you've also got a couple flavors of the SAP Cloud. So I wonder you know, clearly you guys are all-in on this Cloud thing. >> You know I think it's interesting, when you look at what's going on in Cloud, I like to say that the first wave was dominated by infrastructure vendors, and I think the software vendors like SAP have a very big stake in this and are ready to take leadership, but what is our vision? How does that impact the customers? And that's really looking at much more of a multi-Cloud approach. So not sitting here saying we're going to go on one vendor, but staying agnostic and, like you said, we're working with AWS. I saw Diane Green on stage with Google Cloud Platform. We continue to work with Azure. So you know these are key partners to us, but we're the software vendor of that agnostic nature of our customers to be able to move workloads on to any of those platforms, on top of our Cloud Platform, as a major piece is critical. And I think it's given us enormous scale and advantage over what some other people are doing in the industry. >> Yeah, 'cause I mean you have such a great installed base and you're in so many mission-critical applications, obviously with the ERP background, but the other thing that really struck me, Floyd, was Hasso's conversation about a new way to develop applications and you know no more instruction manuals, and intelligent design, and sharing our road-map with our customers, and having customers participate in that road-map. I mean that was definitely not SAP's reputation back in the day. It was you know, "The SAP way or the highway. "We know best. It's a big monolithic application." That is completely turned upside down, and maybe I haven't been paying attention as to when that started to happen, but you know that was a very clear message that he's changing the way that you guys build, deliver, and develop software for your customers. >> I think this has been happening a lot longer than people realize. And when we launched out S/4HANA, and the transformation that provides to really take the core convert to the company and project it beyond even the next decade, that puts you into this real-time notion. And now with that type of technology you need a way to then put more agility, faster app development, better UI experience, better interaction, ability for our customers to take their data and to monetize it in new and different ways, and build ecosystems around them, that's why we have the SAP Cloud Platform. It's designed to be very modern, to be very Cloud-first, the Cloud-data way of developing applications, and really taking our customers to get the speed of innovation to where they need. You know, really SAP is going to help our customers make that. You know we call it the digital transformation, but I like to call it the innovation curve. To help them bend that curve so they can start doing more and more. And if you listen to Bill's keynote, when he said that you have two companies dropping out of the S&P 500, I think he said every week. That's an amazing statistic and something that our customers has, facing destruction at such a high rate, that we've got to be here to help make this transformation. And that's what we're doing. >> Yeah the other part too, again there are so many angles in that keynote this morning, was just the whole machine-learning and artificial intelligence, because it's one thing to talk about it kind of in the abstract, but Hasso was very clear you know you've had airplanes having self-pilots for a long time, but more importantly, you guys have so much data in your systems that you can start to apply the machine-learning and the AI in these new intelligent applications and the machine can learn by doing thousands or millions of repeated scenario processes and start to affect really what on some level might seem like mundane or simple processes, like invoice matching, to actually very, very powerful. If you can actually match 94% of the invoices without having a human touch, you know that's a tremendous business impact. >> Well this is true. AI machine-learning is critical us. I know that he's talked about we're going to put this into all the rest of these applications, and we're going to offer this to our customers in new and interesting ways that change the way you interact with the system. I don't know if you saw some of the of the things we were talking about, about co-pilot and the way that you can actually interact with SAP systems, but changing it from the ground-up, adding this ability to have the system itself kind of answer, like you're saying, self-answer these questions, be more interactive with you in new and interesting ways and really free up our customers to innovate and start doing more with their data than they every thought. I think what you're going to see is that, you know machine-learning and AI right now most of it, what you see in the market all around, more of the consumer based versions, kind of like what you're doing for ad placement and all those types of things. How you apply that same technology to business is a little bit different, and who better than us then to actually it to the business itself? To actually get value out of it, because it's not enough just to have it. Customers have got to get and realize huge business value, which we know is there. And you're going to see a slew of applications. I know Hasso said by next year we'll have 50 of them. But the ones that are coming out there, they're very interesting. They're very unique and innovative, and they can be extended by our customers to specific use cases for themselves. >> Yeah, the other great analogy that he used today was you know kind of comparing Tesla to I presume Mercedes, he didn't call it out by name, but that not only is it a different way to have control knobs and this-and-that in terms of software versus even a beautifully designed and ergonomically proper dashboard, but it's also a different buying experience and just a different experience in general. And really using that as kind of a comparison for really this transformative way that things are being done now that's different from before, and really it's a software-enabled, and software-powered, intelligent design, no-manual way of looking at things. So again, just very impressed by the fact that he's poking fun at one of the best German brands that makes really fine products saying, "Yeah that's great, but software defined is "a whole different way to approach the world "and that's what we are going towards." >> We thought, he's big key is all our user experience, changing that user experience, and really who does read a software manual these days? I don't think any of us do. So the big advantage and the change of what he's really talking about, I love his analogy too because you know he's poking fun at one of the major brands, was that ability to deliver innovation free of fear or risk to that user. So that when you download that application you're not worried. That's doing testing, no one's testing that locally to make sure the test was going to start in the morning, and then changing that ability to innovate at a rapid pace. And I think you're seeing us do this with your idea of S/4HANA being that digital core and then around it the Cloud Platform being the agile, the innovation engine that would deliver in all of these really cool applications that pop up that could be delivered at a much faster pace, and customers then could pick and choose which ones they use. And that's all going to be delivered much quicker. I think that the days of waiting for that big update going over months and months of testing are over. We got to get people moving quicker, but we got to be able to react to what's going on in the industry faster. And that's the whole reason why we transformed the company. I mean we are, and we're seeing our customers have huge benefits as they make this journey with us. >> So Floyd, I know you're kind of up against it on the time. It's busy there in Orlando. So I just want to give you the final say. Any special surprises, funny chatter coming off the floor? What's kind of the vibe there in Orlando on the floor? >> You know the vibe has been interesting because you start off with the keynote from Bill, and then you have Intel, Google on stage talking about their solution sets. And you have Michael Dell coming there talking about the importance of IT again. And then you have the Wladimir Klitschko come out there when Bernd was talking, and the stark message he was talking about about recreating yourself and watching your path. And then you follow that up with Hasso's keynote today, which was outstanding, about just where the company is. I think the buzz really is that SAP now is really going to tell everybody what we're doing in the Cloud. We are committed to this. We have a clear strategy, a clear vision. You can see from our performance we're doing extremely well right now. And we want to really take all of our customers with us, and then add a (phone beeps) lot on the way as we make this transformation. I think people were always wondering what we're going to do, and I think it's out there right now. We're going to be a multi-Cloud company. We're going to offer innovative applications. We're going to have accelerated (phone beeps) bundles of the applications with Leonardo and then we're going to finish this off with the best digital core on the planet with S/4HANA. I think it's exciting times here to be at Sapphire. It's exciting times to be at SAP and exciting times for our customers. >> Alright Floyed, well I think that's a great summary, and you know I think you're fortunate you still have that founder DNA, you've still got a really strong founder that obviously drives that culture, and the fact that he has embraced these mega trends going forward is only good and clearly reflected in the performance of the company. So thanks for taking a few minutes of your time and I'll let you get back to the action there on the floor in Orlando. >> Voiceover: Alright thank you, appreciate your time. >> Alright, thanks a lot. That's Floyd Stremling from Orlando. He is the global VP of SAP Cloud Platform. I'm Jeff Frick; you're watching The Cube on our ongoing coverage of SAP SAPPHIRE 2017. Thanks for watching.

[Narrator] It's The Cube. Covering SAPPHIRE NOW 2017. Brought to you by: SAP Cloud Platform, and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Welcome back everyone live here in Palo Alto for our studio coverage of SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2017. I'm John Furrier of The Cube. Three days of SAPPHIRE NOW coverage from our 4500 square foot studio in Palo Alto covering all the action news on the ground in Orlando, Florida where SAP SAPPHIRE NOW is taking place. The big news and big story of SAPPHIRE is the cloud, multi-cloud strategy and what it means for customers. This is part of SAP's Cloud Platform. I had a chance to sit down with the leader of that team, Dan Lahl, who is the Vice President of Product Marketing. I asked Dan to break down the big news for SAP Cloud Platform. Here's the conversation with myself and Dan Lahl. >> What we're announcing at SAPPHIRE this week is we are going to be running SAP Cloud Platform not only in SAP data centers, but also in AWS data centers, in Azure data centers and in GCP data centers. So, we really now are above the fray of the infrastructure wars. >> It's actually, we also talked with your team at SAP Cloud Platform around Google Next. >> Dan: Yeah. >> And, you guys had a significant announcement. The folks flew in from Germany, the big entourage on-stage with Diane Greene's team at Google, and I was scratching my heading saying I didn't even see this coming, you kind of kept it from me. (chuckles) I knew you had something up your sleeve. Significant presence with Google. So I ping the Amazon folks and say hey what's going on, you lose Hensburg? They said no, no we're doing a lot of great stuff with SAP. Of course, Google is trotted out there as a big win. But this is the strategy for SAP, and Andy Jassy was in San Francisco a while back and he said look, we are winning with more services, more services. But, he made a point. The lock-in spec of the old, and he also talked about the, you can't fight gravity. The old way to buy infrastructure is just taking it down. >> It's dead, it's dead. And our view is we're going to be a software company, right? We're not going to play at the hardware layer, we're going to play above that and differentiate with business services above that. Let the customers decide what they think the best hyper-scale vendor is. We'll give them great software, business services above those layers. >> So, I think multi-cloud is the hottest trend that nobody's talking about. You guys are talking about it obviously, but in the press corps, in the media, no one's actually really digging into this because it's very nuanced. It's an industry kind of thing. But having multi-cloud is like interoperability back in the networking days. >> Dan: That's right. >> And just to be clear, you guys are still behind a hundred percent with AWS, Amazon Web Services, >> Dan: Absolutely, yep. >> and Microsoft Azure. >> Yep, and GCP as well. And then you want to run it at an SAP data center you can do that too, and we'll give customers one cockpit, one piece of glass to manage all those different environments. >> So your PaaS is on Google Cloud Platform >> Yep. >> At Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services. >> To be perfectly clear, GA on AWS, beta on Azure and we're doing a pilot showcase on GCP. That's cool -- >> So that's platforms of service. >> That's right. >> Now that's a completely different strategy than say Oracle. >> Yeah, let's lock you in one more time. Let's lock you in to cloud. >> But they have hardware, and they're going frontal attack against Amazon and vice versa. There's a war going on between the two. That's not what SAP's trying to do, I don't see you making any noise out there. >> To me that's a race to the bottom. That's a race to the bottom. So we're going to provide business services above that hardware layer with the PaaS and then business services above that to help customers. >> So, managing Cloud Workloads is also another topic and this is being talked a lot in context to hybrid clouds. So hybrid cloud obviously is a big deal. A lot of people are moving to public cloud and Andy Jassy says they're happening much faster. I kind of disagree with Andy on this point. I think he's got momentum for sure, and I love what they're doing, but I don't think they're moving as fast. Still got a lot of on-premise. This is your world as well at SAP, so you have to kind of build the connectors if you will. Connectors or API. So, a lot of customers want to know what to do, and then so multi-cloud I think's going to be super important. >> Dan: Yes. >> But I still got the on-premise investment in systems of record, systems of software, that need to enable opportunities for new app development and what-not. How do you talk to customers about that? >> That's not going away. That is not going away for ten years. So, hybrid cloud's going to be with us. So our strategy is we will provide integration services, whether that be at the data layer, whether it be at the process layer, or whether that be through API or microservices. We're going all-in on all of those. So, if you want to connect a business process that you've built in Cloud Platform with an on-premise system, you can do that whether that's SAP or a not SAP. If you want to use APIs and use that infrastructure, we're exposing more and more APIs. In fact, this week we're announcing over a hundred APIs being exposed for S/4HANA, in the finance area for Ariba, for SuccessFactors, for Fieldglass. And then we're adding actually specific APIs for specific business functions. So, do a billing off an invoice, collect data, collect information off a purchase order. We're exposing those higher level services as well. So, integration is huge and again we've been in the data services as well, so you want to move data to the cloud we're providing services to do that too. >> So, two things that are jumping out at me looking at what you guys are doing this week at SAPPHIRE is this API connector. So you're connecting the SAP world into the cloud. And certainly the platform is a service that you have in the platform, the cloud platform is fundamental. But, there's a big buzz around marketplaces. So talk about some of the new things you're doing there because I think this where it gets kind of interesting and it lets us get your perspective on what you guys are announcing, and your thoughts on this notion of the apps center, marketplace, I mean Amazon Web Services is doing a lot of great things. They think that the consumption pattern in the future will all be driven by some sort of app center. You guys are in the software business. I'm assuming that's a big part of what you got doing, what's new? >> Yeah, very exciting for marketplace as well. So, we're extending the value of the app center for our customers. So today you want to look at a partner application, you can go look at it, you can discover it, but you really can't do more than that off the app center. So, today what we're announcing, or this week at SAPPHIRE, the ability discover, to learn, to try, to buy, and to use all directly off the app center. And in further on to that, we'll manage the application for the partner and for the customer. So, if the partner updates their application, automatically gets downloaded and updated through the marketplace, through the app center. >> I've been reading a lot of stuff on the cloud and AI and use the line 'talk to me like I'm a, pretend I'm a five-year old.' People have been using that quote a lot. So, pretend that I'm a customer, I'm not a five-year old, but a customer that's not under the hood, might not be following all the trends. Here's my challenge. I'm on-prem, I'm moving to the cloud, and I just haven't decided yet who I want to look at and John hasn't posted his competitive matrix yet, so I don't know he feels, and I got that coming out, a little plug for my upcoming research, (Dan laughs) but they have a relationship with Microsoft, I have a relationship with SAP, I love Google's got the Mojo with TensorFlow and Machine Learning and all the smart engineers they have. And Amazon is just awesome. I just don't know yet which ones. Can I just choose from the app center? >> Absolutely. >> John: Cloud, any cloud that I want? Or -- >> Well, it's really for any partner that's built on the cloud platform today. So, as we move forward with the multi-cloud you're going to see that happening. >> John: But that's a trend you guys see. >> We definitely see that. And you're right, we want to make it like a five-year old. You want to discover, you want to try, you want to use. That's what we do with the app center today. >> So the other thing I liked about Mobile World Congress when we did chat last, you guys announced in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress this notion of Workflow. What is the new with that? Cause there's some news around some new things you're doing with Workflow. What do you have? >> Yeah, so we're extending Workflow with actually a rules system as well, so we've added a new service to go along with Workflow called Business Rules. So, now you can mash up workflows as we've talked before, mash up some business processes. But now you can actually use the rules system to open up each business process, add logic into that, and as a business analyst it's really if-then type of capability. So pretty easy. Put that, close it back up, now you have a whole new business process or an extended business processes in using Workflow and Rules together. >> So you make it more flexible for the Workflow to get -- >> Let the business analysts deliver more value in their job, and extend business processes more easily. >> What about the app developer? I'm an app developer, I want to take advantage of all the greatness of SAP. What mechanisms are you guys announcing or talking about at SAPPHIRE this year that make my life easier? Without being an expert on SAP, is there any mechanism for me to say hey I want some Rules and app goodness coming into my app? >> Yeah, we have all-new tooling that we're going to be talking about at SAPPHIRE, so we have some relationships we're building with other partners to do high-productivity application work. And then we're extending our Web IDE development tool to be a full stack development environment. Whether you want to do it via the web, whether you want to do it via mobile, if you want to integrate other combinations, other technologies like Slack or other technologies in there. You can do all that in the Web IDE development tool. >> So I can add business services into the API. >> Into the Web IDE, and you can extend the Web IDE like we've done with Slack. So, you just create another tab and import that tool into the Web IDE. So, very easy for developers now to create applications that will run seamlessly on Cloud Platform. >> Let's just take a step back while you're on this topic. This is interesting, DevOps has been the movement that has gone mainstream now with things that we're talking about here. Your philosophy with the developer is what, to just give them SAP all day long? What's the main value proposition for the platform as a service that you have for the developer? >> So, my joke is with Cloud Platform we're able to talk to developers under 40 because it's a Java-based environment. So, what we get with the Cloud Foundry work that we've done with the multi-PaaS and that's how we're doing -- >> John: Oh yeah, everyone over 40 still likes Java too, so we learned about Java >> Me too. (both laugh) So anyway, what we're delivering through multi-cloud we're doing it through Cloud Foundry, and that gives the ability to have multiple run-times. So for those folks that want to use no doT.js they can use that. They want to use different languages like Ruby, Python, Perl, Go, those languages, they can use those as well. So, our view is whatever language, whatever run-time you want to bring to the party, SAP will have this environment where you can develop and deploy in that. And we bring all the mobile technology that we've had for years and years and years if you want to deploy on mobile you can do that too. So I think where we've been lacking in the past is some of the high-productivity tools. So we're adding high-productivity capabilities for our mobile development as well as for core development too. >> Bottom line me on how you would package this up, because there's so much going on at SAPPHIRE. What's the net, net, net? What's the bottom line, because how, gimme the elevator pitch real quick. What's the big news that -- >> Here's the real sound bite. >> -- to set SAP Cloud Platform. >> Yeah, the real sound bite is we're accelerating choice, accelerating adoption, and accelerating ease of use for our customers to be able to adopt cloud. So you get your choice through multi-cloud. You get your choice of different applications that you can do business directly on, and then you're getting choice and capabilities through all of the services. >> What are you most excited about, to point to one thing say look at this new feature. >> It's multi-cloud. We think multi-cloud, as you said, it's the hottest thing going today. We are all-in on multi-cloud. And you'll see us deliver more and more capabilities and services that run on whatever infrastructure provider you want to run on. So, again we're a software company. We're not going to participate at the hardware layer. We're going up, not going down. >> I recently interviewed the CTO of Analytics at Accenture here on one of my shows. He got a huge amount of views. There's a huge interest in analytics. Obviously not something new to you guys, but Accenture's a partner. And that brings up the question, this is all great, you got the cloud relationship so essentially you guys look at cloud the same way you looked at hardware vendors in the past. They're partners, SAP doesn't really change your game, you're still doing the software, still provide all that business intelligence to your customers through software. But I got to ask you the impact to partners, cause they're changing. >> Dan: They are changing. >> Accenture, Deloitte, all of them that, all the top guys out there are changing. >> They're having to become ISVs. It's pretty amazing. They're having to do more than just coming in with a big pitch saying a million dollars in two years. So what we see Accenture, Deloitte, others doing, is providing actual full applications now as an ISV and Deloitte and Accenture have actually done that both through cloud platform. And they're also becoming prototyping and PoC specialists as well. So, they'll come in, they'll do a design thinking with our customer, they'll prototype it, they'll PoC it on the Cloud Platform, do something in four weeks, prove out a concept so that they can then go to the next level, the next step on the agreement. >> Yeah, they're becoming much more strategic with the customers. Well, they always had been, I'm not saying they hadn't in the past. >> But not just implementation, right? It's actually proving that they can do something new in digital transformation, for example. >> I mean, back in the old days SAP ERP roll out in the 80s and early 90s. It was a gravy train for the integrators. >> Yeah. >> You know, the time tables were multi-year. And to your point, the world has changed with Agile that they have to then break down these milestones and have proof of value. Time to value is much shorter, so it's still lucrative, but just different execution cadence. Can you talk about that? >> And just think about that, with the value they're providing they're actually bringing a prototype or a PoC that's a proof point, a proven part of the application that they're going to show to the customer so that they can get to that next level of application development with the customer. So it's really much more of a partnership, and we get to be the platform on which they're running which is the cool part for us. >> Dan, thanks for coming. This Cube conversation's special on SAPPHIRE what's happening around all the new announcements. What should people be looking at this week? What cool things have you got going on on the ground in Orlando? >> Yeah, come to our campus. Come see all the cool things we're doing. Not just what I've talked about, but also IoT that runs on Cloud Platform, Machine Learning AI that runs on Cloud Platform, big data that runs on Cloud Platform. All of the new applications we're bringing that are part of Cloud Platform as well that run on top of the Platform. So, we are truly becoming a pretty cool cog in the SAP wheel. >> Well, great strategy, I'll say it's really brilliant. It's actually mapped the old SAP onto a modern world with cloud as infrastructure. You got the multi-cloud vision, I think that's very relevant. I still, it's still early, early innings stage, but certainly great with the PaaS applied from as a service. The API in the app center, all the new services, great for partners, great for SAP. And again, you're not Oracle. Oracle's fighting all the cloud guys directly. You guys are, you're Switzerland here. >> Exactly. >> Congratulations, thanks for spending the time and breaking it down, appreciate it. >> Dan: Thank you John, appreciate your time today. >> Hi, I'm John Furrier, this is a Cube conversation about SAPPHIRE 2017 with SAP Cloud Platform's Dan Lahl, who's the Vice President of Product Marketing. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (tech music)