>> Man: Hold on, let me check. (musical fanfare) >> Narrator: Live from Silicon Valley, it's the Cube, covering Google Cloud Next '17. (busy electronic music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live in Palo Alto Studios, looking at media as the Cube, our new 4500 square foot studio where we can do broadcasts here, and of course we're covering a two day special, coverage wall-to-wall with Google Next 2017 in San Francisco. We just had the exclusive video with Sam Yen from SAP talking about the new relationship between Google Cloud Platform and SAP, SAP HANA, and also SAP Cloud platform. On the phone right now with reaction to the news in San Francisco is Akash Agarwal, GVP with SAP, Cube alumni, good friend. Akash, welcome to the Cube coverage and thanks for taking the time. >> Akash: Thanks John, we are proud to helping out. >> Akash, you've been intimately involved in a variety of very cool things with SAP. One of them has been the Apple announcement where you guys have a strategic relationship with Apple Computer, and at Mobile World Congress you've released the general availability of the developer kit, SDK, now shipping. On the heels of that amazing news, you now have a deal with Google Cloud. You also have a deal with Amazon Web Services, to be clear, but this a pretty comprehensive strategic deal. All the heavy hitters flying in from Germany. We had talked to Sam, we're talking to you. What is the reaction in Moscone in San Francisco around the SAP Google relationship news? >> Akash: I think, so the reaction is very positive and I think what this sort of shows everybody here that our friends at Google are very serious about the enterprise, and as such, they have extended a very warm hand in partnering with SAP and bringing what I call transactional and enterprise workloads onto Google Cloud, and I think that's a very significant change from what Google Cloud was doing in the past, they are supporting all kinds of workloads, but they're now really focusing on helping enterprises kind of transition into the cloud. I think SAP can act as a massive catalyst for that effort. >> It also brings a huge amount of credibility to the Google Cloud Platform, certainly in the enterprise. SAP has been a leader, powering some of the biggest business in the world with your software system of records, certainly the database is evolving. You've had cloud, you've had HANA, data analytics for many years, I can almost, I think seven years I've been to Sapphire, Bill McDermott, and back then Schnabel, was talking about analytics. This really hits home, because Google has a great mind share with the developer community, they actually have great empathy, they understand developers and open source, certainly they understand cutting edge technology. But now with SAP, this seems to be a nice lucky strike and a lightning strike, if you will, for developers to monetize with SAP, because you guys have real big paying enterprise customers that could use some cloud native. Is that how you see it? Help us understand the impact to developers and then the impact to customers. >> Akash: Yeah, I think the opportunity is multifold, as I would explain it. Customers, our customers and Google customers can take SAP workloads onto Google Cloud, and that is in the form of taking HANA and running any applications that run on top of HANA onto Google Cloud. I think that's kind of one piece of the announcement that we've made today. The second piece, and I think that's what you're alluding to is around developers, and those developers could be our developers, SAP's 2.5 million developers, it could be a multitude of developers that are attracted to Google and all the services that Google provides. But what they can do now is to leverage SAP's HANA Express product which is a developer centric product, and then run that on Google Cloud Platform, and build applications that could leverage HANA technology and build next generation of applications, either applications that are net new that can take data from any data source, or applications that want to extract data from SAP. The final thing that we also now as part of our HANA cloud platform or SAP Cloud platform is the ability to take the cloud foundry components of our SAP Cloud Platform and make them available on Google Cloud Platform and that. That, as you can see, is a very rich environment. We've extended Google's palette of services to include our SAP Platform as a service components to help fast track developers who want to build enterprise class applications that want to interchange data that's already in SAP systems or want to store stuff in our HANA database that is now going to be able to run on Google Cloud Platform. I think that's what has been announced here. It's quite a lot and I think over the coming months, developers will be able to get access to that, and if they can get access to it, on the Google Cloud Launcher platform later today they should be able to get a copy of the SAP HANA Express product. >> What is the impact to SAP? Because we spoke recently at the Amazon Web Services reinvent, Akash, obviously, you have a relationship with them as well. But this really kind of gives SAP a new set of capabilities for developers that aren't familiar with SAP. You have, certainly, a huge ecosystem of developers that are SAP centric, now a new community's developing for SAP, how do you see that unfolding for SAP and what are you guys doing specifically to onboard those developers and really give them the seamless tooling that they need so that they don't have to worry about all the engineering and the back office, database. What goodness are you bringing to those developers to make their life? >> Well, and I think first and foremost we've expanded the market, we are giving them access to great public cloud platforms in Amazon AWS, in Microsoft's Azure, and now with Google Cloud Platform. Now, a developer that wants to develop using SAP Cloud platform and SAP HANA has a choice, and they can now, depending on the expertise they have, depending on what they want to do, they can very easily leverage any of those three major cloud platforms. We're giving them choice and I think the world wants choice. We're making it easy, so that's number one. Number two, our SAP Cloud platform enablement teams are there to help cross track people. We're making it easy for developers to start working on products that are easy for developers such as the HANA Express, and they can, 32 GB worth of data that they use is free to use, and then they can go to SAP store and get a license key, and then enable that license key on any of the other public cloud providers as they expand and extend their systems. As you can see, I think we're giving them choice, we're giving them a lot of capability in terms of enablement, and then we're giving them a product which they can get started with with no friction. >> I want to ask you a question, Akash, because I know you have a lot of industry's view of the landscape. I was clarifying this morning in a blog post and also here on the Cube that you really can't compare Google Cloud to Amazon, they're two different worlds. You have apples and oranges, if you will. Why, help people understand real quickly, why, what is the Google Cloud all about? Because we really want to separate that conversation, they're not really apples to apples, it still is cloud, but there are differences. What is the key take away for users and customers about Google Cloud and what's the differentiation for them vis a vis other approaches? >> Well, that's not something that, I'm not the world expert on Google Cloud Platform, and I think that's something our friends at Google can kind of give you a very good rundown on. But, obviously, Google prides itself at, instead of services that are very data centric, they have, obviously, decades of experience in running their own services, and they're opening up some of those capabilities and making them available to their customers. We felt that we need to kind of double down on Google Cloud Platform and support that just like we're supporting the AWS platform and Azure. We believe that these are three major cloud platforms, each of them have their own uniqueness and capabilities, that these companies market and promote. I think it's best that you get someone from Google to comment on some of the differences, because I think there are quite a few, and I would be remiss at highlighting those. >> That's fair, appreciate that, and we'll try to have someone on in 5:00, we'll hopefully get someone slotted in. Final question for you, Akash. What's in it for the developers? To share your perspective on what you're excited about, that developers that don't know SAP should be excited about. What's the real opportunity for them in relevant? >> I think today a Google Cloud Platform developer has suddenly a window into the SAP world. The SAP world is big, it's very rich in usage, and those customers are large, they're interesting customers doing very complex things. I think it opens them up to grabbing the digital transformation ways that's hitting a lot of customers. I think what this can do to those developers is give them a window into a world that they perhaps didn't have before, because today, with SAP technology becoming available on Google Cloud Platform, they could suddenly target enterprise use cases that perhaps they were not doing before. These are transactional use cases. Obviously, both transactional and analytical type use cases, what we call OLAP use cases suddenly become important. I think the IoT opportunities are very interesting for developers. The industrial Internet is in full swing. Just coming back from Mobile World Congress, I think that was the theme, everything is connected. We can get you access to the customer record, we can get you access to the product, the SKU, that's all in SAP systems, and suddenly, the developer can access those systems to build next generation engagement applications as part of a digital transformation that the company may be doing. >> Yeah, I think Google could lean on you guys a little bit too, for partnering with the IoT certainly. Not a lot mentioned, maybe we'll hear more tomorrow, but I do think that, if I'm a developer, I would look at you guys as a innovation ground for using AI and using that data analytics making it very intelligent. You have the store of the data, you have the database. Congratulations to Akash, really appreciate you taking the time, on the ground in San Francisco. Akash Agarwal, GVP at SAP, friend of the Cube, a regular contributor here on our new studio programs. Thanks so much for taking the time and giving us a reaction and breaking down the news for us on the SAP Google relationship. >> Akash: Thanks, John. >> OK, more live coverage of Google Next coming right up. Be right back. (busy electronic music)

(smooth electronic music) >> Hello, everyone, welcome to theCUBE here in Palo Alto covering Mobile World Congress 2017, #MWC17. I'm John Furrier. We are here with Dan Lahl who's the Vice President of Product Marketing at SAP. SAP HANA Cloud now named SAP Cloud. Dan, thanks for coming in and talking about Mobile World Congress. >> You bet and I'm happy to talk about SAP Cloud Platform. That's what we're talking about. >> So the big news is a lot of stuff going on with Mobile World Congress but let's get down from SAP's perspective. You guys have changed the name from SAP HANA Cloud Platform to SAP Cloud Platfrom >> [Dan] Yeah that's right. >> So why that nuance there? What's the specific point there? >> It's way more than just dropping a word from the name of the product. It's really about repositioning where SAP is. So SAP has been an application company for forever. But as companies move to now from mode one, which is kind of application running, to mode two, which is doing more about agility, optimizing their enterprise, digital transformation, we have to have an offer in that second place. That's where the SAP Cloud Platform fits. Things like IoT services, and integration services, and over 40 services we offer on the platform. We're now helping companies become more agile by being very easy and able to personalize any SAP asset, any SAP app. So you have S/4HANA, you want to personalize it, customize it? You use Cloud Platform to do that. You want to integrate success factors in with your on premise apps SAP or otherwise? You use Cloud Platform to do that. >> A lot of change over the past year. At Sapphire last year, we talked about this at theCUBE. In Orlando I interviewed you specifically about the cloud momentum. One of the things that was striking me, and we talked specifically about SAP had this installed based customer set, which you guys have some of the biggest names in business from powering by SAP. Then new sets of developers onboarding and significant was the Apple announcement where you guys were partnering with Apple Computer and Apple doesn't usually go up on stage with many partners. >> That's right. >> It's very rare. They were onstage with you guys. This was really a seminal moment because this kind of brings two worlds together. It brings the existing SAP software world and the Apple world. So a lot's changed there. I know the news that's hitting around Apple's GA, general availability, of the iOS kit. But also it's the growth of the cloud within SAP and the SaaSification that you guys are going through that journey. Give us an update on those two fronts. The iOS news, that general availability, what does that mean? Two, how is the SaaSification of SAP inside the entire, across the business? >> You bet, you bet. So really exciting with the Apple SDK. When we met last year, I sat on the edge of the bed and told you how great it's going to be, okay? We really hadn't defined exactly what was going to be in the SDK. We already had the all the parts, and pieces to be able to take an iPhone device, and pull it back in to access SAP applications. But we really didn't have much native work that we had thought through with Apple on the deliver side on the mobile device. So we've added a number of controls that Apple is actually adding in to their system into the iOS 10. We're actually creating applications, taking advantage of these new controls. As enterprise applications work in a little bit more complex way than let's say playing Candy Crush on your iPhone, right? We've come up with new controls to make it more easy for someone like a project manager to do project management over their day. Or a service technician to do how they look at their appointments, how they're going to look at parts and pieces they need to put into different service appointments. It's been a really great collaboration. Then the other thing we're doing is we're adding SAP Academy or iOS Academy. The iOS Academy will be aimed at training a million SAP developers and 10 million Apple developers on how to use this SDK, how to think about delivering enterprise apps using this native iOS environment. >> What's the impact to the customer? Because Apple essentially, it's their phone, so you're talking about a mobile native app. >> [Dan] Yes, exactly. >> Taking a software cloud model to the phone. Is that kind of the key point? >> Yeah. SAP has been awesome at business processes and really funky at how it's displayed on screens. I mean I know when I started work at SAP, every screen I had to look for where the next key was. Apple is just the opposite. They're awesome at the UI but not known for the greatest business processes. So we're marrying those two things together. >> Bill McDermott has always been high on the Apple. I remember four Sapphires ago he was holding up the iPad saying-- >> That's right. >> "This is going to power our analytics business." >> Which it is. >> He was right on that. >> He's driven us to make that happen. Apple's come along which has been really great. Again, now we're delivering. >> How was the SaaSification going on because workloads as a service is a theme that comes up a lot. You see hybrid cloud certainly driving a lot of that momentum. Hybrid cloud is not as sexy as AI and autonomous vehicles. But certainly it's a lot of brute force action going on. People are really moving to the hybrid cloud. >> That's right. Hybrid cloud is going to be with us for at least 10 years. Everybody thought okay, the cloud is going to be awesome. As an LOB, I'm just going to pick my app whether that's CRM, or HCM, or whatever. I'm going to have this awesome app that I'm just going to be able to run in my business. Then they figure out oh, as a line of business, this is hard to manage. I'm going to give it back to IT. IT says, "Wow, the HCM guys are not "tied in with workforce management." There's nothing between how we're managing our people and how we're managing our workforce. Or how we're doing our pipeline with how we're managing our supply chain. The SaaSification, what we're providing with Cloud Platform is the ability to tie those things together. So native integration services to be able to tie things like success factors or, believe it or not, Salesforce into SAP delivery systems, supply chain systems, bringing ecosystems together using SAP Cloud Platform. So the personalization of the SaaS apps, integration of the SaaS apps into the enterprise, and then actually working with customers to create ecosystem hubs believe it or not. So we've got customers that have actually said, "Hey, I'm a manufacturer but I've got a lot of information "about what's going on in the manufacturing process "and how my customers are using my products. "I'm going to build a hub on the Cloud Platform "and get all my customers and partners "working together on that hub. "Now I'm actually selling information "that'll allow me to sell more of my product." So we see that happening too. >> We're with Dan Lahl, the Vice President of Product Marketing with SAP, breaking down the Mobile World Congress 17 coverage. I'm John Furrier here in theCUBE. Dan, I want you to take a minute to just lay out all the news and the key announcements that's happening this week for SAP at Mobile World Congress. In context of the backdrop of the key things that are happening in terms of the trends at the show. >> Yeah so I'll talk mostly about the Cloud Platform content. So there's some other things happening with SAP. But from a Cloud Platform perspective, it really is the shift to Cloud Platform as a strategic platform for the company in the cloud. So that's really big. Along with that, the iOS SDK, we've already talked about. We're going into beta on our IoT services. So we've now got over 40 protocols that we're supporting. We've got device management, device provisioning, dashboards for monitoring and managing those. The IoT services, which will be the foundation for our portfolio of apps that we deliver, is all going to be on Cloud Platform. We're delivering that service. They're going to announce some things in the Leonardo portfolio, which is our IoT applications. Those work together hand in glove. Some other things, some other bits and bites. We're opening data centers in Japan and China. We're hitting the Asia Pacific market pretty hard allowing customers to take their-- >> Those are SAP data centers? >> SAP data centers. >> Cloud, for SAP Cloud. >> To run SAP cloud in Japan and China with backup and recover, disaster recovery, HA, in between those data centers. Then also we're providing the capability for customers to bring their own applications onto our cloud if they want to run them closed to their cloud applications or SAP Cloud applications. So a VM style of service that we bring. But we're not going to compete against AWS in that. But if you want to bring that next to an SAP app, boom, you can do that very easily. >> I want to ask you about some of the hot trends that we're tracking on (mumbles) on thCUBE and certainly looking at the data. It's pretty obviously that IoT is the hottest, I would call tangible, trend. AI is the hottest hyped trend. >> Coming trend, yeah. >> Well I mean I think AI is legit and I'm a big fan of AI. But I think it gives people a more of a mental model than IoT. IoT's like oh, industrial, internet of things. It's kind of esoteric to the mainstream. AI is robots, flying drones, flying saucers, flying cars. So it gives people a kind of a feel for kind of what machine learning and IoT can point to. So I want you to talk about what you guys got going on there. The other thing that comes up from a customer standpoint, I want to get your thoughts and commentary on, is the number one thing that comes up besides topic on IoT is integration. Integration points is critical. So open cloud is something that you guys have promoted. IoT kind of brings that to the table. How do I bridge IoT into the cloud? How do I integrate either my on parameter clouds? These are the kind of the threads that are being discussed right now. >> You forgot big data. You forgot that one too. So hey, I worked for an AI company in the 90s after AI was dead, okay? AI was hot in the 80s. I worked for an AI company in the 90s. It was dead until today. >> It's back again. >> I'm just shocked that it's back. So the AI piece-- >> By the way, machine learning hasn't really changed much since 10, 20 years ago either. >> Exactly either as well. But we're building all of our AI and machine learning capabilities using SAP Cloud as the base. We're bringing in some open source technology from Google and others. But we're going to be building services on top of Cloud Platform that will allow you to build machine learning AI apps as well as delivering bespoke applications like matching invoices and some other things that makes sense for SAP. >> Well the IoT thing you bring up, in joking about AI, I think the reality is that AI's been around for a long time as you mentioned, as well as machine learning. But I think that the trend that comes up that makes it so peaked for real time right now is cloud horsepower is awesome, almost infinite compute power available, and the tsunami of data. So you combine the fact that, all those new data sources, with horsepower, and now with 5G dropping on main stage with Intel's announcement, you're seeing a confluence of a new fabric being kind of weaved together. That's interesting because now you have the compute, that's not a bottleneck anymore. So overhead whether it's security encryption, and/or security techniques, machine learning, goes away. AI can now do other things. So this is an interesting-- >> It's an interesting area. You kind of named it. You have to have the ability to ingest all this stuff through an IoT type of streaming capability. You got to be able to analyze it in real time, that's our in-memory capability. We talked about the AI, analyze it in real time. The one thing we haven't talked about is you have to have a big data repository to be able to troll through months and years of data. We've actually added the Altiscale company to our portfolio. So now Altiscale is part of SAP. We're renaming that Big Data Services. But it'll be basically Altiscale. So now you've got Hadoop in the cloud. So you've got an IoT, you've got your in-memory capability through HANA in the cloud. You've got your Hadoop in the cloud. All of that is one piece of cloth to us. You can apply IoT against that. You can apply AI against that. You can apply machine learning against that. And guess what? Blockchain against that as well. That's a little bit early for us. But that is-- >> It's on the horizon for sure. >> [Dan] Exactly. >> This is basically talking about where you process the data and now see the IoT edge is something that we keep our own research team. Our team's been actively pursuing. So I want to ask you to explain a little bit about this IoT service you guys announced. What is that about? I mean how would you describe that capability in SAP Cloud? >> Well it's funny. IoT is all about streaming data if you think about. I've been in streaming data since 2008 'cause we were heavy into financial services and understanding the transaction. So we were running algorithmic trading back in 2008 and we bought a couple of companies that did that. You would say, "Streaming data," to people and they would go like this, right? But now with the iPhone, and people understanding that their iPhone is a sensor device, and people now finally get that well data streaming is a big deal. >> Autonomous vehicle's a highlight set big time. >> Exactly. You kind of hit the nail on the head when you said you have to have not only an analysis inside the data center, in the cloud, but you have to push as much as can of that out to the edge. So part of what we're delivering as IoT services is a whole edge set of components that will actually do some of the analytics out at the edge in the hubs. Like what Intel provides, or Huawei, or Dell, or other companies with these gateway hubs. As well as capturing streaming data, doing store and forward of that data. So it's pushing IoT out to the edge for real time decision making, bringing it back into the data center for maybe a little bit more real time deeper analysis, and then connecting it to a big data source so you can actually troll through that over time, and say over the last six months, "Here's the supplier that's doing great. "Here's the supplier that's giving me not so great parts." All of those pieces for customers at the end of the day is really important. Making them more agile in the IoT environment. Making them more connected in the IoT environment and big data environment. Connecting the enterprise to that. So it's all helping customers from our view. >> Congratulations on the news. Well first the name change I think symbolizes a cloud centric philosophy company wide, which is great. SaaSification of SAP, which is huge for your customer base. But also the Apple news I've always been bullish on because that brings an opportunity for developers to work with you and vice versa. The monetization for developers to play in your ecosystem certainly is a great opportunity. Those are the two big news. >> Just think about that Apple piece. They can now take a process, they can build a set of controls, build a new app, and then monetize that in the App center. That will be very cool. Monetizing enterprise applications or extensions to enterprise applications. Pretty cool. >> Well that's one of the reasons why the enterprise is super hot right now. 'Cause the consumer market is (mumbles) you've seen those unicorns you see Airbnb, you see Uber, all the examples we talk about. Netflix, Amazon, enabling all that good stuff, and others. But now the enterprise is sexy one, because there's some real transformation going on from the network to the Apple Air. But there's business to be done, there's actual opportunities for people to have their work of art, the developers if you will, be monetized. >> If you put IoT, and big data, and AI behind all of that, and then make it look beautiful on the device, that's beautiful. >> IoT is a real trend. I mean that-- >> It's real. >> It's definitely happening right now and I think that's where the meat on the bone is in my mind. Okay Dan, final question for you. For the folks watching and our paying attention to Mobile World Congress in general and in the world, what is the key thing that you think they should walk away with about SAP Cloud now? With the new name, with the Apple news, all this good stuff happing at Mobile World Congress. What is the key walk away message that you'd like to send to folks to know the current state of SAP Cloud? What's the key message? >> So I would say the key message is we've talked about it but now we're delivering. SAP is all in on the cloud. We're not only delivering the SAP Cloud Platform but also S/4HANA, cloud as well. Tons of apps being built using SAP Cloud Platform. SAP is all in on the cloud, all in in mode two computing to help our customers. That's the big news. >> Dan Lahl, Vice President of Product Marketing at SAP Cloud. I'm John Furrier. You're watching a special two day coverage of Mobile World Congress 2017 here in the studios of Palo Alto covering it from Silicon Valley. We've got folks on the ground bringing you more action after this short break. (smooth electronic music) (light electronic music)