(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this special Cube Conversation. We're here in Palo Alto, California with a special guest. Dialing in remotely Paul Martino, the founder of Bullpen Capital and also the producer of an upcoming film called The Inside Game. It's a story about a true story about an NBA betting scandal. It's really, it's got everything you want to know. It's got sports, it's got gambling, it's got fixing of games. Paul Martino, known for being a serial entrepreneur and then an investor, investing in some great growth companies, and now running his own firm called Bullpen Capital, which bets on high-growth companies and takes them to the next level. Paul, great to see you. Thanks for spending the time. Good to see you again. >> John, always good to see you. Thanks for having me on the show. >> So, you're a unique individual. You're a computer science whiz, investor, entrepreneur, now film producer. This story kind of crosses over your interests. Obviously in Philly, you're kind of like me, kind of a blue collar kind of guy. You know hot starters when you see it. You also were an investor in a lot of the sports, gambling, betting, kind of online games, we've talked about in the past. But now you're crossing over into filming movies. Which is, seems like very cool and obviously we're living in a date of digital media where code is software, code is content, obviously we believe that. What's this movie all about? All the buzz is out there, Inside Game. You get it on sports radio all the time. Give us the scoop. Why Inside Game? What's it about? Give us the 411. >> Yeah, so John, I mean, this is a story that picked me. My producing partner in this is a guy named Michael Pierce who made a bunch of great movies, including The Cooler, one of the best gambling movies, with William H Macy. And he says sometimes the movie picks you and sometimes you pick the movie. And I wasn't sitting around one day going wow I want to be a movie producer, it was just much more that my cousin is the principal in the story. My cousin was the go-between between the gambler and the referee. The three of them were friends ever since they were kids. And when they all got out of jail Tommy called me, Tommy Martino. He said hey Paulie, you're about the only legitimate business guy I know. Could you help me with my life rights? And that's how this started almost six years ago. >> And what progressed next? You sat down, had a couple cocktails, beers, said okay here's how we're going to structure it. Was it more brainstorming and then it kind of went from there? Take us through that progression. >> It was a pure intellectual property exercise, and this is where being a startup guy was helpful. I was like, Tommy, I'll buy your life rights. Maybe we'll get a script written, we'll put it on the shelf, so that if anybody ever wants to make this story they have to go through us. Almost like a blocking patent or a copyright. And he's like okay cool. And so I said I have no delusions of ever making this movie. I actually don't know that, I don't know anybody to make a movie. This is not my skill set. But if anybody ever wants to make the movie, they're going to have to come deal with us. And then the lucky break happens, like anything in a startup. I have this random meeting with a guy named Michael Pierce, who was at a firm called WPS Challenger out of London. And we're down in Hillstone in Santa Monica, and I say to him, I say I've got this script written about this NBA betting scandal, would you do me a favor? He literally laughs in my face. He goes a venture guy from Silicon Valley is going to hand me a script. What a bad, anyway, I was like look dude, I'm a good guy to have owe you a favor so just read this dang thing. About 8 hours later my phone rings, he says who the hell is Andy Callahan? This is the best script I've ever read in my entire life. Let's go make a movie. Andy Callahan was a friend of a friend from high school who wrote the script. He actually once beat Kobe Bryant when he was a center at Haverford when Kobe Bryant played at Lower Merion here in the Philly suburbs. So, it's kind of this local Philly story. I'm a local Philly blue collar guy, we put the pieces together, and I'll be danged and now six years later the film is in the can and you're probably going to see it during the NBA finals this year in June. >> All right, so there's some news out there it's on the cover on ESPN Magazine, the site is now launched. I've been hearing buzz all morning on this in the sports radio world. A lot of buzz, a lot of organic virality around it. Reminds of the Crazy, Rich Asians, which kind of started organically, similar kind of community behind it. This has really got some legs to it. Give us some taste of what's some of the latest organic growth here around the buzz. >> Yeah so, think about this. This happened in, primarily '06 and '07. They were sentenced in 2010 and were in jail in 2011. It is 2019 and the front page story on ESPN is What Tim, Tommy, and Jimmy Battista Did. Those were the three guys, the gambler, the ref, and the go-between. And this is a front page story on ESPN all these years later. So we know this story has tremendous legs. We know this movie has a tremendous built-in audience. And so now it's just our job to leverage all those marketing channels, places we pioneered, like Zynga and FanDuel to get people who care about the story into the theaters. And we're hoping we can really show people how to do a modern way to market a film using those channels we've pioneered at places like FanDuel and Zynga. >> You and I have had many conversations privately and here on the Cube in the past around startups disruption, and it's the same pattern right? No one thinks it's a great idea, you get the rights to it, and you kind of got to find that inflection point, that magical moment which comes through networking and just hard work and hustle. And then you've got everything comes together. And then it comes together. And then it grows. As the world changes, you're seeing digital completely change the game on Hollywood. For instance, Netflix, you've got Prime, you've got Hulu. This is, essentially, a democratization, I'm not saying, well first of all you've made some money so you had some dough to put into it, but here's a script from a friend. You guys put it together. This is now the new startup model going to Hollywood. Talk about that dynamic, what's your vision there? Because this, I think, is an important signal in how digital content, whether it's guys in the Cube doing stuff or Cube Studios, which we'll, we have a vision for. This is something that's real. Talk about the dynamic. How do you see the entrepeneurial vision around how movies are made, how content's made, and then, ultimately, how they're merchandised in the future. >> Right, there's a whole, there's a whole bunch of buckets. There's the intellectual property bucket of the story, the script, etc. Then there's the bucket of getting the movie made. You know, that's the on the set and that's the director and that's post-production, and then there's the marketing. And what was really interesting is even though I'd never made a movie, two of those three buckets I knew a tremendous amount about from my experience as a startup investor. The marketing and the IP side I understood almost completely, even though I'd never made a film. And so all of the disruptive technologies that we learn for doing disruptive things like marketing a new thing called Daily Fantasy Sports, we were able to bring to bear to this film. Now, I had fun on the set and meeting all the actors, etc. But I had no delusion that I knew about the making of the movie part. So I plead ignorance there, but of the three buckets that you need to go make something in the media space 66% of what I knew as a startup guy overlapped and I think this is what the future of the media is. Because guys like me and you, John, we actually know a lot about this because we're startup people as opposed to we have to learn about it in terms of how to market and how to get an audience. I mean, my last company Aggregate Knowledge designs custom audiences for ad targeting. So we know how to find gamblers to go see this movie. That's literally the company I started. And so that's a thing that I'm very, very comfortable with and it's exciting to then work with the producer who did the creative and the director and I say hey guys, I've got this marketing thing under control, I know how to do it, oh by the way, the old Head of Marketing from FanDuel, he's a consultant to the project. Right, so, we got that. >> You got that, and the movie's being made. That's also again, back to entrepreneurship, risk. You got to take risks, right? This is all about risk management at the end of the day and you know, navigating as the lead entrepreneur, getting it done, there's heavy lifting and costs involved in making the movie, >> Right >> How did you, that's like production, right? You got to build a product. That is ultimately the product when it has to get to market. How did that go, what's your thoughts on your first time running a movie like this, from a production standpoint, learnings, observations? >> I learned a tremendous amount. I must admit, I was along for the ride on that piece of the puddle, puzzle. The product development piece of this was all new to me. But then again, I mean think about it, John, I started four companies, a social network, an ad targeting company, a game company, and a security company. I didn't know anything about those four companies when I started them either in terms of what the product needed to do. So learning a new product called make a movie was kind of par for the course, even though I didn't really know anything about it. You know, if you're going to be a startup person you got to have no fear. That's the real attribute you need to have in these kinds of situations. >> So I got to >> And so, witnessed that first-hand and, you know what, now, if I ever make a movie again I kind of know how to make that product. >> Yeah, well looking forward. You've got great instincts as an entrepreneur. I love hanging out with you. I got to ask you a question. I talk to a lot of young people, my son and his friends and I see people coming out of business school, all this stuff. You know, every college has an entrepreneurial program. Music, film, you know, whatever, they all have kind of bolted on entrepreneurship. You're essentially breaking down that kind of dogma of that you have to have a discipline. Anyone can do this, right? So talk about the folks that are out there, trying to be entrepreneurial, whether you're a musician. This is direct to consumer. If you have skills as an entrepreneur it translates. Talk about what it takes to be an entrepreneur, if you're a musician or someone who has, say, content rights or has content story. What do they do? What's your advice? >> We have lived through, perhaps the most awesome period of the last five to 10 years, where it got cheap to do a startup. You know, when we're doing our first startups 20 years ago, it cost 5 million bucks to go get a license from Oracle and go hire a DBA and do all that stuff. You know what, for 5 grand you can get your website up, you can build, you can use your iPhone, you can film your movie. That's all happened in the last five to 10 years. And what it's done is exactly the word you used. It's democratized who can become an entrepreneur. Now people who never thought entrepreneurship was for them, are able to do it. One of our great examples of this is Ipsy, our cosmetics company. You know, Michelle Phan was a cocktail waitress working in Florida, but she had this YouTube following around watching her videos of her putting her makeup on. And you know when we met her, we're like you know what? You're the next generation of what entrepreneurs look like. Because no, she didn't go to Stanford. She didn't have a PhD in computer science, but she knew what this next generation of content marketing was going to look like. She knew what it was to be a celebrity influencer. You know, that company Ipsy makes hundreds of millions of dollars every year now, and I don't think most people on Sand Hill would've necessarily given Michelle the chance because she didn't look like what the traditional entrepreneur looked like. So it's so cool we live in a time where you don't need to look like what you think an entrepreneur needs to look like or went to the school you had to think you'd go to to become an entrepreneur. It's open to everybody now. >> And the key to success, you know, again, we've talked about those privately all the time when we meet, but I want to get your comment on the record here. But I mean, there's some basic blocking and tackling that's independent of where you went to school that's being creative, networking, networking, networking, you know, and being, good hustle. And being, obviously good judgment and being smart. Do your thoughts on the keys to success for as those folks saying hey you know I didn't have to go to these big, fancy schools. I want to go out there. I want to test my idea. I want to go push the envelope. I want to go for it. What's the tried and true formula from your perspective? >> So when you're in the early stage of hustling and you want to figure out if you're good at being an entrepreneur, I tell entrepreneurs this all the time. Every meeting is a job interview. Now, you might not think it's a job interview, but you want to think about every meeting, this might be the next person I start my company with. This might be the person I end up hiring to go run something at my company. This might be the person I end up getting money for, from to start my company. And so show up, have some skills, have some passion, have a vision, and impress the person on the other side of the table. Every once in a while I get invited to a college and they're like well Paul, life's easy for you, you started a company with Mark Pinkus and you're friend with Reid Hoffman and this... Well how the hell do you think I met those people? I did the same thing I'm telling you to do. When I was nobody coming out of school, I went and did stuff for these guys. I helped them with a business plan. I wrote the code of Tribe, and then now all of the sudden we've got a whole network of people you can go to. Well, that didn't happen by accident. You had to show up and have some skills, talent, and passion and then impress the person on the other side of the table. >> Yeah >> And guess what? If you do that enough times in a row, you're going to end up having your own network. And then you're going to have kids come in and say, wow, how can I impress you? >> Be authentic, be genuine, hustle, do networking, do the job interview, great stuff. All right, back to final point I want to get your thoughts on because I think this is your success and getting this movie out of the gate. Everyone, first, everyone should go see Inside Game. Insidegamemovie.com is the URL. The site just went up. This should be a great movie. I'm looking forward to it, and knowing the work that went in, I followed your journey on this. It should be great. I'm looking forward to seeing it. Uh, digital media, um, your thoughts because we're seeing a direct to consumer model. You've got the big companies, YouTube, Amazon, others. There's kind of a, a huge distribution of those guys. The classic Web 2.0 search kind of paradigm and portal. But now you've got a whole 'nother set of distribution or network effects. Your thoughts, because you were involved in, again, social networking before it became the monster that it is now. How is digital media changing? What's your vision of how that's happening and how does someone jump on that wave and be successful? >> Yeah, we're in the midst of disruption. I mean, I'm in the discussions and final negotiations right now on how we're going to end up ultimately doing the film distribution. And I am very disappointed with the quality of the thinking of the people on the other side of the table. Because they come from very traditional backgrounds. And I'm talking to them about, I want to do a site takeover across Zynga. I want to do a digital download on FanDuel of a 20 minute clip of the film. And they're like what's FanDuel? Who's Zynga? And I'm sitting there, I'm like guys, this is the new media. Oh, by the way, there's a sports app called Wave and Wave is where the local influencers in the markets who want to write the stories are, and we want to do a deal with those guys. And oh, by the way, the CEO of that company is a buddy of mine I met years ago, right? One of those kids I gave advice to, and now I'm going to ask him for a favor from, right, that's how it works. But, it's amazing when you have these conversations with traditional old line media companies. They don't understand any of the words coming out of your mouth. They're like Paul, here's how much I'll give you for your film. Thank you, we'll go market it. I'm like, really? Seriously? I got the former CMO of FanDuel going to help out on this. You don't want to talk to him? >> Yeah >> And so this is where the industry is really ripe for disruption. Because the people from the startup world have already disrupted the apple cart and now we've just got to demonstrate that this model is going to continue to work for the future and be ready when the next new kind of digital transmedia thing comes along and embrace that, as opposed to be scared to death of it or not even know how to talk the language of the people on it. >> Well, you're doing some amazing venturing in your, kind of, unique venture capital model on Bullpen Capital. Certainly isn't your classic venture capital thing, so I'm sure people are going to be talking to you about oh, Paul, are all VCs going to be doing movies? I'm sure that's a narrative that's out there. But you're not just a normal venture capital. You certainly invest. So, venture capitals have reputation issues right now. People talk about, well, you know, they're group think. You know, they only invest in who they see themselves. You mentioned that comment there. The world's changing in venture. Your thoughts on that, how you guys started your firm, and your evolution of venture capital. And is this a sign that you'll see venture capitalists go into movies? >> Well, I don't know about that part. There have been a couple venture people who have done movies. But the part I will talk about is the you got to know somebody, it's an inside game, ha ha, we'll play double entendre on Inside Game here. You know, 20% of the deal we've done at Bullpen, we've done over 100. 20% of them were cold emails on something like LinkedIn or business plans at bullpen.com. 20%, now there's this old trope in venture if you don't get a warm intro I won't even talk to you. Well 20% of our deals came in and we had no idea who the person on the other side was. That's how we run the firm. And so if you're out there going I'm one of those entrepreneurs in the Midwest and no one, I don't know anyone. I'm not in a network, send me a plan. I'm someone who's going to look at it. It doesn't mean I'm going to be an investor, but you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to give you a shot. And I don't care where you're from or what school you went to or what social clique you're in or what your political persuasion is. Matter of fact, I literally don't care. I'm going to give you a shot. Come into my office and that, I think, is what was missing in a lot of firms, where it's a we only do security and we only look at companies that spun out of Berkeley and Stanford. And yeah, there can be an old boys network in that. But you know what, we like to talk to everybody. And the more blue collar the CEO is, the more we love them at Bullpen. >> That's awesome. Talk about the movie real quick on terms of how Hollywood's handling it. Um, expectations, in terms of reaction, was it positive, is it positive, what's the vibe going on in Hollywood, is this going to be a grassroots kind of thing around the FanDuels and your channels? What's your plan for that and what's the reaction of Hollywood? >> So it's going to be a lot of all of the above. But PR is going to be a huge component, I mean, part of the reason we're on today is there's a huge front page story on ESPN about Tim Donaghy and the NBA betting scandal of 2007. And so the earned media is going to be a huge component of this. And I think this is where the Hollywood people do understand the language we're speaking. We're like, look, we have a huge built-in audience that we know how to market to. We have a story. Actually, in the early days, you asked about risk? Back when I was thinking about if I would do this project I would do the following little market research. I'd walk into a sports bar, it didn't matter what town I was in. I could be in Dallas, I could be in Houston, I could be in Boston. I would literally walk up to the bar and say, hey, uh, six of you at the bar, ever hear of Tim Donaghy? It'd be amazing. About seven out of 10 people would go yeah he was the referee, crooked referee in the NBA. I'm like, this is amazing. Seven out of 10 people I meet in a bar know about the story I want to go tell. That sounds like a good chance to make a movie, as opposed to a movie that has no built-in audience. And so, a built-in audience with PR channels that we know work, I think we can really show Hollywood how to do this in a different way if this all works. >> And this comes back to my point around built-in audiences. You know, YouTube has got a million subscribers. That's kind of an old metric. That means they, like an RSS feed kind of model. That's a million people that are, could be, amplifying their network connections. It is a massive built-in audience. The iteration, the DevOps kind of mindset, we talk about cloud computing, can be applied to movies. It's agile movie making. That's what you're talking about. >> Yeah, and by the way, so we have a social network of all the actors and people in the film. So when it's ready, let's go activate our network of all the actors that are in the film. Each of them have a couple million followers. So let's go be smart. Let's, two weeks before the movie, let's send some screenshots. A week before the movie let's show some exclusive videos. Two days before the film, go see it, it's now out in the theaters. You know what, that's pretty, that's 101. We've got actors. We've got producers. Like, let's go use the influencer network we built that actually got the movie made. Let's go on Sports Talk, talk about the movie. Let's go on places like this and talk about how a venture guy made a movie. This is the confluence of all of the pieces all coming together at once. And I just don't think enough people in the film business or in the media business think big enough about going after these audiences. It's oh, we're going to take ads out on TV and I'm going to see my trailer and we're going to do this and that's how we do it. There's so many better ways to get your audience now. >> And this is going to change, just while I've got you here, it's just awesome, awesome conversation. Bringing it back to kind of the CMO in big companies, whether it's consumer or B to B or whatever, movies, the old model of here's our channels. There's certainly this earned media kind of formula and it's not your classic we've got a website, we're going to do all this instrumentation, it's a whole 'nother mechanism. So talk about, in your opinion, the importance of earned media, vis a vis the old other buckets. Owned media, paid media, well-defined Web 1.0, Web 2.0 tactics, earned media is not just how good is our PR? It's actually infrastructure channels, it's networks, a new kind of way to do things. How relevant and how important will this be going forward? Because there's no more website. It's a, you're basically building a media company for this movie. >> That is exactly right. We're building an ad hoc media business. I think this is what the next generation of digital agencies are going to look like. And there are some agencies that we've talked to that really understand all of what you've just said. They are few and far between, unfortunately. >> Yeah, well, Paul, this was theCube. We love talking to people, making it happen. Again, our model's the same as yours. We're open to anyone who's got signal, and you certainly are doing a great job and great to know you and follow your entrepreneur journey, your investment journey, and now your film making journey. Paul Martino, General Pen on Bullpen Capital, with the hot film Inside Game. I'm definitely going to see it. It should be really strong and it's going to be one of those movies like Crazy, Rich Asians, where not looking, not really well produced, I mean not predicted to be great and then goes game buster so I think this is going to be one of those examples. Paul, thanks for coming on. >> Love it, thank you! >> This Cube Conversation, I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto, California, bringing ya all the action. Venture capitalist turned film maker Paul Martino with the movie Inside Game. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (triumphant music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone we are here in Palo Alto for the special CUBE coverage of Mobile World Congress 2017. In our studio breaking down all the action happening in Barcelona, for the next two days, wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, and our next guest is Michael Foran, who's a product manager at SAP, formerly HANA Cloud, now called SAP Cloud. They renamed it, part of the big news at Mobile World Congress. Michael, thanks for stopping in and sharing your thoughts on SAP Cloud and the impact at Mobile World Congress. >> Thank you for having me. >> So you guys have, we've been following, obviously your Cloud game since the initiative started, the announcement, and then kind of like the slow start, but last Sapphire, SAP Sapphire in Orlando, which we had theCUBE there live, really was the release of the cloud, the announcement of the Apple deal. Now that's going to be the big news here at Mobile World Congress this week is the shipping of that general availability of the iOS developer kit. Once you guys hit the market with the product, it's just been rolling, incrementally getting better. And you changed the name from HANA Cloud to just SAP cloud. I interviewed Dan Lahl earlier about what that means. I don't want to get into that, but it means that SAP's now sassifying all their products. As the project manager, you got to put the roadmap together with the team, so I'm sure you have to balance really two camps, right? You got the SAP installed base which SAP, in my many conferences with Bill McDermott, the CEO, it's you guys run, the biggest businesses are running on SAP. So you have a huge install base. At the same time, the cloud brings Greenfield developers, cloud native, which don't have any SAP in it. So it's the merging of the best of both worlds. That's a product challenge, so I want to get your thoughts. What's the key thing for folks to be aware of at Mobile World Congress this year about the aha moment for SAP cloud? What is that key product feature that bridges the cloud native with the pre-existing SAP? >> Well, that's one of the benefits of having the cloud platform like ours, right John? Because we wanted to support this concept of the bimodal IT because we recognize that a lot of our existing customers really wanted to leverage their existing investments, but at the same time be able to address a lot of the upcoming innovations and being able to address even their change in work force, for example. They want to be able to utilize and adapt, I guess, to a key word that people kind of throw around there as being agile. And being agile means helping the customer be able to adapt efficiently and economically to the changes, whether it's user expectations. I read somewhere like some of the workforce by 2020's going to be 75% millennials, and their expectations of their product experience is going to be much different than what traditional users have been. And at the same time you have a business that you've kept running for a long time and you don't want to just change the way that they've been doing things. You want to have those things there but at the same time bring new innovations. And with the HANA cloud platform, you're going to be given a set of tools and services, as you've probably heard from Dan already, that's going to enable you to do that, bringing new innovations like IoT and machine learning, and so forth. >> And you got the use cases, you got people who actually are building apps, and just last Friday on my Silicon Valley Friday show I interviewed Paul Martino, who had probably one of the best quotes He's also an investor in Bullpen Capital, he does a lot of startup action. But there's been a democratization of entrepreneurship because it's so easy to build apps. Could be a 16 year old in the basement to the dorm room to the old age home where guys my age are building apps. So this is kind of like an app tsunami happening. So that's cool, that's cloud native, great market for that. But then this integration that's really big, because now apps are great by themselves, but if you look at Mobile World Congress, the key theme is 5G and 10, so apps got to start playing well with others. You hear microservices, talk about machine learning, these are now the new tools of the trade to bring that building block approach. Do you guys agree with that, and what are you guys doing specifically to facilitate that seamless integration, the building blocks, is it microservices, is it servantless architecture? Can you share some thoughts on that? >> Yeah, you're absolutely right, and this is where businesses have come. And helping enterprises grow, you mentioned starting with small companies and so forth, but as they grow, what we recognize from customers is that their landscape becomes really heterogeneous. They're trying to integrate best of breed software and so forth, and having a platform like ours that's able to integrate into those things is the perfect utility and the perfect platform for doing that in the essence that we are able to. Let's look at it from the end consumer experience or the end business user. If we do technology right, the technology that's underlying it should be almost invisible. It doesn't matter that they're accessing five, six different systems in order to do their job. With the cloud platform we have a way of being able to integrate all those systems and be able to present it as one experience, one UI, friendly, user-friendly UI and using like, for example, our Fiori user experience and paradigm. >> What's the integration point? Because I think this is something that the developer, developers are fickle, right? I mean, developers are great, but also they wield a lot of power and they're moving to the front lines with their apps, but at the end of the day, the business outcomes are really where the holy grail is. And that's where the developers are getting close to, they're getting close to the outcomes and they're part of that process. So they're out developing, they're slinging their code around, slinging their APIs around, doing all this great stuff with microservices, but sometimes they don't really think about the integration. That's why DevOps was so good. They let the infrastructures be programmable. Some of the times it's not that easy to program integration. Sometimes you have to really understand that. Are we going to have programmable integration playbooks and templates, how is that evolving? Because this seems to be the hot area where, okay, infrastructure is code, I can see that, that's working great, how do you connect down and make it work so that the integration works better? >> Kind of the approach we've kind of taken is that when you're doing integration between systems and so forth, it's best to do it through well-defined APIs, that where there's a decoupling of the system. That way the systems that you're interacting with are not so dependent upon each other. So if one piece changes, the others can still run, as long as that API, or that handshake, if you will, doesn't change. And you brought up a another good point as far as having the developers and business people work in a more collaborative fashion. Because at the end of the day this is what we want to target, we want to enable the business users to be able to have applications that they're comfortable with, that they're able to be efficient with. And the way we're doing that is, we're putting services on top of the platform that's going to allow them to be really, the guys who are actually designing the applications at the end of the day, that they're ones that they're going to be using. Because we in the past have made some bad compromises when you're designing software because you got the business person saying, hey this I want to see and then you got the developer saying, this is actually what I can achieve. But through the platform we offer this service called our build service, which basically allows the business analyst to essentially be the ones who become-- >> They're composing, not necessarily coding. >> Yeah, they're composing, but at the end of that composing, they're able to get that user feedback and go through the rounds of saying, is this the software that I really want to use? And when they're done with that, they're able to pass that along to developers and say, okay, great, I know exactly what you're using it for, now let me be the ones that help you tie into the various systems that perhaps I actually need to integrate with. >> Okay, Michael, tell us the big things that people should pay attention to this week during Mobile World Congress from the cloud. Is it the updates, what are the key news that gets your attention that you want people to look at and take notice of? >> I'm sorry. >> Okay, well, you guy had the, there's been some good proof points You guys had the new capabilities, got the iOS native kit. Is there any machine learning going on in the cloud? Can you share some insights? Because AI is certainly the hype factor right now. But machine learning and IoT, that kind of connects the dots on some of the cool features of what's going on now. >> That's absolutely right, John. In terms of machine learning, here's the thing, once we start integrating all these systems, we have a lot of information that's rolling into the system, essentially. How do you actually make use of that information? Part of it is, we're only human. What we would like to do with the technology is, give you some superpowers with the technology. The technology that we work with is not meant to replace you, but meant to augment what you're able to do. And machine learning's a great vehicle to do that in. This is one of the areas that I think you should be paying attention to. There's going to be a lot of stuff coming out on the platform in terms of services that's meant to aid you, meant to aid the developer and seeing how they can actually do their task a lot better. For example, some of the stuff that's coming to be coming down in the future on top of our platform is, we have this service called the CoPilot, which if you could imagine, it's a digital assistant. So if you're performing a task that you have somebody, have somebody sitting there next to you reminding you perhaps things to be cognizant of. For example, if you're trying to create a purchase requisition or what not and the system already knows that perhaps you're low on budget, these are things you need to be wary of, that's something that you can then act on right away without having to wait for that process of submitting the purchase requisition, getting it back and saying we can't approve this because of budgetary reasons. >> That's the speed of big data. You actually get the software working on new work flows. I want to get your take on, anecdotally speaking, you're the product guy, so you get to see what's going on with the requirements, the roadmaps, this is kind of the keys to the kingdom. I love talking to product guys because I used to be a product guy myself back in the old days. But you got think holistic, you got to look 20 miles down the road and think about those tradeoffs you mentioned earlier. What anecdotal things can you point to from customers that you see that seem to pop out as a trend that you guys are doubling down on? What's the key customer requirements that's the focus? >> Well, a lot of the things that we tend to see from customers these days is a trend actually back towards being able to use standard products. They don't want to do these hypercustomizations on the products themselves because we've seen where it's taken them, and that is -- >> Mean one offs, basically. >> Yeah. One offs and just changes to their system where they're so dependent on the customizations they're afraid to do these upgrades. So it makes them really slow to react and be agile in their business. So this is where having the SAP cloud platform, they're able to keep those things running and then being able to do the new innovations. It's really, from the customer's perspective, they're really asking us to-- >> Scale. >> Be able to scale. >> Is it scalability? >> It is scale. >> Okay, so scale seems to be. So talk about the Google Next coming up. I know you guy got announcements. I'm trying to get the news, although it's under a lot of confidentiality. You got Google, you got Amazon, you got Microsoft out there. Oracle has a cloud. I mean, we're living in a multi-cloud world. And it's pretty clear from our reporting and our analysis, Amazon is obviously doing very well, but it's not going to be a winner take all. Customers want to have multicloud. How do you guys view that conceptually and philosophically from the customer standpoint? >> The SAP cloud platform is a very open platform. We recognize this from the customer's perspective as well as that they don't want to be tied into any one vendor, they want to be able to do what they need to do without being tied to any specific one, and certainly with SAP cloud platform we're adopting that. You've heard of the announcements of the availability of us using Cloud Foundry on top of our platform as well and being able to bring in those Community Source and Open Source type products into the platform. And that also leverages existing investments from the customer's developer workforce. >> So you guys are open cloud, basically. You support open all the way. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, my final question for you, what's the most exciting thing that gets you jazzed up about the SAP cloud? >> I think the most exciting thing about my work and being able to do this stuff is really enabling and empowering people to do their jobs more efficiently. Because at the end of the day, none of us are really the people that want to just be administrators. And some of the applications, some of the things that we do make us administrators versus being a recruiter versus being an interviewer or whatnot. And we want to make software that really fits your needs and really helps you be what you're supposed to be doing and not an administrator. >> The best software is invisible, as I always say. Making it happen, Michael, thanks so much for spending the time here in theCUBE, appreciate it. You're watching two days of wall-to-wall coverage of theCUBE, covering Barcelona, Spain, covering Mobile World Congress 2017 from Palo Alto, analyzing and opining on all the news and commentary. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)