[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)

>> Voiceover: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCube, covering Sapphire Now. Headline sponsored by SAP HANA Cloud, the leader in platform-as-a-service, with support from Consul, Inc, the Cloud internet company. Now here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. >> Everyone, we are live in Orlando, Florida for a special presentation of theCube at SAP Sapphire Now's theCube SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from noise. I'm John Furrier, with my co-host Peter Burris Want to give a shout out to our sponsors. Without them, we would not be here. SAP HANA Cloud Platform Console Inc, Capgemini and EMC, thanks for your support, really excited to be here. Wall-to-wall coverage, three days. Over forty videos going to be hitting YouTube: SiliconANGLE.com/youtube. Our next guest is Dan Lahl, VP of SAP HANA Cloud Platform Product Marketing, welcome to theCube, thanks for having us. >> Thank you, John. You got all that out without a stumble. That was fantastic. >> I memorize it. >> That's great. >> Without our sponsors, we wouldn't be here, thank you very much. Thanks to you, and it's a been great support from you and your team. Really appreciate it, welcome to theCube. >> Love being here. You guys have something very unique in how you bring a play-by-play but from an analyst's perspective, very, very unique. >> Someone called me Pat Summerall, and Peter, John Madden yesterday, which was a great compliment because our lives are ESPN of tech. >> And I like it because it means I'm the better looking one. >> Exactly. >> NFL Gameday, but the game is on. >> Peter: Who's a guy? >> John: Boom! (laughs) >> Boom the Cloud is here! >> It's the whiteboard. But all seriously, great conversation. One of the things that's emerging out of the whole HANA Cloud Platform Ecosystem play is that it's really buzzing, and it's not like sizzle, but it's steak on the grill as well. So, just a lot of meat on the bone and the thing that we're seeing is that SAP has been putting themselves out there with tech. And not trying to do the land grab, not saying, hey, we're SAP and this is all a marketing program to get more SAP share for our other stuff. There's clear separation between SAP stuff, whether it's, whatever the customers are buying, and then an open way for developers; both SAP developers and, now, mainstream developers, iOS and Apple so, huge shift. And the Ecosystem's super excited, so I got to ask you, how do you guys separate out the market? Explain to the folks out there how this all fits in because the HANA Cloud platform is more open, it's really non-SAP, in a way. And there's other clouds out there, and let's face it, you guys weren't getting the buzz. A little bit late to the party, and you've got the product in good position right now. But you got Amazon out there, as your Microsoft was here, you know, doing relationship with you, your partnering with Apple, IBM was on, Cisco, all the big guys are here working with you. Separate out what it means. >> So let me back up, let me back up and give you all the HANA buzzwords, we've been very confusing to the market on how we brand it to different HANA products. There's the HANA database, data managing platform, we came out with that in 2011; very similar to Oracle from SQL Interface standpoint, very different from a technology standpoint. All in memory, and everybody knows that by now. Then, we have another initiative called S/4HANA. That's taking all of the applications, putting them onto the HANA data management platform. So that's the app stack. So business suite is now S/4HANA. So data management was HANA, S/4HANA, app stack. Then we have something called the HANA Enterprise Cloud, and that's just basically a managed service. You want to take your landscape, give it to our data center, let us manage for you. >> For SAP stuff? >> SAP stuff. Yeah, not any of the red stuff or anybody else's apps but >> But some of the partner extensions? >> But some of the partner extensions, yes. And that has to be certified, but basically it's a managed service. So you want to give your data center over to SAP? Guarantee that it will run, we'll upgrade all of the apps and enhancement packs and that kind of thing. So that's HANA Enterprise Cloud. And then finally, HANA Cloud Platform is something different altogether. It really is our offer, open platform as a service. So, any of the applications that SAP is shipping today, whether that be business suite, S/4HANA, Success Factors, Ariba, Concur, Cloud for Customer, you name it, can be extended or integrated using HANA Cloud Platform. Okay, so HANA data management, HEC, the managed service, S/4HANA, the new app stack, HCP, really the extension platform for that SAP Ecosystem. Okay? Now I say that, it's an open platform. It's Java-based, can you believe it? It's not ABAP-based, it's Java-based. Node.js, all open systems. We announced at the show that we're shipping Cloud Foundry with Node.js runtimes scripting languages like Ruby and Python and PHP and Go. Databases like Mongo and Postgres and Redis, it's open systems, baby, right? >> All the tools that they are offering. >> Exactly, they can do that. Yeah. So, any programmer under 30, we can now approach and have a conversation with. They don't have to learn a German programming language, right? Now, whether it's good or bad, it doesn't make any difference, it's open systems, right? And so that's kind of the framework of what we announced. >> What's that mean to developers? Let's take that forward, okay, open cloud platform, okay, great, under 30, or, just open source is so good now all the Q&A, all the questions are on Stack Overflow and all these Node.js and technology out to be used, so that's what people want. Okay, what's the impact to me? I'm the developer. What does it mean? What's in it for me? Do I have access to all the SAP stuff? I'm used to dealing with all these different tools to put systems together. >> That's the beauty, John, is all of those tools that you use, as an open systems developer, you can now, through HANA Cloud Platform, get to the back end systems that we didn't expose before, expect through an ABAP stack. Right, you don't have to learn BAPIs, you don't have to learn ABAP. You can use your Java capabilities, using Eclipse if you want, if you want to do it on your desktop device, or use a web IDE that's Java-based, right? >> But you're exposing these through API? >> Exactly, exactly, through either APIs or through integration services, through a direct connect back to the back ends. And we not only expose data, but also processes as well, so you can take advantage of a process. One of the things we announced this week was the API Business Hub. So now, we're going to deliver a catalog of APIs, where we'll publish into and an open system developer can say Oh, what's with that management accounting services? That hooks back into S/4HANA, I just need to call the API and take advantage of those management accounting services. Very cool. >> So on the Apple relationship, which is an iOS-based thing, the developer can then go to the Enterprise customer, so this is the Ecosystem now, okay I'm a developer. I have a whitespace, I see some unique thing, a problem that my customer has, that I can solve, or I'm an entrepreneur and say Hey, you know, I have a unique idea, I want to solve that problem. I code it but I might rely on SAP data, say an ERP, I could tap that-- >> You can now tap it. >> John: And integrate it in seamlessly? >> Yes, and show it natively on an iOS device. That's what we're delivering through the ACP software development kit SDK. So you're an Apple developer today. Well, you could develop the next SnapChat or some consumer-to-consumer app. But interesting, the bulk of Apple devices or the bulk of devices in the Enterprise, are Apple devices. They're not Android devices. Apple's done some work on that, upwards of 75% are actually Apple devices. So now, you're a developer, you want to get access to all of those different applications that SAP has, delivered in beautiful 1990s master detail today. >> Let's face it, I mean, we had this comment on theCube which we concur with, the user experience of Enterprise software is dated, and old, and people are bringing their phones to work. >> That's really kind of you to say dated and old, okay? I would have said old and crappy, okay? >> No one wakes up and says, hey I can't wait to download my Enterprise app and use it on the weekend. It's like root canal, don't love it, but you need it. >> Part number 000743xp, okay so now they can get into all of those processes without having to know the back end process. Through the SDK, we're going to expose all of those. >> Share some data on some of the onboard. I know you had a lot of early adopters and now the program's ramping up. We've talked over the past year and you guys are tweaking the product. You want to make sure the product was solid, that was key. Might have been delayed a little bit, but the timing of the Apple announcement, perfect. But I can imagine that the developers are excited because certainly in the Ecosystem out there, in Silicon Valley and beyond, there's a softening, it's kind of a bubble bursting, if you will, on the consumer stuff, so there might not be a couple more unicorns. The few unicorns that come along at every cycle of innovation. But the Enterprise is hot, so the buzz on the street is the Enterprise is hot, that's where you make money. As everyone works for a revenue model, you got to break even, so, there's a big focus on that in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. So, is there an uptake that you can share or any stats on the kinds of new onboarding that you guys are doing. >> Yeah, so just this week, we also announced that IBM is taking all of their MobileFirsts for iOS applications. They're going to participate in the SDK and they're going to move all of their applications onto the HANA cloud platform. They had a beautiful UI that they built for a hundred little mobile apps that were enterprise ready, but not enterprise connected. So now they're going to connect all those hundred little apps like Find&Fix, and Parts Manager and that kind of thing. >> I can see the slogan now. Enterprise: Ready to Connect. >> Exactly. >> Connecting. >> It's pretty decent validation of some of the things we're talking about here. >> Exactly, and the HCP play in it, for SAP is that's the gearbox to get them back to all of the SAP apps. Whether they be On Premise business suite, On Premise S/4HANA, Workforce Management, with Success Factors and Fieldglass. It's the gearbox to get them back to all of those. >> So let me ask the question, you're in a private market so you've got your eye on the prize in the market, you're forward-facing, but also you've got to work with the product teams and deal with that. Do you see a window of opportunity right now? Because the timing of having the product ready with HANA Cloud Platform plus the Apple relationship and the IBM stuff, which is more validation, a window of opportunity, the wind is at your back. This window, you've got a short window to kind of go out and win. Are you worried about that? Are you guys investing heavily now, do you see now a time to throttle it up and pedal to medal, straight and narrow, 90 miles an hour? >> You know, I actually see it as the wave is forming. Okay, I don't think our customer base knows that much about HANA Cloud Platform, it really has its coming out party at TechWave, last October. It's now exposed to the business group. We had the techie outage, now its the business outing. I see the wave starting to form, okay? And we've got to catch the wave and we got to ride the crap out of it. And there's a lot of stuff on the product side we have to deliver. There's a lot more that we have to do for integrating into our existing systems. We have to provide more direct, not direct connections, we've already got that piece, but more integration with the processes. We're not all the way there yet. So we have to push our product, our product management and engineering teams to do that. And that's not always easy at a big company like SAP that has all these different divisions building processes. And then the other hard part is, you got to make sure our sales reps are introducing us into every single customer account as a gearbox, as the agility platform. So that's starting to happen. So I wouldn't even say we're on the wave yet. We're starting to catch the wave. >> So let me build on that. I have two questions. I don't want to say they're quick. But here's the first one, here's what our CIO clients are telling us. One of the advantages of everything you said, platform, a lot of entry points, means that their business can pick their own road map for how they go to S/4HANA, as opposed to having single one-way, and that's the only way in, that'll extend the adoption cycle. Do you see that being a positive thing ultimately for not only SAP, in getting this message, and getting this product out, but also all the partners and the Ecosystem to drive this whole thing forward? >> Let me answer the customer part of that first. The way we have set up S/4 and HCP, is S/4 is the core that you really don't want to touch that much, you don't want to customize that much, you don't want to extend, you do that in HCP. Why would you want to do that? Well, as we deliver new enhancement packs, and we're delivering every couple of quarters, on the S/4 platform. Every time you do a customization inside the app, when you have to upgrade, you have to do regression tests, you got to check to customizations against the new rev. It becomes, in technical terms, a hairball. It becomes a huge hairball. Take that off the plate, just do it on HANA Cloud Platform. And so that's the customer angle to it, the partner angle to it is very simple, and it's a win-win for partners and for us. They can, and for customers as well, they can build a little app on the platform, snap it into S/4, Success Factor, and make it look like an app that's part of our SAS application, okay? The customer doesn't have to provision anything. The customer takes a tile and puts it on their Success Factor application. We win, because they're consuming it on HCP, so we're monetizing that too. So the partner has an easy path, the customer gets something easy, we help monetize on that. >> It's a great story and a lot of folks are looking forward, so for example, some of our clients are telling us, We are looking at the S/4platform, the S/4HANA platform, we came to it through analytics. So here's an interesting question Dan, you've got a lot of background in database. So the old way of thinking about building a database application is you didn't want to write an application required more than 80, 90, 100 disk I/Os. >> Yeah. Now we're talking about in-memory databases, calmative organization, provide any number of different straight-forward, common interfaces from a few standpoints back to the application. We're talkin' about what used to be or the equivalent of tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of I/Os. What does that mean to the types of applications that we're going to be able to build in the Ecosystem over the course of the next few years. >> So you're right in that all data's immediately available in-memory ready to go. But here's the cool thing that I think you were getting at. You can build a structure one time, you build a table structure one time. On top of that, you just build views, logical views. And then your queries or your application looks at the logical view. Now logical views aren't somethin' new. It was just horrible to do it on a disk-based databse. >> Yep, very digital. >> You have to do tons of optimizations. In a memory database, it doesn't matter. It's all there. You just look at the logical view. So we're going to see people stacking up more and more and more logical views. Specifically in the analytics case, we see that all the time. From a partner standpoint, they're going to build their table structure, and then mix and match different application types using logical views. And you know, in HANA, we provide calc views and attribute views. So even better ways to do that. >> But the bottom line is the way you get to that ability to take a tile and drop it into a system and add that functionality, is because that underlying platform can support that view in an almost unlimited way. >> Exactly, whether the data is in HANA in the Cloud, or whether the data is still on premise through a direct connection back in the existing HANA system on premise. >> Of course unstructured data complicates the database equation, but also they have to coexist with the schemas and the structured databases out there. Has that thrown a curve ball at you guys at all? Or not a problem at all with HANA? >> So you know we've got an answer for that with Vora. I don't know if you've talked to any of the Vora folks, but you know what Vora brings to the party is it brings in-memory capabilities. It's an in-memory indexer for dup data. So instead of pointing your sequel query or building a MapReduce or using Hive or one of those technologies-- >> Or data lakes-- >> Or whatever, you just point it at Vora, and it's already indexed in memory. So our plan and our hope is that soon Vora will be on the HANA Cloud Platform. So that's just another piece of technology-- >> Peter: Way of generating a view. >> It's another service that we provide for generating a view on top of the dup data. >> Yeah, that's key. So talk about the Ecosystem innovation. Because one of the things I loved in McDermott's opening keynote, and I love the term, business model innovation. 'Cause that just really speaks to a whole new level of innovation. Usually it's tech innovation. >> Yeah. >> You get destructive enablers, platforms. At the end of the day, the application of the tools and platforms, however they're developed, by whomever, impact something. That's the business. That's the revenue. These new processes that are emerging. IoT is a great example. It's kind of an unknown process. It's hard to automate that workflow because it's evolving in real time. What innovations can you point to that you see, and that SAP sees as key mile markers, if you will, that shows that these things are being innovated on the business model side with the Ecosystem? >> Yeah, I'll give you two examples, one that's kind of just a speed up. And then I'll give you one that's a business model. So Hamburg Port Authority is the Port Authority for Hamburg, the second largest port in Europe. For them to keep up with the competition, they're going to have to double and triple in the next 15 years, the amount of goods going through their port. They have nowhere to build out. They cannot make their port bigger. It's surrounded by a city. There's nowhere for them to go. So they're using HANA Cloud Platform to basically create a grid. They're creating a utility or a cell network grid of all the containers that are sensorized, all of the trucks that have telematics information in the trucks. And they're also bringing in traffic information so that when the container comes in, they can bring the exact truck in that needs to get it in the right path into the port. If you think about that, that's a cellular network. And that's what they built using HANA Cloud Platform. So it's a semi-change in business model for the technology-- >> So minutes matter to them. >> Seconds matter to them, literally. The faster they can match up the container with the truck that's going to move that container, the better off they are. >> They got to clear the inventory. Sounds like a business problem. >> Exactly, exactly right? And think about it, they're probably going to sensorize the ships as well. They're going to stage those guys coming in over time. >> John: What's the other example? >> The other example is really interesting. This small company in Germany that builds forklifts, There can be nothing more pedantic than a forklift. It picks up a pallet, it moves the pallet, it puts it down. So here's what this company's done. It's called Still Forklifts. They are using HANA Cloud Platform to match up their order system, which is an SAP with the forklifts that are sensorized on HANA Cloud Platform so that the order system will send the order to get picked by the forklift. And the forklift and the order system have the maps of where everything is in the warehouse. >> The client's order system. >> The client's order system. And they've also now, they haven't done it yet, but they're working on a forklift to forklift integration so that if this guy's over in this part of the warehouse he has to pick something up over here. This forklift is over here. They meet in the middle. Trade some product, get it out to the docking station. >> So the forklift is an IoT device to the order system. And it opens up the possibility of greater automation within the warehouse floor. >> And they've changed their business model. They're no longer selling forklifts. They're selling pounds of goods moved within the warehouse. From in the warehouse to shipped. And they're billing on a monthly basis based on pounds of goods shipped. They're not selling forklifts anymore. That is pretty cool. >> So that's a complete shift. >> That's a business model shift. >> It's an outcome shift. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> They're selling the outcome. >> Exactly, exactly. And they had to think differently about their business. They had to think, we are not a forklift operator. We're a goods mover operator. >> Or to your business model, we were a forklift operator. Now we're a goods mover, an in-warehouse goods mover. >> Exactly, exactly. >> That's a great example and also a huge innovation. Because now, as the keynotes were saying, people are afraid to go out of business. And so the opportunity for the Ecosystem is, put one of those guys at check. They'll get the check. If they don't move, you take their territory. >> Exactly. >> So it's a nice cycle, SAP wins on both sides. >> On both sides, yeah, very cool. >> All right Dan, I got to ask you the question. Plans for this year, you got the Apple. You got the Cloud Platform. You have all this goodness goin' on. What's the plans for the year. Give us a taste of some of the things that you want to achieve this year, out in the market. And what KPIs are you looking at-- >> Yeah, what are we going to be talking about this time next year? >> I think we're going to be talking about what did you guys do in the area of Cloud Foundry. Have you guys really delivered on your Cloud Foundry promise of going opensource and moving toward portability? So next year, if we're fortunate enough to speak again, That's what I want you to ask me. Where are you guys on delivering Cloud Foundry? Pushing opensource, open development for developers even further as we talked at the outset of the interview. And then secondly, where are we on the API business hub? What is SAP doing to expose the thousands of business services that we have to our customers? To be able to use the HANA Cloud Platform with a catalog of business services that we're exposing to help them extend or modify or build that new application. >> And new onboarding numbers, having numbers showing both. >> That's right. Now what that means from a revenue standpoint, it means, you know we got to double or triple our business next year. We're not talkin' a 10%, 15% growth. We're talking an order of magnitude growth for our part of the business. >> And so you'll be investing more in marketing, training, tools. >> All of the above, all of the above. >> Hey, companies want to get into the enterprise, and the existing enterprise suppliers want to stay in the enterprise. >> Exactly, exactly. >> John: So it's a good time to be an arms dealer. >> Exactly, and we'll supply it with the HANA Cloud Platform. >> John: Dan, thanks so much for sharing your insight here on theCube. Really appreciate it, and great to meet your team. >> As well. >> And everyone here has been fantastic. We are live, here in Orlando. The theme is live, here at SAP this year. And of course we got the live coverage from theCube. This is theCube, I'm John Furrier, with Peter Burris. We'll be right back. You're watchin' theCube. (soft electronic music)

>> Narrator: It's the Cube. Covering Sapphire Now 2017. Brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform. And HANA Enterprise Cloud. (electronic music) >> Welcome to the Cube everyone. We're here for the special exclusive Sapphire Now 2017 coverage from Palo Alto studio. I'm John Furrier, three days of Sapphire coverage. Our next guest is Jason Kotsaftis who's with Senior Director Database Solutions at EMC. Who came in here in Palo Alto. You guys have some news down there, full team down there. I know, normally we cover SAP, it's our first year we're doing it from our studio. But EMC's always been on the cube. You guys had a great relationship with SAP. I think our first year we've done the cube in 2010. >> Jason: That's right, yes, I remember. >> You were that SAP Sapphire. >> You guys were. You were on the Cube. You've been with us for awhile, but the relationship with an SAP, and EMC, now Dell EMC, it's pretty significant. What's the big news you guys have going on? >> Yeah, I mean, it's a huge relationship for us. We've been, even before we were merged with Dell, one of our top partnerships. Now it's even bigger. We've been amazed at how much Dell had been doing with SAP, and we're bringing the best of the two companies together right now. So, yeah, we have a huge presence at Sapphire as you mentioned. We saw Michael Dell do a brief speech at the show, and I thought that really helped set the stage for, not just Dell and EMC with SAP, but even some of the words he said were a good microcosm of Dell and EMC talking about the importance of bringing together people and processes. And we're going through that right now, and we're we're going through how we're going to merge the portfolio to go after Cloud, go after HANA, internet of things, data center transformation, all of those major things. >> Well surely SAP, the theme is Cloud, Multi-Cloud is a big message. >> SAP Cloud platform, we had Dan Lahl on the Cube. We also interviewed the HANA Enterprise Cloud group there also, got a huge alliance with Amazon Web Service, Terry Wise, there. We all saw Century Link. So you start to see the industry formation going on. The fog is lifting, you're starting to get some clear visibility on swim lanes, tactics, we'll help people with settling in. Whatever metaphor you want to use, people are finding it. Dell EMC is just absolutely just a monster now. I mean that in a good way, I don't mean that in a bad way. But it's so big. EMC was already very powerful, and winning in the storage business. Great enterprise jobs, the sales force, the culture, really well, great culture as you know, we know them. Dell has been lean and mean, like a speed boat. Great with channels, great with operations, very lean and efficient. EMC, the direct selling, you bring them together and now the supplier relationships are changed. I was talking with your team. Dell brings to the table deep Microsoft Intel relations. Not that you guys didn't have them, but they have deep relationships. >> Correct. >> You guys bring deep relationships. How has that new culture dealings changed your relationship? And specifically, what's the impact to SAP? >> Sure, you know, great question. First of all, it's been very complimentary. And we felt that going into the merger. I've been at EMC for 21 years right. So I had worked with Dell 10-15 years ago. Very, very complimentary, and you nailed it. They're very good at one segment of the market historically, we're very good at another. You know, for the most part I think it's been a really, really good matching, made sense from merger perspective. If we think about SAP for a second, one of the first things that we've been bringing together is, we have two very complimentary HANA portfolios. So, HANA is obviously a huge focus for SAP customers. I was just at Dell EMC world last week, every single customer that I talked to, whether they were running Oracle or Microsoft, they're all asking about HANA. We had a great focus at EMC with our enterprise HANA systems. And at Dell they have a very good packaged appliances and Scale Up bundles. And right now we feel like we can address the whole breath of what people may want to do with HANA. Whether it's, TDI, Scale Up, Scale Out. Very, very strong and >> John: Where does HANA fit in, because I want you to just take a minute to explain this, because it used to be a blanket word, even when they were kind of getting it out early. It was great marketing from the beginning, You know, it has legacy to it, but as the market changed, HANA changed. And as SAP changed, they changed from their positioning. Specifically, they used to call it HANA Cloud Platform. And they have HANA Enterprise Cloud. Now they've renamed it to SAP Cloud Platform, which is the platform as a service, the cloud native stuff. And then HANA Enterprise Cloud, which is really the managed service. So from your perspective, how do you define what HANA is today. And where is is settling in? Is it just the core engine of SAP? But how's it relate to all these new things? >> Yeah, for us it's really a platform. So if we think about where HANA began when we started working with SAP, it was all about analytics. Collecting data, analyzing data, making better business decisions. Now with S4 on the horizon, and the inevitable cut over to that from all the other enterprise applications of SAP, we really view it as a platform. And it's going to have big implications. If we look at our own SAP install base at EMC, there's a lot of customers that run Oracle underneath their SAP apps. So it's part of the HANA transformation, where we're going to be getting them, hopefully, on the road to, not just take advantage of HANA today, but as they go forward how are they going to get ready for S4 and have, hopefully, a smooth migration path to that. >> Obviously their cloud platform, I mean, their cloud strategy, or cloud direction. I don't know if you can have a cloud strategy. As Michael Dell said, Clouds like the internet, it's everything. >> Jason: Right. >> So, there's no real strategy, it's just the way life is. They're going to be on premise and off premise. And they're clearly targeting multiple Clouds, unlike say Oracle, for instance. But neither here nor there. The point is, is that on premise there's still going to be a 10 year plus journey, nothing's going to be disappearing over night. So the on prem Cloud dynamic is interesting, cuz they used the word mission critical. That was a big buzz word with when I talked to Michael Dell, He banged home mission critical. A lot of the teams in Dell EMC World last week was around mission critical work loads and choice. So you guys have that same mojo going on with SAP, how is that translating for you guys? Big new business, new opportunities? >> Great question. So one of the big things that we've acquired and focused on in the SAP space was Virtustream. So they've been a really big off premise cloud provider for us, but at the same time, when you look at what we've been building at EMC even before that we had our own enterprise hybrid cloud offering. One of the things that we're talking about this week at Sapphire is actually bringing those two together. So we can have people have an off premise and an on premise experience, a single view of their data, a uniform way to manage SAP in the cloud, and to the point of mission critical like you said is, as much as we see people moving to the cloud, there are still people that want to have for certain production systems they want to control that. They don't want to give it off to the cloud yet. They may not want to control the hardware but they certainly want to control the data. And with this new relationship that we're blending in the EHC and Virtustream we can actually allow them to have that choice to your point. >> John: What's EHC? >> The EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. So that's our own self service automation of software framework that we put around the cloud. >> Which cloud, your cloud or other people's cloud? >> Right now it's our cloud offering. >> So you have a public cloud. >> We have a cloud offering that's a hybrid cloud offering. That you can deploy on premise or off premise, and Virtustream has been historically used off premise. >> So you use Virtustream as your off premise component of that piece? >> Correct. >> That makes sense. Cuz you bought them in January, I get that. >> That's right, and we had to bring the two together, and that's been a big new step for us. In that regard we think it's very, very complementary for SAP, that's one option we provide, right. We also work through SAP's own offerings to make sure we give them the right and the best infrastructure behind what they're trying to do with their own cloud. I was at a large partner of ours recently, OpenText, and we were talking about content archive, all the things that they do there, they're very deep in the SAP cloud, so we're working with them to start to potentially build the right archiving and capabilities behind that. >> So what's the big news for SAP this year, obviously we saw the coverage, we got some folks calling in, we had some folks down on the floor giving us some input, but from an SAP EMC, Dell, now Dell EMC relationship, what's the big news, what's the big story for you guys? What are you leading with, what's the announcements, be specific. >> The big news is we're all about the cloud. The bringing together of the on premise and off premise EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Virtustream, giving them that uniform way to consume SAP in a cloud based model, whether it be on premise or off premise, that is absolutely our biggest new highlight. >> You guys released that was a hard news that went out for you guys or... >> Yeah it was part of an EHC evolution story that we brought out, the other things that we have that are not necessarily formally announced but are more things that help the day to day administration of SAP applications, we often forget about that. We're pushing people to the cloud and we all talk about cloud. >> So there's no big splash in the pool like, hey we're releasing a new VxRail version of whatever, it's momentum specific. >> Correct. >> What are the big momentum's you plan, you can look back now and we've seen a lot of the evolution, we've seen the relationship with SAP grow, we've seen the converge infrastructure movement, now going to a whole nother level, hybrid cloud and converge infrastructure is happening. What's the new wave that you guys are riding with SAP together besides the cloud, it's generically cloud. What's specifically, can the customer pinpoint that you guys have solved? >> I think you just touched upon it, it's the whole build versus buy model. So historically if you look at where the SAP customers spend the most of their money, it's the op ex. It's the operational expense of administering and maintaining the SAP landscapes. >> You mean like total cost of ownership stuff, just like, easing some of the pain between deployment and costing. >> Workflow automation, copy clone refresh, backup recovery, performance automation, disaster recovery, all the things that you got to do to keep the SAP applications generating value to the business is heavy operational cost to them. That holds them back from doing innovation and investments. >> Those are the details you got to get down and dirty on. >> Yeah. We've done some great studies with you guys on this, one of the things that, there's different ways to go about tackling that. One of the ways that we believe is good is to simplify what you can. And so one way to do that is, well from an infrastructure perspective, you should have the ability to basically buy the infrastructure as an outcome, not have to build all the components and get it together. >> All the provisioning pain that goes with it. >> Yeah, and so when we were just EMC, we had one choice. We had what was called a Vblock, and then we build VxRacks and VxRails. >> Vblock was so successful, it really was, you did a good job of that. >> Yeah, a lot of customers from the SAP. Now that we're Dell though, we have the PowerEdge family, and we've been bringing that in to not only Racks and Rails, but looking at that in terms of building what we call Ready Bundles, where we can actually deliver as a single... >> Think about this ready solution, because the thing that got me at Dell EMC World was two things. The purpose built mission continued, I mean that in a good way. And two, the disruption of data backup protection and backup with the cloud. With the cloud as a new disruptor. For some reason backup and recoveries, clearly different in the cloud than it is on prem. So we've seen a lot of action in there too. Those are the two ready areas, and then also, dynamic changes going on with backup and recovery. >> Yeah, ready solutions was a huge thing, and this is part of the merger we rebranded our solutions organizations into one. Our whole, as the name implies, the whole goal is to deliver a ready infrastructure to the customer that they can just deploy, so they can focus on their applications and their business and not worry about the server, the network, the storage, which ones do I put together for what reason. We want to give them that menu of choice, whether it's a single node, a bundle of components, or an actual system, and deploy that in any way they want. >> What can we expect from Dell EMC, from your team VZB, with respect to SAP? Next couple months, next year, what's the plans, what's the continued momentum playbook? >> Some things that you'll be seeing more of if you go to the Dell blueprints page where we have all our solutions. You'll be seeing some new and refreshed offerings around HANA, you'll be seeing some new things around SAP landscapes, and you'll be seeing much more formal communication around the cloud offering I talked about. >> And cloud seems to be, again, cloud is taking it outside the four walls, which is different, great capabilities, people going in analytics, putting a lot of analytics in the cloud. So seeing that being the first wave beyond dev tests. Dev tests, even though Oracle says dev tests is really going to be around for a long, long time, people are already moving to analytics in the cloud. That's interesting for instrumenting for backup and recovery, what's possible. Quick thoughts on the changes there, in the landscape between the old way of thinking about backup and recovery, and by the way you guys have some of the best solutions out there that will data domain, scratch record goes to history, but now it goes to the cloud. What's the tricky parts that you guys are watching? >> Well I think on the one hand there'll be people that want to worry about their mission critical, like you said we have great integrated offerings to the workload, so you can have a backup team handle it or you can have your workload team handle it, it's really up to you. As people go into the cloud I think they have to decide, what's the tiering strategy they want to approach that, what's the retention data strategies that they need, how's that going to, >> Where the hell is the data going? >> Where's the data going, is it safe and secure, and how does that relate to how they're protecting their on premise data. I mean from our perspective, and back to the SAP example of where we have this uniform cloud approach, we have the backup capabilities built into that. Whether it's long term data retention, short term backup and recovery, yep. >> Question for you, this is a test, a real time cube test. I'm sure you'll pass with flying colors. What is the most, what are the biggest two waves that the customers should be surfing in the enterprise, top two most important waves? >> I think one of them we've already talked about, which is certainly cloud. I think if you look at the whole digital transformation, which I know is related to cloud, but the whole digital transformation wave I think is separate from that. So if you look at big data and analytics and machine data, every customer, whether it's a traditional RDBMS environment or what have you, they're all looking at how to harness that data. I think when you get into that and look at all the data in your data center that you may not be using today, you may not have been trying to take advantage of, with technologies like Splunk and other things that are out there to help you do that, that's a great thing to look at. We're seeing heavy.. >> So data basically, cloud and data are the two big waves. >> Yeah, digital transformation of data and taking advantage of that data. >> Well they go hand in hand, cuz you got the scale of the cloud for compute and other things, data drives the digital chest of digitalized data, digital assets are data, right, everything's data. So you would agree, cloud and data, two big waves. >> Yes. >> Jason, thanks so much for coming on the Cube special coverage and final comment, I'll give you the last word on SAP Sapphire, I know you got a relationship, you're probably going to be like oh yeah, SAP, everything's great. Be straight, what's going on with SAP. What's the outlook for SAP from your perspective. >> I think there's a great opportunity to your point, but there's also a good challenge, cuz we're going through a merger. I think we're making great progress to bring the two portfolios together, and SAP's being a great partner helping working with us. >> And you're cool with them now, you guys feel good about SAP. >> We feel great about them, we use them in our own environment at Dell as Michael talked about, to run our own business. So it's a great relationship >> Jeremy's been a remote telecast performer at EMC World. >> As you know, these partnerships in the industry go up and down, we talked a little bit about Oracle over the years, that's fluctuated. >> I was dating myself the other day on a Cube gig, and I said, oh it's a Barney deal, which my language was, you know, no real deal, cuz Barney was a character that kids watched, my kids watched, you know, I love you, you love me, it's kind of a love fest, but nothing happens. It's called a Barney deal. I need a new meme now because most of the people in the industry don't know who Barney is. >> Oh I remember, we used to joke about him when I was in alliances, we called them Barney meetings. You got a good meeting with a partner, you'd all talk and nothing would happen. >> You guys do not have a Barney deal with SAP, it's pretty deep across the board, SAP has good relationships, I got to say, they tend to do really, really good. They're either in or they're not, it's pretty obvious. Thank you Jason, so much. Jason Kotsaftis, who's the senior director of the database solutions group with Dell EMC joining us for a special three day coverage of Sapphire now from our studio. Great week, we had Informatica World in San Francisco, Google IO going on today as well, we've got live coverage today with Rob Hove, also VeeamOn is in New Orleans, Dave Vellante is there, and I'm in SAP Sapphire. A lot of coverage for events for the Cube, stay with us more for live coverage after this short break. (techno 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)

(upbeat techno music) >> Okay, welcome back to SiliconANGLE's Cube special two-day coverage of Mobile World Congress 2017. The hashtag is #MWC17. My next guess is Emily Mui who is with SAP Cloud, formerly SAP HANA Cloud. Great to see you. Thanks for coming in. >> Good seeing you again, John. It's been a ... Over a year. >> Since Sapphire, since the big news of ... >> That's right. >> The cloud team kind of really showing its stuff. >> Yes. >> That was called the the HANA Cloud. >> Yes. >> Now it's called SAP Cloud. The name changed. Give us a little bit more deeper ... Meaning behind the name, why the name changed, 'cause, you know, everyone knows what HANA is. >> Yes. >> HANA's got a great brand name. >> Right. >> Why drop HANA? What's the deal? >> Well, very good question. I like to talk about ... I've been with this product for over two years now, and I've really seen the evolution of the product. We have so many more capabilities than we did about three years ago, and a lot of it is customer-driven and demand-driven and market-driven. So what we realized is that yes, we have a lot of customers that wanted to do real-time decision, but then we also had a lot of customers that wanted to talk about IOT, use IOT. They want to talk about machine learning, they want to talk about analytics, so it's not just about HANA. So the name change really helps reflect the product and the evolution of this platform as a service that is now known as SAP Cloud Platform. >> So mainly what I hear you saying is that it's gone broader than that. So it's not ... HANA was like a Ferrari, something really good and was great at what it did ... >> [Emily] Yes. >> And that's all great, but the Cloud is more, right? >> Exactly. >> [ John] And what specifically more would you mean? Non-HANA solutions, or ... Greenfield opportunities? >> We have so many customers that do different things, and they're the ones that are helping us understand what is needed to be in the product. So there are many, and what we've learned is that there's a lot of business value that they're seeing from it, and they're the ones telling us that they're trying to be more agile, they're trying to optimize their business processes, and what's interesting is they want to become digital, and I'm not talking about the Ubers of the world, or the Airbnb. I'm talking about those traditional brick-and-mortar companies, manufacturers that are trying to figure out, how do I stay competitive? How do I get one step ahead of the game, and how do I use technology to do that? >> One of the things I love about Mobile World Congress is that it's like CES but in a different way. CES is hardcore early adopters. Yeah, Mobile World Congress is a lot of people who love the device news, yeah, so-and-so's got a new phone, 5G's going to be amazing, it's going to power autonomous vehicles. So, there's some glam and sex appeal inside with some of the tech, but it's almost like a meat and potatoes kind of show in the sense that it's mostly, it's a very business deal-oriented show. A lot of telecos trying to figure out their future, a lot of enterprises trying to figure out how things like network function virtualization works with mobile apps, so you're seeing kind of what I call the early adopter market be more of a CES, and Mobile World Congress be more of a ... Okay, how do you make it real? So this seems to be the topic that we're seeing across the hundreds of events that we go to at theCUBE a year, which is you have the Ubers and Airbnbs, the pioneers, the Facebooks. Then you have the settlers who come in and say, okay, I get it now. I understand what digital transformation means. Now I want to operationalize it. And Amazon Web Services has been so much success with their cloud, in the enterprise, of all places, now. So that's a tell sign that ... Real businesses ... >> [Emily] Yes. >> Not the unicorns, want to use the technology. >> [Emily] Right. >> Do you see the same thing, and can you give some anecdotal or specific examples of how a normal business gets SASSified, and what path does it take? >> So, a really good point and really good question. So one of the customers that is actually going to be at Mobile World Congress is Mapal, and they are a mid-size German precision tool manufacturer. And you think, how are they going to use the cloud and cloud technology to help them improve their business, and it's quite interesting, because they're trying to become digital. They are, you know, and this is ... Their way of doing business is not different from how anyone else is doing. They're trying to connect their suppliers, their customers together, and then be able to track what's happening with the tools that they're manufacturing. The whole life cycle of that tool, from the minute they actually start manufacturing to the point of selling it. But they're using technology to do that, right? And so they're using that SAP Cloud platformm creating the application, and then being able to track what's happening and then providing visibility to their customers, to everyone on the plant floor, to their suppliers, so they're connecting everyone together. >> You know, Emily, I was just talking with Jeff Frick, who runs theCUBE. We had our Silicon Valley Friday show last week, and we were talking about some of the conversations that we hear in cloud from some of the normal businesses out there, and things like microservices ... It's a geeky term, but microservices, containers, a lot of application conversations happening, so you hear that, and also you hear about integration. So these are the two hottest areas that we see, because basically, the SAP has been in the process business. We value chains and manufacturing, customer support, and CRM, ZRP, all that good stuff that goes on, but now, those are being completely shattered and reconfigured with cloud. So integration is top of mind, whether it's an IOT, internet of things or a new application. How does this all get threaded together? Can you share some insight into the SAP Cloud strategy, and what things do you offer to those customers, because that seems to be the critical decision point for most CXOs on the cloud SASSification. >> That's another good point, because we see a lot of customers trying to connect. They're trying to figure out how to get to the cloud, and no one is immediately jumping to it, so they've got different applications that they're trying to build out, but in order to do that, they have to connect their backend, right? And not all of it is cloud application. Most of it is on-premises, and so you've got legacy systems, you've got some SAP applications, you've got some other ... I shouldn't mention venture applications, and then they're trying to figure out how do you extend and create new applications? So how do you bring it all together? So integration is one of the key services that we provide. APIs, integration ... We've also invested in microservices technology. SAP's heavily looking into that and seeing how we can help those companies out there who want to leverage that type of technology. How do they bring all that together? Build small applications, connect everything together, and then build out an application that will help support their business. New opportunities for their customers to make their customer experience better, for their employees, and trying to track talent. So there are a lot of different use cases where ... >> What are the top three use cases that you're seeing there right now from your customer base, as they look at the HANA Cloud ... Well, it's not HANA Cloud. The SAP Cloud. >> Yes. >> New name. When they look at it, what do they gravitate to? What does the ... I mean, it's not all the same, but I mean, some low-hanging fruit. >> Right. >> Most people say, oh, test/dev, but probably in SAP. What is that low-hanging fruit for you guys, and where do you see more of these ... >> Integration. I mean, a lot of times, they start with integration, because they need to bring that together, but integration's kind of a means to an end. So, an example I can think of is we have a customer named Owens-Illinois. They're a glass manufacturer, another real business, right? It doesn't always sound so sexy, but the reality ... >> They're billion ... These are billion-dollar businesses out there ... >> Yes, exactly. >> That aren't called Uber, and no one's ever heard of them, but they're businesses, doing their thing. >> Exactly. And they need to be able to integrate their backend. They had this one specific requirement where they had to quickly meet the requirements of the Peruvian government, because they needed to create e-invoicing, and if they weren't able to bring together their backend systems, build out this application to do e-invoicing, their plant in Peru was going to get shut down. So, really good example ... >> [John] A critical path item. >> Exactly. Integration, and then being able to extend that. So those are really key examples of what our customers are doing, and then of course innovation, just coming up with something completely brand new. You know, there's so many examples of of those types of ... >> You know, you mention some of these traditional businesses, whether they're a glass company or a tooling company or whatever. This is really highlighting the big trend, internet of things, or IOT. AI kind of gets bolted into that 'cause it's got machine learning and using data and things. Is the digitization of business ... It's not just like IT and getting your email and things of that nature. Seeing the industrial, analog side of the business being digitized, so, with sensors ... You can't look any further than some of the more obvious consumer examples, the Tesla car, self-driving cars, drones, all have data. And so that's kind of a mental model for most folks, but it could be plant and machinery, it could be airplanes, flown off data ... This is the industrialization of this new era. >> Right. >> [John] Of data. >> Yep. >> That's connected to the internet. Therefore, it is an internet-connected device that needs to be managed. So this is a new use case that points to some of these businesses that are now digitizing. Is that a big part of the new IOT service, and how do you guys talk to that market, because some of it's not an IT market, they're like a normal business market, that might have SAP accounting software, or manufacturing software... >> Well, I mean, I think, like most companies and most people out there, everyone's a consumer, right? We talk about companies, but within those companies, we're talking about employees, people, and everyone has a phone, a smartphone of some sort, if not an iPhone, an Android device. There's so much data that's being generated. I could give an example of my teenage ... Just turned teenage boy, and I don't want him to carry cash around. He wants to go to Starbucks, so I make sure that he has an account set up. So it's easy. All that ... Just think about the way he's transacting. He walks into Starbucks, and he can pay. I can see how much he's paying, what he's buying, right? So there's so much data, and businesses are transacting in such a way that they've never had to do before. >> [John] Do you track his location? >> That too. I know when he's going in the wrong direction. He's on the wrong bus, right? So, there's so much data, and businesses have to figure out what's the best way to monetize that, to create opportunities from it, right? And to provide that experience for their customers and then come up with new solutions and new products and new services. >> That's a great parent story. I feel the same. My wife and I have the surveillance tracker, and that's part and parcel to us paying for the phone, so. >> [Emily] Right. >> Quid pro quo. If they want to pay for their own phone, they can be anonymous. But that brings us back to the customer. I want to get back to the customer impact, because the challenges are also opportunities, so what are some of the key challenges that your top customers face in the cloud. Because I think right now, it's pretty obvious that Mobile World Congress is kind of proving it's no branch of the cloud. It's really the business model behind it. Okay, I need to have my business model align with the value preposition for what we sell to customers, and how do we execute that operationally? >> [Emily] Right. >> So, take us through how you guys help customers through those challenges and turn them into opportunities. >> Well, first, John, we listen to what those challenges are. We've heard it over and over again. How do I ... How does the company become agile? How can they stay competitive? And you're always trying to stay one step ahead of your competition, and how else do you do it? So agility is really important, and when we talk about agility, we're not just talking about being able to create an opportunity quickly. It's how can you become flexible? How can you integrate your backend quickly? How do you support your new business requirements? If you're IT, how do you support your business partner very quickly? So it's about agility, and we provide the software that will help them do that. The cloud platform allows them to quickly integrate and extend those applications, and then of course, optimizing business processes. Who doesn't want to be efficient? I don't know how many businesses out there who wants to do things this old-fashioned, slow way. They're always trying to do it better and quicker. >> They got to preserve the old, but kind of bring in the new at the same time, it's a ... >> Right. So how do we help them optimize that? So they're asking us that all the time, and we're SAP, right? Our bread and butter, ERP, CRM, applications. We know business processes, so we understand what it takes to help them optimize those business processes. >> I didn't get a chance to ask Dan Lahl, who I interviewed earlier, about ... Who's Vice President of Product Marketing at SAP Cloud, your colleague. I didn't get to ask him this question, but this is important. Customers want to know ... That their partner, in this case, SAP Cloud, has a healthy ecosystem around it. Why is an ecosystem important, a healthy ecosystem important for customers, and then what does SAP Cloud doing to foster more innovation and openness and relevance in that ecosystem? >> Another really good question, because SAP has a history of building out an ecosystem for partners, and with SAP Cloud platform, what's great about it is it's technology that our partners are, today, leveraging and creating applications. So for those integrators, systems integrators who work really closely with our customers or their customers, they understand their businesses. They're very intimate and close with them. So they're developing applications that will help support their needs, and there are actually a lot of these partners. We have over a thousand applications that have been built by partners today. We have 600 partners that are building applications with SAP Cloud platform, and that's quite remarkable, considering the product has been around ... for just three, four years. Four years. So, it's really good news. Our partners are really invested in this technology. >> Can you comment on some of the big news that's happening at Mobile World Congress, specifically around this concept of an integrated solution set? So we see 5G was a big announcement by Intel. You're seeing autonomous vehicles as a showcase. You saw them at CES by the way, too ... It was an auto show there, too, but it allows people to really get a sense that it's not a stovepipe or a silo anymore of software stack solutions in that, you know, you need some bandwidth, you need some glue software, you need some third-party solution. You need to have things componentized or Lego-blocked kind of designed in, so this is kind of this new fabric. Could be IOT from machine manufacturing equipment, to wearable computers, all kind of coming in. That's kind of the new solution set. What's the vision for you guys on that? >> You know, at Mobile World Congress, we actually have a couple really cool demos. I should probably say they're not just demos, but they're actually exhibits. We've got a connected vehicle. We talk about the connected stadium, and when we talk about the connected stadium, we're talking about the whole experience of someone coming to an event and then being able to use their iPhone or their Android device and be able to buy their food, be able to understand what's happening and know what, you know, be able to go to their seats, and things like that. Help them through the whole experience with a connected vehicle. Be able to rent a car, and then be able to create an expense report, all on their phone. All of that needs integration. >> [John] It's a mashup of all kinds of stuff. >> Exactly. >> An accounting system is now part of feature of a stadium. >> [Emily] Right. >> A cool sports venue. >> Think about all those business processes that have to be integrated, and not just on the IT side, but all those business processes. So, like you said. >> The speed is critical. You have to have low latency ... >> Yes. >> And great software to make that work. >> A repository, right? To be able to collect all that data, streaming data, bring all that together, and then be able to analyze and then make decisions and then trigger actions immediately, so. >> All right, so, let's go through some of the cool highlights real quick. I know we have limited time. I want to get to it. In terms of the demos, you mentioned the stadium thing. What else do you have? Explain some of the demos, and kind of give a little bit of a quick synopsis of each demo, and the coolness of it. >> Yeah, so, definitely, like I mentioned, the connected stadium's going to be a cool factor. The connected vehicle. We're going to have a car there, so that's going to be fun to watch, so, the fact that it's all connected. It's all IOT. It's through your phone. It's rental. >> [John] What's going to be in the car demo? >> Lots. (both laugh) Through the iPad, you can see certain things. I don't want to give it all away. >> So go to the demo. If you're in Barcelona, we're here in Palo Alto. >> [Emily] We'll have examples of what exactly the ... >> But what is in the car, because, if you think about it, obviously, over the years, I've seen tons of demos on stage, certainly at Sapphire and the big events. And there's a lot of real-time dashboarding stuff. Is that some of the ... The glam and flair going on at the demos? >> That's some aspect, yep. Yes. So, I can't give anything away yet. We want people to watch when we're there, but yeah. So there's going to be some cool demos there. And then we're actually going to be showcasing ... Intel, who's also a sponsor, for this particular show. This time around. Yeah, so we're going to be showing a prototype of a really simple IOT example, where we're going to connect it with Google Home and Amazon Echo, and we're able to control this little prototype building, send elevators up and down, all through bot technology. >> So SAP as a company's moving from a back office powering 80% of the world's businesses to a much more front-end, agile solution provider with technology ... >> [Emily] Exactly. >> Using the cloud and big data. >> And digital. >> [John] And digital. >> Yeah. And all of that is because our customers are demanding it. They see it, they know that ... They trust that we can help them along the way, on the backend as well as on the integration front, and help them become digital. >> But this is the transformation you guys have been at HANA. The system of record, that's the database and software. System of engagement, that's free-flowing data, and now you have AI ... >> [Emily] Yes. >> Kind of automating a lot of that real-world examples, so that seems to be the same. Nothing changes on the SAP vision on that front. >> No, it's an evolution. So I think all the technology components are in place. So AI, predictive, machine learning, that's been around forever. It seems like it's the holy grail for marketers, for people in risk management, you name it. Everyone wants to be able to use analytics. >> It's all integrated. >> Yeah, and now you've got the database, you've got the in-memory database, you've got the streaming capabilities, you've got ... There's so many different components that are now ready and in place to make it actually a reality. So it's exciting. >> Emily Mui with SAP Cloud Group. Final words, somewhere that you'd like folks to walk away with from a customer standpoint and impact here, Mobile World Congress this week. What's the big story from your perspective? >> Big story is that we've got a great cloud platform solution that people are just learning more about, and they should learn more about it, because we've got all the components, all the services available to help them become a much more agile business, help them optimize all the business processes they have in place today and the ones they're looking to create, and then of course becoming digital. It's become a benefit for them. It's an actual benefit to become digital. >> The IOT really highlights your value proposition as a company in general, and the cloud opportunity is just right ... Right lockstep with that. Congratulations. Thanks for coming out. >> Thank you. >> Emily Mui, here inside theCUBE in Palo Alto breaking down and talking about Mobile World Congress. Special two days of coverage here at Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music) (bright instrumental 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)