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