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

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's the Cube, covering .NEXT Conference 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to the Cube, I'm here with Keith Townsend and I'm Stu Miniman. Happy to have on the program first-time guest Joe Zarb, who's with SAP Labs. He's the Vice President of Global Technology Partners. And welcome back to the Cube, long-time guest, Venugopal Pai, Vice President of Customer Success with Nutanix. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Great to be here, Stu, great to be here, Keith. >> All right, so Venugopal, our audience has seen him a few times. Joe, let's start, your role and inside SAP Labs what your organization does. >> Sure, happy to do that. So Joe Zarb, I head up our global technology partners within our global business development and ecosystems team. Basically helping our customers to respond to their needs and their wants for solutions that span not only SAP, but their whole digital transformation agenda. So we do that with the partners, and we do it with global service providers, we do it with software technology partners, and hardware technology partners. >> And Pai, we talked to Inder earlier today about customer success, but from an application standpoint, tell us why you're here. >> Of course, no thank you, Stu, thank you, Keith. Very good to be here again. So the reason that I'm here with Joe from SAP is we've had a long-standing relationship with SAP. Spanning almost four years. And the reason it's important is as Nutanix becomes the platform that customers start to depend on for the infrastructure, the key elements of what value we provide the customer is to mitigate a lot of the complexity that comes from infrastructure and allow them to focus on the business value of the application. And the predominant application as you start to global enterprises, large customers, SAP tends to be the lifeblood of that company. And the business value of how they drive value. So our partnership with SAP is to really make sure that as we start looking at transforming the data center and moving them to a digital platform that makes it very easy to consume, the ability for transcending the value to an SAP application, making sure that customers have that trust of, if I run SAP on Nutanix, the trust of availability, performance, capability, all the things that they need enterprise vendors to stand up to, we wanted to make sure that our journey with SAP started up early. Our journey with SAP in making sure they understand the concept of hyper-convergence and the impact of what it does for them has been a very fulfilling one and has been a journey that will continue on for a long ways to come. So that's why we're here. >> So, Joe, let's talk about digital transformation and the drivers. You know SAP, rich set of data is, I've heard it called a cash register of the world. So many transactions go through that. With that said, it's also one of those areas that we say, oh thoust dare not touch SAP. It is the system of record. However, it's a rich, rich area for digital transformation. The go fast, break things, part of the IT team, wants access to SAP, they want to get the data from there, they want to update transactions. Talk about that conflicting role that SAP has of, we're steady, rock solid versus go fast and break stuff. >> Right, so that's a great question. And what we're facing at SAP are demands that are coming from our customers around what people term as bimodal IT. They got to run their business, but they also have to innovate. So a big part of our strategy going forward is centered around HANA as you know, which is our real-time database, and it's a translytics database, right? So you could do transactions in it, you could also do analytics with the database within the same data set. So it provides a very powerful platform so that you could do your transactional operations and the analytics in a way where you could innovate. So that bimodal IT, and the relationship with Nutanix and the other hyper-convergent infrastructure players that we work with is really to focus on driving down the total cost of ownership in those operational areas, get to market quicker with those, and free up a technical center of excellence and functional center of excellence resources so that they can help the enterprise innovate. We have an entire platform that's dedicated just to innovation. It's our SAP Leonardo platform with our SAP Cloud platform, with Nutanix, and other hyper-converged players, and our transactional system. So that whole digital transformation really needs to take into account, hey, you got to protect the base, you got to run those core applications, but you can't take your eye off of innovation 'cause digital transformation's all about innovations. Business model reinvention as well as business process reinvention. So I think that's a big part of what we're focused on. >> So talk about Nutanix's role. How do you help customers with that goal of saying, the things that we do before are critically important, you need to keep doin' 'em, we need to do it cheaper, we need to do it faster, and we need to do it more reliably while we look to innovation. >> Absolutely. And I think that's a great story in terms of what Joe talked about in terms of SAP's lead into making sure that the ship is steady as it goes while making sure that the innovation engine is not forgotten, right? Where we start seeing is that the amalgamation between the two saying, I've got the traditional applications running as is, but I got to embrace innovation. And if we look at what Nutanix has done, and continues to do as you saw in some of the announcements at this event, is bringing the innovation in, but making sure that that innovation is brought with the respect of applications running in the data center, and still giving the customer the flexibility of hey, I want to embrace Cloud. I want to embrace the concept of what Cloud means to me, not just taking my data and moving it into the public Cloud, but giving me the way to get the Cloud-like heuristics, the Cloud-like management, Cloud-like flexibility, Cloud-like agility, the consumption of Cloud DevOps capabilities, so the combination of what we delivered in infrastructure layer, become where hardware to software, and tie it to what SAP is doing to drive that innovation from an application level is a very good partnership conversation to have, is hey, how do we now blend this software base in terms of what we're doing in the data center, and tie that to the innovation that SAP's driving at the application level, and together that's when true innovation for customers starts bringing to light. Because they focus the applications, we got the infrastructure, but this partnership then brings the two together. >> So, Pai, let's put some meat on the bone. It takes nine months, 12 months, to deploy SAP infrastructure period. Nutanix rack and stack, I can get a whole cluster up in less than an hour. However, there's still that SAP layer that basis layer that has to be laid out. How are you helping customers get more agile in that so that they wow the business? >> Absolutely. And just to put things in context, our SAP partner who has been around for four years, right? We've been SAP certified for 2 1/2 years, right? Both for SAP NetWeaver running on VMware hypervisors, and then as of a year and a half ago, running on our AHV hypervisor. So we're bringing that hypervisor innovation into the SAP world. Right, so that's one side. When you start looking at our software stack that start disseminating the focus on why things take so long for deploying an application is because the application layer is complex and the infrastructure layer is complex. So what we're doing is with the 40 to 50 customers you already have running on SAP is what we bring is if we can reduce the complexity of the infrastructure layer, the speed to value of deploying an application becomes much, much faster. So that's why customers are gravitating to Nutanix is because the infrastructure complexity has been eliminated as hey, it takes me six months to spin up a infrastructure that's meet variety of where they apply the amount of VM, which server, which storage, and you figure we're networking, and then I spin up the application. When we bring in Nutanix, the ability for us to disaggregate all that layered complexity that comes into play, speeds up the deployment of the application, therefore better time to value for customers saying, hey, I got to spin up the application a few months. I can't wait for nine months because the infrastructure's slowing me down. We start eliminating that complexity. >> Joe, one of the more interesting things to watch in the industry is the change in how customers are purchasing. Especially from software. The days of everything fully shrink-wrapped are long behind us. It's the subscription economy now. Nutanix is going along that journey from buying to software to fully subscription model. Can you touch on what you're seeing in maybe either you or Pai'll connect how that comes together with Nutanix. >> Yeah, I'd be happy to do that. So what we are seeing, and this is implemented in our strategy and our go-to market approach, is really that we live in a hybrid world. And I thought that that was a wonderful quote that I heard here at the conference or driven home in the keynote. So we do. We live in a hybrid world. SAP's strategy recognizes that. That's what our customers want. So we work very closely with Cloud partners like Microsoft Azure and Google, and of course Amazon and others. And of course we have an on-premise suite of solutions. So when we start to look at these business models, it's oftentimes about right-sizing the business model for the workload and the need of that particular customer sometimes for a particular industry. Now where Nutanix comes into play in this hyper-converged infrastructure is, there's some really difficult things that need to get done to make this world a reality. Right if you're going to move workloads and have them run in the Cloud, you might have them run at the edge if it's an IoT solution leveraging our Leonardo platform you might have them running in the core or you might have it running in a branch office. Every time you start adding those layers, you're adding complexity, you're adding cost, and you're adding a requirement for skills. So when we can work with close partners to downgrade the skills, downgrade some of the number of people you might need, create simplicity and create an environment where really it's a Nutanix statement but where our customers have that freedom to move their workload to the right environment to take advantage of it. Those are the partners who we want to work with. >> So SAP Labs, you can't get out of a Labs conversation without talking, well no we can't get out of a SAP Labs conversation without talking mobile and Fiori and all of the great stuff that's happening on just taking advantage of the deep data. Data's the biggest accessor, and mobile and giving that data to mobile, let's talk a little bit about the itch. What's the story between Nutanix, SAP, when it comes to stuff that CIOs care about today and that's Fiori. >> Yeah, so a great question. So if we look at Satyam presented yesterday in terms of our direction around IoT and looking at the edge as a very critical component of the entire operating system, enterprise called operating system model. One of the key things that we are spending a lot of time on is understanding the use cases for verticals and understanding okay when you look at a specific vertical, let's say it's oil and gas, or energy, or manufacturing, right? All of those verticals have a unique perspective on what IoT means to them. So IoT is a good buzzword and a good catchword, but when it comes to use cases and verticals, there's a very specific nomenclature on what they mean by IoT for them, right? So spending a lot of steam and Nutanix making a lot of time in deciphering what IoT means for customers, defining what use cases mean for that vertical and then working with SAP in determining okay, what does Leonardo mean for them because Leonardo is again, is a platform. Within the verticals, we're working with SAP and okay within the Leonardo platform, within the vertical, how do we define what our value prop within the IoT landscape is when it comes to the edge? And so you can see more coming from us, but we truly understand the importance of data like you said, and the creation of data at the edge, and the importance of analyzing the data, maybe in the Cloud. And that transformation of where the edge of data's created and where it needs to be analyzed, that journey is very complex. And if we can make that journey simple, then SAP customers win, SAP application, deployment wins, and we're able to therefore mitigate some of the complexity that comes with making that journey simple. >> You know I might add to that is again, what Pai said is spot on, but if you look at it from a manufacturing point of view, moving to the edge, customers are confronted with the reality of the networking complexity and they're either going to take the processing and move it to the problem or bring the problem to the processing. And so to do that takes hard work. And servers, and so there's a whole new genre of high-performance gateways and hardware that's emerging on the market from players like Fujitsu and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Dell, what have you. And you end up having a plethora of these devices at every well head, on every AMI, AMR meter-reading infrastructure in the utility system or in every single plant floor. So how do you take that level of innovation that's happening now at the plant floor and make it part, not only of your operational system, but of your IT and your data center so you could manage it with all the ilities that IT people do. And I think Nutanix and SAP are working to solve that problem. And our Leonardo platform is what we have to drive that edge and with Nutanix it's a very manageable environment. >> Great well, Joe and Pai, really appreciate the update on where you are today, where some of the direction are, we're going to the future. Getting towards the end of two days of live coverage here at Nutanix .NEXT 2018. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching the Cube. >> Thank you. (upbeat music)