(click) >> Hey, welcome everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Well, it is an excited day and we're really happy to be covering big announcements coming out of Google Next today. And we wanted to get right down here to SAP Silicon Valley Headquarters and talk to Sam Yen and get his take on what's happening up in San Francisco today. So, first off, Sam great to see ya. >> Yeah, great to see you as well. >> So, Sam you are the Managing Director of SAP Silicon Valley. Obviously, you guys have a big presence in Philly, and a big presence here in Paulo Alto. And also the Chief Design Officer. So, let's just jump into it. So, Bernd Leukert was onstage with Diane Green this morning kicking off the Google Next Conference and talking about this new relationship between SAP and Google. >> I think, first of all, it's the trend in what the industry's happening right now. If you look at companies, companies are more and more willing to go to the public cloud in terms of helping them with their infrastructure needs. The market is actually really going to double between now and 2020. So, with that we have three major announcements that we announced today. The first one was SAP's flagship products running on GCP, Google's Cloud Platform. The first one is HANA. If you know anything about SAP, HANA's been our data processing engine, memory processing engine for the last number of years. It's our flagship product that we've been talking about. And that's now certified for GCP. The second thing is really more for the, it's still part of the first announcement, but for the development community bringing HANA Express which is a downloadable version of HANA that you can put on your laptop and really get to know what HANA's all about and see how easy it is to develop on top of HANA. So, that's now available on Google Cloud Launcher. Also, SAP's cloud platform is also going to be, we're working very closely together to co-innovate together with Google. The second part of the second announcement, is taking infrastructure as a service to the next level. SAP has always had a multi-cloud strategy offering customers choice in where they want to deploy on public cloud. And Google is now available from that perspective. But beyond just infrastructure to service, we want to partner with Google to take things like data privacy and protection to the next level by offering transparency over how customers monitor and understand what's going on from the governance, risk and compliance perspective on their information. The last thing, which is really exciting as well, is bringing together productivity tools together with SAP. Google's G Suite, things like Mail and Sheets and Hangouts and things like that, and making that integrate seamlessly into the SAP backend system. >> So, so many layers to these announcements. And thank you for laying it all down. The first one, just at a high level, is clearly enterprises are comfortable with public cloud. There's now more enterprisy software firm out there than SAP. And for you guys to really get together with Google and Google Cloud, that really shows that the conversation is no longer about, "Should I go to the cloud?" or "Is the cloud safe?" or "Is it appropriate for enterprise?" But enterprises are fully all in. >> That's definitely the trend. Customers are different in their journey but more and more we're seeing that. And the numbers that I talked about in terms of the investment and spend for public cloud is growing through the roof. At the end of the day, SAP from an SAP perspective, and also from a Google perspective, we want to provide as many options for customers as we can. And we think that by doing this we're providing the best potential solutions for where a customer thinks they need to be today and tomorrow. >> Right, and it's really about workloads, right? It's not even specifically about customers. 'Cause you guys still have Google Cloud, or excuse me, SAP Cloud, recently the HANA Cloud platform recently renamed. So, you still have your own cloud if they want their own kind of enterprise cloud that you're going to run for them. Obviously, they can run SAP on their own internal cloud now you're saying they can run SAP on Google's cloud. But it's really more workload and application and use case specific as opposed to a company. >> Yeah, and I think ultimately options for the customer in terms of their particular situation. Yes, SAP will continue to have our own hosting, our own cloud as well. But you also mentioned SAP Cloud Platform. So, there's many, many different ways from a platform as a service perspective, enterprise services that we provide from a SAP perspective running on Google's infrastructure. And also leveraging the Google services that they provide on their Cloud Platform as well. >> Right, another piece that you said kind of towards the end of many, many announcements happening today, is really the developer angle. Every show, we cover a hundred shows a year, and every one is fighting for the attention of the developer, and really trying to cater to the developer. 'Cause that's where the power is. And you want a robust developer ecosystem because that's what moves things forward. So, this is a pretty interesting announcement now that developers can basically download a version of HANA onto their laptop to have an appeal to help them develop more stuff for you. >> Yeah, and I think the broader statement here is we're combining the power of the SAP development ecosystem with the millions and millions of people also in the Google development ecosystem to build solutions for customers. At the end of the day, the power of your offering is really the power of your ecosystem. And it's kind of interesting, being here in a German company actually in Silicon Valley from an SAP perspective, enterprise seems to be the new black right now. There are more consumer brands that are looking at going into the enterprise. And SAP's starting to become more and more an on-ramp into the enterprise for these companies. >> And it's interesting because public clouds, traditionally, years ago weren't really thought of as a true enterprise solution or maybe test but you'd never run your production workloads. But clearly now that's going away. That said, there's a lot of very specific issues that you have to deal with with the enterprise security, compliance, the rules around the world that are different for data sovereignty, etc. So, you guys bring a real depth of experience in those areas to this new announcement. >> Yeah, I think that's the power of the partnership if you think about Google and the public cloud, the scalability, the availability, the reach of the Google public cloud and their expertise in terms of the infrastructure and the operations. And then you combine that with SAP's experience in terms of what works from a governance, risk and compliance perspective. We have an understanding both with customers and their needs. And also working with local governments and the policies that need to be in place. So, I think it's a beautiful combination of the two companies. >> Now, the next kind of big trend that cloud is helping even accelerate more is A.I. and machine learning and you know, we're kind of going to Phase Two of what was formerly known as Big Data and Hadoop and now were moving to a much more sophisticated version of that enabled by cloud. Obviously, Google's got a ton of expertise in machine learning and A.I. You guys have been doing it on the enterprise side. Again, coming together, one plus one makes three? >> Absolutely, this is one of the exciting things that we're also, we've also talked about and announced, that we are partnering with Google to really take machine learning to the enterprise use cases. There's so much information that's going through enterprise systems. More and more information as things like Big Data, and Internet of Things, and social things are bringing information in. This is really, really fruitful area where think there's a lot of collaboration. Also, from a design perspective, once you have this information, how do you expose this stuff to the users that makes sense and really amplify human capabilities when we're talking about all this technology. >> Right, so you're sitting 6,000 miles from Waldorf, 3,000 miles from Philadelphia. How does this change things for you? You said you've been at SAP for a number of years now. You're sitting in the heart of Silicon Valley. What does this mean to you, kind of personally, and to SAP's presence in Silicon Valley to do this partnership with Google who's just right down the road and clearly one of the main powers. >> Yeah, I think it really talks about the importance of SAP's presence here in Silicon Valley. Again, as an on-ramp into the enterprise. There's lots and lots of partners that want to expand their business and figure out how they can bring their services also to the enterprise. It's almost like consumerization of IT if you will. And really, that's SAP's purpose and reason for being here. >> All right, well Sam I'll give you the last word. Great event today. Really exciting but before we know it SAP Sapphire will be upon us. I presume you guys will keep working tomorrow and have something new and special for us in Sapphire. >> Yeah, Google and SAP, we're in it for the long term. This is just the beginning. And look out for exciting announcements coming in Sapphire as well. >> All right, super. He's Sam Yen, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (energetic, techno music)

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