>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018. (upbeat electronic music) Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin, in the NetApp booth, at Sapphire Now 2018. We are in Orlando, this is an enormous event, there's more than 20,000 people here, and there's about a million people that SAP is expecting to engage online, that's a lot. We're excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time, Klara Young, the director of Strategic Alliances from AppBuddy and Steven Cox, the head of Global Sales Tools at NetApp, hi, guys. >> Howdy. >> Hello. >> Hi, Lisa. >> Thanks for having us. >> Absolutely, so Klara tell me about AppBuddy. Who are you guys and what do you do? >> So AppBuddy is a provider of a user experience layer that can sit on top of core systems like SAP Sales Cloud or SAP Service Cloud and that really allows the administrators to configure a dream workspace where you can get all the data that you need to work with in one place, and then, the users can interact with that very easily. And so, it's all very user friendly and it allows us to enable sales processes, I want to manage my pipelines, or my accounts, my contacts, all with a very easy to use interface right in the middle of the core system. >> So your target audience would be customers that are already using SAP or customers that are maybe in the transition from, say Oracle to SAP, or something like that? >> So any users that are planning to use SAP or are already using SAP and then want to enhance that user experience, want to give them a faster way to interact with the data, more intuitive, more functionality, right in the same core interface. So those would be good clients for us to enhance that experience, absolutely. >> And what about customers by industry know SAP really kind of being very, very strong in a lot of industries but manufacturing, digital supply chain, but if you look at their customers that are here at Sapphire and there's a million of them, they span so many industries. >> Yeah. >> I think yesterday they were saying HANA is installed in 23,000 customers across 60 industries. Does AppBuddy have a particular suite of industries where you really add even more value, or is it fairly horizontal? >> Oh, that's a real good question. Actually what's the beauty, I think, of AppBuddy's product, is that it is completely agnostic of which process or which industry that you're deploying it in. So you decide what objects, what information I want to put on that. It's not a purpose-built application specifically for one process or one industry. So we serve clients in all sorts of industries. We have a lot in high tech, or in the health care industry, manufacturing, as well but we're not specific to one industry. So really welcoming any use case and we'd love to hear from customers, hey, can I do this? With AppBuddy, could I put this object and that object together and build a process basically, almost in your own app. And we're very looking forward to those feedback from customers and wanting to build those use cases with them. >> And that's been such a huge theme or really an undertone at SAP Sapphire the last few days is how much SAP listens to their customers and really involves them and especially strategic accounts like in a collaborative way and yesterday, Steven, we spoke with your CIO Bill Miller. We talked to him about NetApp and SAP have been partners for 17 years. NetApp is 26 years young now and has undergone a big transformation. Bill talked about some of that yesterday, but you guys also did a big transformation that you were leading within your sales processes and your CRM move into SAP, talk to us about that. What were some of the reasons for that transformation? >> Yeah, it's working with Bill and his team I'm represent the business side and we're looking as NetApp is transforming from a traditional storage company to more a cloud. It's a change in the way we go to market. In the past we shipped boxes to people and they install them or we install them. And in the future, we're looking to more services and cloud-oriented things. And so the kind of infrastructure that we built up to support our large sales force doesn't work as well in the new world. And so we about two years ago, started a pretty big transformation journey to move from this more old-school hardware to more new cloud and through that process, we needed to change our systems. Changing out our CRM became an important component of that 'cause we need more flexibility and we needed to sort of be more contemporary and we worked with AppBuddy and our old system, we used to have Salesforce, and the field was pretty used to using that kind of interface. And when you build stuff like this, you don't always know how important it is to the field. You know, you have guesses at it, and as we looked at things that we had to do to prepare to move this was always something on our list that we felt like was important but we weren't able to do it immediately. It took us an extra release to get it out, so an extra few months. And through those few months, we learned the hard way that the field really wanted it. It was really impacting them. And we had guessed that we thought it was somewhere around 25% improvement in their overall productivity. And what we found was that it's at least that, if not more. >> Wow. >> Because they came back and said, "We can't do our jobs "without this, you guys gotta get it for us." >> So they said either AppBuddy or the highway? >> Yeah, pretty much. (laughs) Pretty much, AppBuddy or they're not happy. They're not happy all the time anyway but I feel like they-- >> Salespeople. >> That by getting that to 'em we were enabling them to go faster in a few things. And it's simple, it's hard to understand, I think, for everybody, it's a simple layer. Whenever you build a CRM or any kinda system, your job is to collect information and then display it back, make it easy to change. And the way CRMs typically work today is, you have a list for you of stuff, opportunities, or new registrations, quotes and you just have to look at that list and then pick one you wanna edit and then go to this details screen and look at it and then go to the edit screen and then edit it and then go back, back, back. And what AppBuddy provides, is it takes all that noise and makes it into one screen so that you can just simply make and change the data, the way you would expect to on a spreadsheet, in a simple experience. And once you give it to the reps, they sorta expect that as the tablestakes, and it's a gap if you look at most CRMs they don't have this kind of in-line edit capability out of the box. And so this is a great, SAP is really excited about this 'cause it gives them a way to solve this problem without having to build it themselves and that's the beauty of these kind of infrastructures where you can add capabilities by just plugging something in. >> Right. >> And it speaks using the APIs to the tool. And so all the rules that we build around the data about who should access it, what should happen when they change stuff, should we protect data. All that is followed, because AppBuddy works right through our APIs, through the SAP provides. And so it doesn't require a lot extra coding or anything. In fact. >> That's right. >> IT guys are standing over there somewhere. They don't like it 'cause I do it myself. I'll actually build experiences for the field really quickly 'cause that I can make a quick custom business process to support something that's needed. >> So, on the AppBuddy website, Klara, I saw, I love stats, and you guys said, we can save time and improve enterprise productivity by 5X to 10X. >> That's right. >> Those are big numbers. >> That's right. >> And you were saying there's been a massive improvement in employment productivity and I imagine in terms of the speed is essential. You know, we were talking, one of the underlying themes here at Sapphire, this year, is the intelligent enterprise, which demands the integration and the embedding of advanced emerging technologies, AI, for example, to make these enterprises truly intelligent, connecting supply chain and demand chain and it's essential, its table stakes these days. >> Yep. >> To be able to drive things faster, right? So that you guys can get what your customers need faster. >> Yep. >> So, you mentioned that huge productivity boost there but also that you were familiar with AppBuddy before your sales guys and gals were like, hey we need to have something that we're familiar with to be able to make our jobs better, so you're also doing, it sounds like a pretty good job of listening to your customers. >> Yeah, I try >> Who are probably very vocal. >> I try, I try, I mean, it's a hard job because you're sort of channeling the sales guys and in our world they're very different. In Europe, they sell very different than they sell in the US and APAC is different. And even within different sections of Europe or in the US, they act differently, and our goal is to try to streamline that so that they can act as much the same as they can across that and we can deploy sort of one experience without having to customize it totally. But tools like AppBuddy give us the ability to be much more targeted and flexible. A simple example I've been given pretty commonly is we have our sales kick-off this week also in Las Vegas and all of our sales guys are going there to learn about how to sell better, how to sell our new products and solutions and leverage some of our improved selling processes and before they go there, we wanted to have them identify a few key opportunities they're working on to say hey, these are the one's that I'm gonna use as my work case as I'm learning these new things, and in theory as we go through and finish our sales kick-off they go back and start the selling process those opportunities should sell at a higher rate then the other opportunities. And so to make that work, I configured a grid, or an AppBuddy list view, and all I put on it was the list of opportunities in one field that says, this is appropriate for our kick-off and so, instead of putting it in the middle of a very complex world, I sent 'em an email, they had a list and they just had to say this guy, this guy, and that guy, and that's all they had to do. And so our response rate on something, which if you sent a list of things to do for the field, they're not gonna respond. They're busy, they're makin' money. But in this case, because it was tied to the new learning and they felt value in it, 80% of 'em responded within 10 days. >> Yeah, wow. >> And you know, you just don't see that kind of response. But it works because it's a simple experience, right? The only thing they could do with that, they get an email that says, do this, they open it, they see the list, they click, yes, yes, yes, and it's done. And that's a whole business process that in the old days could take months to prepare for and create fields and deploy new code and do all the things you have to do. And in this case, I can create the fields in a day, create the grid in five minutes, and then I put it in an email, and done, you know? So this is where you take things to the next level and make it easier for the sales reps to do the things they need to do help us all be successful. >> Did it also sort of abstract, I can imagine, the fundamental challenges that go along with replacing an entire new CRM, going from Salesforce to SAP. >> Yeah. >> Has that been able to help kind of abstract some of the inner machinations of that so that the sales people can just focus on we know this same interface? >> It totally does, because the list views that we create are only the things they have to have. In any system like this you have a bunch of other fields that are specialized for, say, we have a professional services group and they really want to know blah blah but most sales reps, they don't deal with that at all. But you need it on the page, I need to build that. In these views, I can build it for a sales rep view that is perfect for them, right? Meaning there's no extra fields on that list. It's what you need to get your job done. And so it's like a laser focus, and then I can build a separate one for a different kind of role and give that one to them. So without changing the tool, I'm just creating a focused experience. It all uses the same things. You need sorting, you need filtering, you need a simple edit and that's all available and once they learn that core capability then the rest just kind of falls in. >> And then from your perspective it's probably business outcomes that, George, your CEO, is going to be really excited about, cost savings, employee productivity. >> Yep. >> I'm wondering though, we're talking about it in the context of what you're doing within your sales processes and your CRM. Klara, so obviously working with SAP, are there other businesses processes that AppBuddy can sit on top of and help to streamline the interface with? >> Yeah, great question, and actually thank you for asking 'cause I was gonna say, we talked a lot about sales but we could be enabling any other processes as well and services, for example, is a big one. I've got a list, a queue of cases, I want to make quick updates to that. I want to change things or I'm doing some forecasting, some account planning, but our vision, ultimately is to be able to bring from lead to cache all processes and again tailor it for each user, role specifically for them and we're not giving the solution, the customers are defining what do they need for each one of those processes and that's the power, I think, of this configurability and agility that you get. It's not built and hard coded. It's really you who puts it together. But again, we really have that vision of not only linking the CRM data but ultimately we would love to be able to get more use cases of, hey the CRM data together maybe with your ERP data, I want to see my opportunities but I also want to see the orders and I want to see the invoices so get really this 360 view of your customers that I think we've talked a lot about, even Bill McDermott was talking about it. It's so essential and critical to be customer focused is to have that visibility and with this application where you can basically pull data from wherever you need it for that specific view, you give your users that full visibility and therefore much faster answer questions, be in contexts, not lose critical information of a customer. >> Right, you're right, Bill McDermott did mention yesterday in the keynote about really what, SAP's been pretty vocal about for a while, they want to be one of the top 10 global brands. >> Mm-hmm. >> Right. >> Most valuable brands, and they want to be up there with Apple and Google. >> Right. >> And Coca-Cola, and that's for a software company that sells invisible technology, they're on their way. They're now ranked number 17, but he talked about this. >> Yeah. >> Kind of unique position that SAP's in to link and synchronize >> That's right. >> The demand chain with the supply chain >> That's right. >> Which is pretty revolutionary but ultimately, it's not about just having a 360 view of sales automation, it's of the entire customer process. >> Correct, yeah. >> So Steven, sounds like you are a rockstar in that app, with your sales guys going, hey, we need this AppBuddy technology to make our lives easier, our jobs easier. Do you foresee rolling the AppBuddy technology out to include other business processes? >> All the time, yeah, it's all about the data. And change management or getting the field to act in the same way is really hard and it doesn't sound like it should be but, (Lisa laughs) it's like having 1,000 cats on the table and getting them all to look one direction, it just doesn't happen, right? So my job is to make that and if I can have it with a single user experience, right, without having different flavors of screens and extra fields and narrow it down to what they need, bringing whatever data they need to flow from end to end it makes life easier and I've got 'em all trained. You know, we had very high usage in our previous platform and we're building now from that but they all know how to use it now so I don't have to train the cats to look in the same direction, they all know where to go. All I gotta do is add the data, right? And if you look at NetApp's transformation, from a storage company to a data company my job is really data, it's not about the tools as much. It's about how do we facilitate the salespeople to do more with what they have, right? How do I do a cross-sell, up-sell, how do I get them enabled so they can move faster so that's innate and built into what they do? >> Yeah. >> And in that you have to build, and we were just at another panel talking with SAP about, you have to give back to the sales reps and to the people doing the data 'cause CRM's not fun, I mean, it's not like, hey, I'm gonna go play my CRM tonight. (laughs) It's a different deal. CRM requires work and so you need to give them stuff back. Do machine learning, do things that provide scoring, show the probability of close, help them be more successful at their job and bring the data together in one spot. >> You know, I think yesterday one of the themes also was data and trust, the new currency, right? If you can't access it and extract valuable insights immediately and act on them then you risk being usurped by your competition. So being able to enable the data to be accessible, insights gleaned as quickly as possible, you must be the king. >> Well, I don't know about that. >> The data king. (laughs) >> Yeah, it's definitely our job. >> But as we wrap here in the last few seconds, digital transformation and every company has to go through it or you're not relevant but that requires a cultural transformation as well. >> It does. >> And it sounds like what you guys are doing together is helping that at least from the sales force's perspective of where change has to happen. >> Yep. >> Not only is it improving the efficiency of your SAP environment, your CRM environment, but it's also helping, sounds like, from a cultural perspective, as, hey, we've got to go through this transformation, let's make it where we can simplify, let's do that. >> Very much so. Just like I was talking about the cat problem. You've got the reps that are used to doing something the way and you're saying hey, we're gonna evolve and do something different and that change is rough and people don't feel like it's the right thing at times. The great news with this change and the timing of it is that when you're moving from one platform to the other, it's the one time in the life cycle of these products where you can make significant change, drop whole business process and they won't even notice it. I dropped three quarters of the stuff that we had before and just didn't build it. And I don't have people coming to me going, hey, I really miss doing that, and that's good news, we're helping drive the change. >> Yeah. >> Well, thank so much you guys for stopping by theCUBE and Klara telling us about AppBuddy, what you guys do, how you're working together with NetApp and SAP. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you for the opportunity, Lisa, thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin at SAP Sapphire 2018. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)