>> (upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi, and welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Amazon Web Services, Public Sector Awards for their partners. Really interesting, we get to talk to people around the globe, we talked to the vendors, the award winners as well as their customers who have some interesting projects. So happy to welcome to the program coming to us from Argentina. I have Leo Bracco. He is the Latin American Executive Director for CloudHesive and joining him, his customer Carolina Tchintian. She is the Director of the Political Institution Program at CIPPEC. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> All right, so Leo, first of all, let's start with you if we could. So CloudHesive first of all, congratulations, you were the Nonprofit Sector award winner for cybersecurity solutions. Of course, anybody that knows public sector, there's the government agencies, there's nonprofits there's education. The cybersecurity of course, went from the top priority to the top, top priority here in 2020. So if you could just give us a snapshot of CloudHesive for our customer. >> Well, CloudHesive is a US based company, started six years ago in 2014. And we decide a couple of years ago to move to Latin America and to start working with Latin America customers. Our offices are in Argentina right now. And one of the focus that we have in the solutions that we give to our customers is security. We work on services to help companies to reduce the cost, increase productivity, and what should the security posture? So we've been working a long time ago to many NPOs, and seeing how they can leverage the solutions and how they can give secure, how to be secure in the world. In the internet. >> All right, Carolina, if you could tell us a little bit about the CIPPEC and maybe then key us up as the project that you're working on. >> Okay, thank you. So CIPPEC is a nonprofit think tank, nonprofit organization, independent organization that aims to deliver better public policies in different areas. In economic development, in social protection and state and government. My particular program, the political institutions program goal is, or the mission is basically to promote evidence based decisions to improve democratic processes and to guarantee civil and political rights across all the countries. So we on issues such as improving election administrations, legislative work, representation, and that's our area of work. >> Wonderful. Sounds like a phenomenal project. Leo, if you could help us understand where did CloudHesive get involved in this project? Was there an existing relationship already, or was it for a specific rollout? that tell us about, obviously the security angles are a big piece? >> No, we didn't have a previous engagement with them. They come to us with a very short time to elections and they need a secure solution. So we first have to analyze the actual solution, how it works, acknowledging well the current infra that they have. Then we have to understand the challenge that they're facing. They have a very public site, they need to go public and they need to be very secure. And the last, we have to develop a fast migration strategy. We knew that AWS was the perfect fit for the need. So we just had to align a good strategy with the customer need. And all these it has been done in less than 72 hours. That was our deadline to elections. >> Wow, talk about fast. Okay, Carolina, help us understand a little bit. Had your organization, had you been using a Cloud before? Seventy-two hours is definitely an aggressive timeline. So help us understand a little bit as to what went into making your decision and obviously, 72 hours super short timeframe. >> Super, super short. Yeah, that was a big challenge. So let me tell you more about what we do and the context. So Argentina holds elections, national elections every two years. In each election year CIPPEC tries to generate and systematize analysis of provincial and national elections with the goal of informing key actors in the electoral processes. This is and decision makers, political parties, media, and general population. So as our first experience in 2017, with informed voter project, we had this collaboration with the National Electoral Authorities in which we created a landing page in our website where you could find as the voter, all of the information you need to go and cast your vote throughout the entire election process. Meaning from the campaign stage, election administration details, polling places, electoral offer, participation et cetera. So that was a landing page hosted in our website. And in 2017, we managed to have a button in every eligible voter in Argentina Facebook feed. So you could go click there and go to our website, right. And have all of the information summarize in a very simple way, straightforward way. So what happened in the 2017 election day is that the button was so successful that the landing page made our server to collapse in the first hours of the election day. So we learned a huge lesson there, which was that we had to be prepared in 2019, if we wanted to repeat this experience. And that is how we get to CloudHesive. >> Wonderful, Leo, if you could, help us understand a little bit architecturally what's going on there, what was CoHesive doing, what AWS services were leveraged? >> Perfect. Well we need great reliability, performance, scalability of course and the main thing security. We have no doubt about the Cloud and all the differentials of AWS. Our main question was about how do we align the right services to give the best solution to the customer? So we did kind of strategy with S3, CloudFront, and we, at the same time being monitorizing everything with CloudTrail and securing the public's access to all of these information. That give us a perfect fit for the solution, a very easy solution and very of course scalable, but more than anything, we could improve the customer experience in very small amount of time. So this is a very simple solution, that fits perfect for the customer. >> Wonderful. Carolina, if you could, tell us how did things go? What lessons have you learned? Anything along the way that you would give feedback to your peers or other organizations that were looking to do something similar? >> Yeah, well, the 2017 experience was a very tough experience for us because we've been preparing for election day during the 2016 and 2017. And the infrastructure was the limit we had in that point. So we couldn't afford ... We have a commitment with informing voters and informing key actors on election process. And these key actors are expecting that information on election day, before, and after. The lesson there is, we cannot be limited by the infrastructure. Assuming that in 2019, that the landing page would receive a similar amount or a huge amount of traffic volume visits on the election day, basically, we knew that traditional hosting service couldn't fulfill those needs so we had to go beyond traditional and the partner was critical to help us to the migration, to the Cloud. >> Yeah, Leo, maybe you could speak a little bit to that, the scalability, and of course, nonprofit's very sensitive to costs involved in these solutions. Help us understand that those underpinnings of leveraging, AWS specifically in CloudHesive. How this meets their needs and still is financially, makes sense. >> Perfect. When you have this kind of solutions, of course, your first concern is, okay, how do I make a scalable solution that fits on the, just on this moment that they need the behavior for so many infrastructure involved. And then at the other day, they need no infra at all, but you have another two big things that you have to focus on. One, is the security, you need to monitor all the behaviors of the content and pay attention to any external menace. You have one 24-hour day, so you need to be very responsibility and high sensitive information that the customer has on the set of data there. It's good to say that we have no security incidents, and no security breach during the most public stage of the operation, so that there was very good for us. The next thing is from the delivery perspective. You have a potential pick of people over the side to usually manage the content delivery network to answer all the requirements. You must be able to share the content in CloudFront, and so you have, and you can achieve your goals, right? And what I can say, it's about numbers, we achieve more than 99.5 efficiency hit rate you over the CDN, that's over CloudFront. And we kept server CPU such below 10% all the time. So this was a major success for us. Like we have no trouble, we use things at the most. And most of anything, the customer has the security, everything look from our perspective. (mumbles) >> Leo, what follow up if I could, if you look at 2020 being able to scale and respond to the changes in workload and be able to stay secure when bad actors, many people are working at home, but doesn't mean the bad actors aren't out there. We've actually seen an increase in security attacks. So just, do you have any commentary overall about what's happening more recently in what you see in your space? >> Yeah, well, we're very focused right now and while security is being each time bigger, right? One of the biggest menace in security is our own team, because we have to keep our teams auto align to the process and understanding the security as a first step doing things from the network perspective. Then we have a very good experience over this last two years, with all the security tools that AWS is seeking to the market. So we now have CloudTrail. We can do many things with WAF we're working towers of new good security solutions. And so I think this will be the future. We have to focus ourself in these two pillars. The first pillar is, okay, what we can do on our own network and the other pillar's, all the tools that AWS is giving us so we can manage security from a new perspective. >> Carolina, last question that I have for you is, look forward a little bit, if you will, are there things that you'll be looking to do in future election cycles or anything else from this project that you could expect going forward? >> Yeah, definitely. We're going to repeat this experience in 2021. Trying to think of the success was the 2019 election cycle. And in this particular informed voter project, we might want to keep doing this for the next election cycles, not only 2023 now, but for the future. >> All right then, Leo, last piece for you, first of all, congratulations, again, winning Best Cyber Security Solution for Nonprofit. Just talk a little bit if you would, about your partnership with AWS and specifically, the requirements and what you see in the nonprofit segment. >> Well, we see that the nonprofit are growing large too, they will need very good scalable solutions. We see that all the focus that we have in on security is the next need because we have been working on these towers to the future. The solutions kept growing each time. The networks are growing each time. And the traffic is growing. The focus on the security will be one of the appendix of our work in the future. And I think that's the biggest issue that we are going to have. Having good engineers, good hard work and manage the challenge and consolidate all the solution as a need. Right now, we're working on many projects with different NGO's and we're working towers that they have the solution that fits them. And of course, we try to keep, in all the public sector, we try to keep the cost at a range level that we can afford that our customers can afford. That's I think, a big problem that we're having. >> Well, Carolina, congratulations on the progress with your project. Thank you so much for joining us. And Leo, thank you again for joining us and congratulations to you and the CloudHesive team for winning the award. >> Thanks. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, stay tuned for more coverage, theCUBE, at the AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin, on the ground, at SAPPHIRE NOW 2018 in the NetApp booth with Keith Townsend for the day. Keith and I are joined by Scott Feldman, the Global Head of SAP HANA and Leonardo Communities. Scott, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, great to be here. >> So, communities, plural. Why are... Tell us about the communities at SAP. Why is there specifically an SAP HANA community, before we get into Leonardo? >> Okay, well it's kinda fun because you saw one community and then they say, "Well, go do another community." So you do one, and it's like, okay do one. Do another one. So we have, at SAP, a global community that runs on the SAP.com platform. That's for everybody. That's for all customers, all partners, all analysts, everybody. That's normally called a SAP community. What we realized back in, around 2012 or 2013, is that we wanted to have a special place where our SAP HANA early adopter customers could go and join and network with each other on an online presence, right, and then have an opportunity to share their knowledge with each other and get more information from SAP. So we created a separate community on SAP HANA. It's actually a pretty easy URL, it's called SAPHANACommunity.com. It's pretty simple to remember. And now, we've doing this for about five, six years. >> So talk to us about what's unique about the HANA community outside of the technology. SAP Communities, in general's already pretty big, very active community. >> Correct. >> But what was the call out or what was the results of creating the HANA community? >> Great, and that's a great question. So what's really interesting about the SAP HANA community is that the topic and coverage of the content is specifically related to SAP HANA, data management, database tools and technologies, analytics, and other surrounding areas that are connected to that HANA platform as an anchor. So we have provided, over the past five years, almost 300, 300 webinars of content on SAP HANA technology. A lot of that content has come from SAP product managers, a lot of it's come from solution experts, partners as well, have provided content. And they're in the form of webinar frameworks as well as whitepapers and other content that's on there. Now, the people that join the community, which is all free by the way for the customers that join, are mainly our SAP customers. Now I'm proud to tell you, here and also SAPPHIRE 2018, we're here, we're over 6,100 or so members, globally, of the SAP HANA community. And what's really great about that is, you know, relative to some of the millions of numbers of people throughout for other communities, it seems like, you know, 6,000 plus is a small number. But you have to keep in mind that it's very targeted, right? So the people that are through the door, and our members of the community on the SAP HANA Jam, we have it on our SAP Jam site which is hosting the SAP cloud platform. These are people that really are interested in that topic. And they really wanna learn about SAP HANA and the technology surrounding SAP HANA. So they're very, very high-qualified, high-quality people. >> Very engaged, it sounds like. >> Absolutely. >> So, speaking of that, so this morning during Bill McDermott's keynote, he mentioned 23,000 HANA customers. >> Yes. >> You mentioned 6,000 actively engaging in your community. >> Yes. >> Collaboration was a big theme of this morning, talking about, this is not grandpa's CRM anymore, what SAP is doing to break that status quo. How influential are those customers engaging in the HANA community to its development and its evolution? >> That's a fantastic question. So what's happened is the community... Think of almost like a pyramid. So the community of the large, vast number of people who have joined the community for interest in topics have mostly consumed information, they are kinda the base line of the pyramid. Some of those customers have some great stories to tell. Okay, so what we did was we started a webinar series in 2013 called Spotlight. And I'll take credit for the name, actually, 'cause we call it the SAP HANA Spotlight. And essentially, what we're doing is, imagine the customer in a spotlight where they're sharing their journey. They're sharing their SAP HANA story and their journey. So we launched that a number of years ago and now we've done almost 80 separate HANA Spotlight webinars with customers that are sharing their stories. Well we even took it one step further beyond that. In 2013, some of the executives from our early adopting customers for SAP HANA, they came over to SAP and they said, "Gee, SAP, we're betting our career "and our company survival "on this new technology called SAP HANA," back in 2013. And they basically came to us and said, "I wanna have a council." So we wanna have a council of influence so that we have an opportunity to get together, share stories, share our journeys with each other, get to know who the other customers are that are also early adopters and are embarking on this journey with us together, and then, more importantly, to answer your question, feed that information back to SAP development so that we could, back at SAP, improve the product and come out with some additional features and functions and make it even better. Well that was 2013. Our very first meeting was up in Canada, in a suburb in Toronto, at one of our customer locations. We had 13 people in that meeting. Today, dial up six years, we're at over 750 members of an executive, so these are C-level VPS, senior IT, and chief architects that are in our community globally. We've done 24 meetings, I'm about to schedule the 25th meeting, and I've globalized that. And the customers, I thought they would've been tired of these kinds of meetings, they love it. They absolutely love it. So again, going back to that analogy, this is kind of the high peak point of the pyramid. We get the executives that are making these decisions and we talk about thought leadership. We don't talk about features and functionality. We do talk about road maps, we talk about investments that they need to make, and we anchor it again on the SAP HANA platform but we're bringing in other technologies and components like analytics or SAP Leonardo, right, or S/4 HANA, right. Now that it's announced, we'll bring in C/4 HANA. So we'll cover other topics as well, and of course the cloud platform. >> So you set it up, rinse and repeat, now we're at Leonardo. >> Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. >> What is, first off, what is Leonardo? Great name, I love the name. But what is it? >> So SAP Leonardo is a methodology. It's an opportunity for our customers to co-design, co-invent, and get engaged in the design thinking process to understand how data, and we talked about this today, how we can, how data and how knowledge can enable an intelligent enterprise. And it's a process. So what people need to understand, and customers work with at SAP and they could go to the SAP Leonardo booth areas at the conferences and see as many testers as they wish. But essentially it's a foundation. It's an understanding of, how do I take where I am today from my own understanding of how I operate my business, and where do I need to go, what is my next gem process? Where do I need to be in five years to be that thought leader and how do I get there? So how do I take data that I know and data that I don't know? We have, I just ran into one of our customers... We run a program out of our team as well called the SAP Innovation Awards. It started off as the HANA Innovation Awards and now we cover all technologies and all topics for customer innovation. So SAP Leonardo, cloud platform solutions, SAP HANA solutions, data management solutions, these are all innovative offerings. We just announced all the winners, we have a actually ceremony tomorrow night where all the winners have been announced and they're gonna be receiving their trophies. We've been doing this for many years. What's interesting about that is all the innovative projects that are coming from the customer programs, projects, innovations. What are they doing? How are they co-innovating? Are they co-innovating with SAP? Are they doing smart farming? We have one winner that's actually doing smart farming, micro-crop planting to understand soil composition. And humidity and moisture composition is different even if you go one meter away on this, one meter, which is nothing. >> You're right. >> For the Americans listening, it's three feet. (everyone laughs) And that's pretty close. And they can actually combine different crop plantings based on soil conditions and compositions and this is all being monitored in the SAP HANA cloud. So this is really phenomenal. >> Yeah, that would be. >> And we love these kinds of stories. And what we're doing now, as you can imagine. You're probably gonna ask me, how do you connect the dots? Well it was pretty easy to connect the dots. We have the customers that are presented these great programs. They've created these great values that they're providing to their industry, right? And they're great wins and successes. And we're leveraging those customers in the community as thought leaders. And we're also doing sessions like that. I'd like to get them on theCUBE. Have them talk about some of the things >> That would be great. >> that they're doing. >> We would have fun. We love customer stories. >> I love it. I think it would be phenomenal. >> So, let's talk bout the dynamics of running a community program that featured around a product. And HANA, very straightforward, is about the tech, a lot of it was speeds and fees transitioned into solutions. >> Right. >> When you start out with something as ambitious as Leonardo framework, are the dynamics different, like what are, what is the community like? >> A little bit 'cause SAP HANA is the foundation. And we saw this today at the keynotes today. And Bill's keynote was phenomenal and we saw that how he was positioning this and it's all about the intelligent enterprise and SAP HANA as a foundation, it's fantastic. And we've been doing this for a lot of years. But what do we do to build upon that? When we established the foundational community for SAP HANA, people started coming in and wanting to understand everything about the HANA community. We did a couple fundamental things. Number one, we connected with the SAP HANA Academy. And I'll give a shout out to my friends at the academy, I love them to death, and we've been partnering with them for five plus years. The SAP HANA Academy is a YouTube site of thousands of videos on how to do anything. It could be data management, it could be data hub, it could be Vora which is the connected to Hadoop. It could be SAP HANA. It could be analytics. And there's thousands, literally thousands of videos on how to just about do anything that you want connected to the community. So the people and the SAP HANA Academy team has presented content, webinars on our community broadcasting at least for the last... This year they did one, they do like two or three every year for the last number of years. What we did with SAP Leonardo was, Leonardo can be thought of as a combination of the technologies. So we have, as you know, with machine learning, IoT, blockchain, right, analytics and a whole bunch of other things, design thinking methodologies that are in Leonardo, so what we did is we took a lot of that and created a series of webinars and content. We just finished something called the SAP Digital Transformation Series featuring SAP Leonardo in conjunction with ASUG, the America User Group, that's our co-conference sponsor here and we love them to death. And what we did was do the 14-part webinar series. We had thousands of people come onto these calls and each call covered, for example, Mala, who's our president, she did what is the overview of Leonardo? How do we do this? We covered analytics with Mike Flannagan. Maricel covered design thinking. And then we went from there. Then we covered the solutions themselves. What is IoT, what is blockchain, what is machine learning? How do you understand what these things do and how they impact your organization? Then we took it one step further. We went into the industry solutions. So the partners are developing industry solutions. The industry accelerates, we talked a little bit earlier, there's a press release that just came out on that, on some of the.. >> The Partner Medallion Initiative. >> The Premiere Medallion Initiative, right. My friend Mike is running, from the Leonardo team. And that is certifying partners for the specific solutions that they're building around the industry, the deliverables that they have around the SAP Leonardo, we feature that as well. So all of that content was in this series and we continue to build upon that. What we really want, though, now is we wanna do what we did this time last year which was, we want the customer stories. So we've done, I've told you, we've done a lot of webinars in the community. So a lot of content going to the members of the community from the experts that understand that content. Next step, second half of the year, is we want those customer stories out there. So those 80 or so webinars that I mentioned that we did with our customer Spotlights, we want those Spotlights now. So we'll focus those... Anybody watching, give me those Spotlights. We want those stories. We want the customers to really articulate their story, their challenges, their successes, their wins, what are they doing to the SAP technology that-- >> You're preaching to the choir about customer marketing persons so that there's no better value-- >> Isn't it great? >> Brand validation, than the voice of the customer. Speaking of brand validation, I heard this morning that Bill McDermott announced that you guys are now 17 on the top 100 global most valuable brands. >> Absolutely. >> He wants to be in the top 10. >> And we're proud of that. I'm part of that team. >> Up four. You're doing this with a tremendous amount of partners is what you mentioned, partners. We're in the NetApp booth. >> Correct. >> Talk to us about what SAP and NetApp are doing in the community to enable this amazing amount of education that you're doing. >> So that's a great find. I mean, SAP wouldn't be where it is today, and I've been with SAP for (chuckles) I don't wanna say the number of years but people watch me and they know I've been at SAP a long time. It's like you can't say Scott Feldman without SAP. So it's been kind of anchored in for a long time. It's sort of the blood, the blue blood runs in the DNA you know. It was just kind of fun. But some of the partners that we've worked with in the communities have taken it to another step. NetApp is one of those. And I love working with NetApp. They're a strategic technology provider and a fantastic global partner with SAP. I know you just heard from RJ who did an interview, we work a lot with him and his team as well, Roland and the rest of the team. And what NetApp has done is they've made another strategic investment with us in the communities, for the HANA community and the Leonardo community such that they're a name-sponsored partner. And what's really nice about that is we have a special spot and if you go to the SAPHANACommunity.com site, or if you're already a member, or the other one is, you can guess, SAPLeonardoCommunity.com, very similar, right? If you go to either one of those sites, you'll find that there's a spot for partners that are specific to that community, that have taken the next step to add additional value. NetApp is there, there's a page. And what we've done is we've created a page with all the NetApp content on, what is NetApp's contribution on SAP HANA and Leonardo? Where is the value proposition? Why NetApp? What are they doing with SAP? Where are the links that we can go for all the content that NetApp has provided to us to post in that community? And not only that, NetApp is also an outstanding member, upstanding member of the SAP HANA CL Council Community 'cause they also run SAP. And, in addition to that, NetApp is a strategic partner that provides webinar content for SAP, for the community. So, about once a quarter, there'll be a webinar that is sponsored by NetApp and now I'm bugging them a little bit to get the customers in front of the webinar so we can have these little-- >> There must be some NetApp-SAP Customer Spotlights just waiting to come into the surface, right? >> Oh, absolutely. And we're doing them in small snippets so what's really great about that, it's kinda like this discussion that we're having, these small chunks. 'Cause I think the new wave of doing things, >> Snackable content. >> And I could certainly tell you're from the generation that's just maybe a little bit younger, is that they don't have time to sit down and watch a webinar for one hour. But they'll take it in 20-minute doses. They'll just like, "Man, give me "all the 20-minute webinars you want." It's like, I'll just give me a chunk and I'll take it and boom. I really want that. So that's been a lot of fun. So NetApp's been a fantastic strategic partner and we'll continue to partner with them moving forward. >> So I'm hearing a lot of collaboration, a lot of participation, energy just radiating, I think off from the main stage-- >> Oh I don't like the community, just do the watch, uncles love it. >> From the main stage to what you're talking about, what with what you guys are doing and I love to hear that the customers are being recognized for their innovation. Not just-- >> They are, yeah. >> Transforming their businesses, new revenue streams, new business models, but leveraging their partners like SAP, like NetApp, to become the intelligent enterprise and change industries. >> Absolutely, Lisa. And they're becoming the thought leaders of their own industry. So if you want to become a leader or a thought leader in your own specific industry, join the SAP HANA Community, make the investments in SAP Leonardo, work with SAP, work with NetApp, and like Bill says, let's get it done. >> Let's get it done. Scott, thanks so much for stopping by and chatting with Keith and me this morning. >> Thank you for your time, it's been my pleasure. >> And enjoy the rest of the event. >> I look forward to it. >> All right. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend on theCUBE from the NetApp booth at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Thanks for watching. (funky music)

>>We're back at Supercomputing 22 in Dallas, winding down day four of this conference. I'm Paul Gillan, my co-host Dave Nicholson. We are talking, we've been talking super computing all week and you hear a lot about what's going on in the United States, what's going on in China, Japan. What we haven't talked a lot about is what's going on in Europe and did you know that two of the top five supercomputers in the world are actually from European countries? Well, our guest has a lot to do with that. Florian, bearish, I hope I pronounce that correctly. My German is, German is not. My strength is the operations director for price, ais, S B L. And let's start with that. What is price? >>So, hello and thank you for the invitation. I'm Flon and Price is a partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe. It's a non-profit association with the seat in Brussels in Belgium. And we have 24 members. These are representatives from different European countries dealing with high performance computing in at their place. And we, so far, we provided the resources for our European research communities. But this changed in the last year, this oral HPC joint undertaking who put a lot of funding in high performance computing and co-funded five PET scale and three preis scale systems. And two of the preis scale systems. You mentioned already, this is Lumi and Finland and Leonardo in Bologna in Italy were in the place for and three and four at the top 500 at least. >>So why is it important that Europe be in the top list of supercomputer makers? >>I think Europe needs to keep pace with the rest of the world. And simulation science is a key technology for the society. And we saw this very recently with a pandemic, with a covid. We were able to help the research communities to find very quickly vaccines and to understand how the virus spread around the world. And all this knowledge is important to serve the society. Or another example is climate change. Yeah. With these new systems, we will be able to predict more precise the changes in the future. So the more compute power you have, the better the smaller the grid and there is resolution you can choose and the lower the error will be for the future. So these are, I think with these systems, the big or challenges we face can be addressed. This is the climate change, energy, food supply, security. >>Who are your members? Do they come from businesses? Do they come from research, from government? All of the >>Above. Yeah. Our, our members are public organization, universities, research centers, compute sites as a data centers, but But public institutions. Yeah. And we provide this services for free via peer review process with excellence as the most important criteria to the research community for free. >>So 40 years ago when, when the idea of an eu, and maybe I'm getting the dates a little bit wrong, when it was just an idea and the idea of a common currency. Yes. Reducing friction between, between borders to create a trading zone. Yes. There was a lot of focus there. Fast forward to today, would you say that these efforts in supercomputing, would they be possible if there were not an EU super structure? >>No, I would say this would not be possible in this extent. I think when though, but though European initiatives are, are needed and the European Commission is supporting these initiatives very well. And before praise, for instance 2008, there were research centers and data centers operating high performance computing systems, but they were not talking to each other. So it was isolated praise created community of operation sites and it facilitated the exchange between them and also enabled to align investments and to, to get the most out of the available funding. And also at this time, and still today for one single country in Europe, it's very hard to provide all the different architectures needed for all the different kind of research communities and applications. If you want to, to offer always the latest technologies, though this is really hardly possible. So with this joint action and opening the resources for other research groups from other countries, you, we, we were able to, yeah, get access to the latest technology for different communities at any given time though. And >>So, so the fact that the two systems that you mentioned are physically located in Finland and in Italy, if you were to walk into one of those facilities and meet the people that are there, they're not just fins in Finland and Italians in Italy. Yeah. This is, this is very much a European effort. So this, this is true. So, so in this, in that sense, the geography is sort of abstracted. Yeah. And the issues of sovereignty that make might take place in in the private sector don't exist or are there, are there issues with, can any, what are the requirements for a researcher to have access to a system in Finland versus a system in Italy? If you've got a EU passport, Hmm. Are you good to go? >>I think you are good to go though. But EU passport, it's now it becomes complicated and political. It's, it's very much, if we talk about the recent systems, well first, let me start a praise. Praise was inclusive and there was no any constraints as even we had users from US, Australia, we wanted just to support excellence in science. And we did not look at the nationality of the organization, of the PI and and so on. There were quotas, but these quotas were very generously interpreted. So, and if so, now with our HPC joint undertaking, it's a question from what European funds, these systems were procured and if a country or being country are associated to this funding, the researchers also have access to these systems. And this addresses basically UK and and Switzerland, which are not in the European Union, but they were as created to the Horizon 2020 research framework. And though they could can access the systems now available, Lumi and Leono and the Petascale system as well. How this will develop in the future, I don't know. It depends to which research framework they will be associated or not. >>What are the outputs of your work at price? Are they reference designs? Is it actual semiconductor hardware? Is it the research? What do you produce? >>So the, the application we run or the simulation we run cover all different scientific domains. So it's, it's science, it's, but also we have industrial let projects with more application oriented targets. Aerodynamics for instance, for cars or planes or something like this. But also fundamental science like the physical elementary physics particles for instance or climate change, biology, drug design, protein costa, all these >>Things. Can businesses be involved in what you do? Can they purchase your, your research? Do they contribute to their, I'm sure, I'm sure there are many technology firms in Europe that would like to be involved. >>So this involving industry though our calls are open and is, if they want to do open r and d, they are invited to submit also proposals. They will be evaluated and if this is qualifying, they will get the access and they can do their jobs and simulations. It's a little bit more tricky if it's in production, if they use these resources for their business and do not publish the results. They are some, well, probably more sites who, who are able to deal with these requests. Some are more dominant than others, but this is on a smaller scale, definitely. Yeah. >>What does the future hold? Are you planning to, are there other countries who will be joining the effort, other institutions? Do you plan to expand your, your scope >>Well, or I think or HPC joint undertaking with 36 member states is quite, covers already even more than Europe. And yeah, clearly if, if there are other states interest interested to join that there is no limitation. Although the focus lies on European area and on union. >>When, when you interact with colleagues from North America, do you, do you feel that there is a sort of European flavor to supercomputing that is different or are we so globally entwined? No. >>So research is not national, it's not European, it's international. This is also clearly very clear and I can, so we have a longstanding collaboration with our US colleagues and also with Chap and South Africa and Canada. And when Covid hit the world, we were able within two weeks to establish regular seminars inviting US and European colleagues to talk to to other, to each other and exchange the results and find new collaboration and to boost the research activities. So, and I have other examples as well. So when we, we already did the joint calls US exceed and in Europe praise and it was a very interesting experience. So we received applications from different communities and we decided that we will review this on our side, on European, with European experts and US did it in US with their experts. And you can guess what the result was at the meeting when we compared our results, it was matching one by one. It was exactly the same. Recite >>That it, it's, it's refreshing to hear a story of global collaboration. Yeah. Where people are getting along and making meaningful progress. >>I have to mention you, I have to to point out, you did not mention China as a country you were collaborating with. Is that by, is that intentional? >>Well, with China, definitely we have less links and collaborations also. It's also existing. There, there was initiative to look at the development of the technologies and the group meet on a regular basis. And there, there also Chinese colleagues involved. It's on a lower level, >>Yes, but is is the con conversations are occurring. We're out of time. Florian be operations director of price, European Super Computing collaborative. Thank you so much for being with us. I'm always impressed when people come on the cube and submit to an interview in a language that is not their first language. Yeah, >>Absolutely. >>Brave to do that. Yeah. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. We'll be right back after this break from Supercomputing 22 in Dallas.

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante despite all the chatter about cloud repatriation and the exorbitant cost of cloud computing customer spending momentum continues to accelerate in the post-isolation economy if the pandemic was good for the cloud it seems that the benefits of cloud migration remain lasting in the late stages of covid and beyond and we believe this stickiness is going to continue for quite some time we expect i asked revenue for the big four hyperscalers to surpass 115 billion dollars in 2021 moreover the strength of aws specifically as well as microsoft azure remain notable such large organizations showing elevated spending momentum as shown in the etr survey results is perhaps unprecedented in the technology sector hello everyone and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we'll share some some fresh july survey data that indicates accelerating momentum for the largest cloud computing firms importantly not only is the momentum broad-based but it's also notable in key strategic sectors namely ai and database there seems to be no stopping the cloud momentum there's certainly plenty of buzz about the cloud tax so-called cloud tax but other than wildly assumptive valuation models and some pockets of anecdotal evidence you don't really see the supposed backlash impacting cloud momentum our forecast calls for the big four hyperscalers aws azure alibaba and gcp to surpass 115 billion as we said in is revenue this year the latest etr survey results show that aws lambda has retaken the lead among all major cloud services tracked in the data set as measured in spending momentum this is the service with the most elevated scores azure overall azure functions vmware cloud on aws and aws overall also demonstrate very highly elevated performance all above that of gcp now impressively aws momentum in the all-important fortune 500 where it has always showed strength is also accelerating one concern in the most recent survey data is that the on-prem clouds and so-called hybrid platforms which we had previously reported as showing an upward spending trajectory seem to have cooled off a bit but the data is mixed and it's a little bit too early to draw firm conclusions nonetheless while hyperscalers are holding steady the spending data appears to be somewhat tepid for the on-prem players you know particularly for their cloud we'll study that further after etr drops its full results on july 23rd now turning our attention back to aws the aws cloud is showing strength across its entire portfolio and we're going to show you that shortly in particular we see notable strength relative to others in analytics ai and the all-important database category aurora and redshift are particularly strong but several other aws database services are showing elevated spending velocity which we'll quantify in a moment all that said snowflake continues to lead all database suppliers in spending momentum by a wide margin which again will quantify in this episode but before we dig into the survey let's take a look at our latest projections for the big four hyperscalers in is as you know we track quarterly revenues for the hyperscalers remember aws and alibaba ias data is pretty clean and reported in their respective earnings reports azure and gcp we have to extrapolate and strip out all a lot of the the apps and other certain revenue to make an apples-to-apples comparison with aws and alibaba and as you can see we have the 2021 market exceeding 115 billion dollars worldwide that's a torrid 35 growth rate on top of 41 in 2020 relative to 2019. aggressive yes but the data continues to point us in this direction until we see some clearer headwinds for the cloud players this is the call we're making aws is perhaps losing a sharepoint or so but it's also is so large that its annual incremental revenue is comparable to alibaba's and google's respective cloud business in total is business in total the big three u.s cloud companies all report at the end of july while alibaba is mid mid-august so we'll update these figures at that time okay let's move on and dig into the survey data we don't have the data yet on alibaba and we're limited as to what we can share until etr drops its research update on on the 23rd but here's a look at the net score timeline in the fortune 500 specifically so we filter the fortune 500 for cloud computing you got azure and the yellow aws and the black and gcp in blue so two points here stand out first is that aws and microsoft are converging and remember the customers who respond to the survey they probably include a fair amount of application software spending in their cloud answers so it favors microsoft in that respect and gcp second point is showing notable deceleration relative to the two leaders and the green call out is because this cut is from an aws point of view so in other words gcp declines are a positive for aws so that's how it should be interpreted now let's take a moment to better understand the idea of net score this is one of the fundamental metrics of the etr methodology here's the data for aws so we use that as a as a reference point net score is calculated by asking customers if they're adding a platform new that's the lime green bar that you see here in the current survey they're asking are you spending six percent or more in the second half relative to the first half of the year that's the forest green they're also asking is spending flat that's the gray or are you spending less that's the pink or are you replacing the platform i.e repatriating so not much spending going on in replacements now in fairness one percent of aws is half a billion dollars so i can see where some folks would get excited about that but in the grand scheme of things it's a sliver so again we don't see repatriation in the numbers okay back to net score subtract the reds from the greens and you get net score which in the case of aws is 61 now just for reference my personal subjective elevated net score level is 40 so anything above that is really impressive based on my experience and to have a company of this size be so elevated is meaningful same for microsoft by the way which is consistently well above the 50 mark in net score in the etr surveys so that's you can think about it that's even more impressive perhaps than aws because it's triple the revenue okay let's stay with aws and take a look at the portfolio and the strength across the board this chart shows net score for the past three surveys serverless is on fire by the way not just aws but azure and gcp functions as well but look at the aws portfolio every category is well above the 40 percent elevated red line the only exception is chime and even chime is showing an uptick and chime is meh if you've ever used chime every other category is well above 50 percent next net score very very strong for aws now as we've frequently reported ai is one of the four biggest focus areas from a spending standpoint along with cloud containers and rpa so it stands to reason that the company with the best ai and ml and the greatest momentum in that space has an advantage because ai is being embedded into apps data processes machines everywhere this chart compares the ai players on two dimensions net score on the vertical axis and market share or presence in the data set on the horizontal axis for companies with more than 15 citations in the survey aws has the highest net score and what's notable is the presence on the horizontal axis databricks is a company where high on also shows elevated scores above both google and microsoft who are showing strength in their own right and then you can see data iq data robot anaconda and salesforce with einstein all above that 40 percent mark and then below you can see the position of sap with leonardo ibm watson and oracle which is well below the 40 line all right let's look at at the all-important database category for a moment and we'll first take a look at the aws database portfolio this chart shows the database services in aws's arsenal and breaks down the net score components with the total net score superimposed on top of the bars point one is aurora is highly elevated with a net score above 70 percent that's due to heavy new adoptions redshift is also very strong as are virtually all aws database offerings with the exception of neptune which is the graph database rds dynamodb elastic document db time stream and quantum ledger database all show momentum above that all important 40 line so while a lot of people criticize the fragmentation of the aws data portfolio and their right tool for the right job approach the spending spending metrics tell a story and that that the strategy is working now let's take a look at the microsoft database portfolio there's a story here similar similar to that of aws azure sql and cosmos db microsoft's nosql distributed database are both very highly elevated as are azure database for mysql and mariadb azure cash for redis and azure for cassandra also microsoft is giving look at microsoft's giving customers a lot of options which is kind of interesting you know we've often said that oracle's strategy because we think about oracle they're building the oracle database cloud we've said oracle strategy should be to not just be the cloud for oracle databases but be the cloud for all databases i mean oracle's got a lot of specialty capability there but it looks like microsoft is beating oracle to that punch not that oracle is necessarily going there but we think it should to expand the appeal of its cloud okay last data chart that we'll show and then and then this one looks at database disruption the chart shows how the cloud database companies are doing in ibm oracle teradata in cloudera accounts the bars show the net score granularity as we described earlier and the etr callouts are interesting so first remember this is an aws this is in an aws context so with 47 responses etr rightly indicates that aws is very well positioned in these accounts with the 68 net score but look at snowflake it has an 81 percent net score which is just incredible and you can see google database is also very strong and the high 50 percent range while microsoft even though it's above the 40 percent mark is noticeably lower than the others as is mongodb with presumably atlas which is surprisingly low frankly but back to snowflake so the etr callout stresses that snowflake doesn't have a strong as strong a presence in the legacy database vendor accounts yet now i'm not sure i would put cloudair in the legacy database category but okay whatever cloudera they're positioning cdp is a hybrid platform as are all the on-prem players with their respective products and platforms but it's going to be interesting to see because snowflake has flat out said it's not straddling the cloud and on-prem rather it's all in on cloud but there is a big opportunity to connect on-prem to the cloud and across clouds which snowflake is pursuing that that ladder the cross-cloud the multi-cloud and snowflake is betting on incremental use cases that involve data sharing and federated governance while traditional players they're protecting their turf at the same time trying to compete in cloud native and of course across cloud i think there's room for both but clearly as we've shown cloud has the spending velocity and a tailwind at its back and aws along with microsoft seem to be getting stronger especially in the all-important categories related to machine intelligence ai and database now to be an essential infrastructure technology player in the data era it would seem obvious that you have to have database and or data management intellectual property in your portfolio or you're going to be less valuable to customers and investors okay we're going to leave it there for today remember these episodes they're all available as podcasts wherever you listen all you do is search breaking analysis podcast and please subscribe to the series check out etr's website at etr dot plus plus etr plus we also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com you can get in touch with me david.velante at siliconangle.com you can dm me at d vallante or you can hit hit me up on our linkedin post this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr have a great week stay safe be well and we'll see you next time you

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Moore's Law is dead, right? Think again. Massive improvements in processing power combined with data and AI will completely change the way we think about designing hardware, writing software and applying technology to businesses. Every industry will be disrupted. You hear that all the time. Well, it's absolutely true and we're going to explain why and what it all means. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we're going to unveil some new data that suggests we're entering a new era of innovation that will be powered by cheap processing capabilities that AI will exploit. We'll also tell you where the new bottlenecks will emerge and what this means for system architectures and industry transformations in the coming decade. Moore's Law is dead, you say? We must have heard that hundreds, if not, thousands of times in the past decade. EE Times has written about it, MIT Technology Review, CNET, and even industry associations that have lived by Moore's Law. But our friend Patrick Moorhead got it right when he said, "Moore's Law, by the strictest definition of doubling chip densities every two years, isn't happening anymore." And you know what, that's true. He's absolutely correct. And he couched that statement by saying by the strict definition. And he did that for a reason, because he's smart enough to know that the chip industry are masters at doing work arounds. Here's proof that the death of Moore's Law by its strictest definition is largely irrelevant. My colleague, David Foyer and I were hard at work this week and here's the result. The fact is that the historical outcome of Moore's Law is actually accelerating and in quite dramatically. This graphic digs into the progression of Apple's SoC, system on chip developments from the A9 and culminating with the A14, 15 nanometer bionic system on a chip. The vertical axis shows operations per second and the horizontal axis shows time for three processor types. The CPU which we measure here in terahertz, that's the blue line which you can't even hardly see, the GPU which is the orange that's measured in trillions of floating point operations per second and then the NPU, the neural processing unit and that's measured in trillions of operations per second which is that exploding gray area. Now, historically, we always rushed out to buy the latest and greatest PC, because the newer models had faster cycles or more gigahertz. Moore's Law would double that performance every 24 months. Now that equates to about 40% annually. CPU performance is now moderated. That growth is now down to roughly 30% annual improvements. So technically speaking, Moore's Law as we know it was dead. But combined, if you look at the improvements in Apple's SoC since 2015, they've been on a pace that's higher than 118% annually. And it's even higher than that, because the actual figure for these three processor types we're not even counting the impact of DSPs and accelerator components of Apple system on a chip. It would push this even higher. Apple's A14 which is shown in the right hand side here is quite amazing. It's got a 64 bit architecture, it's got many, many cores. It's got a number of alternative processor types. But the important thing is what you can do with all this processing power. In an iPhone, the types of AI that we show here that continue to evolve, facial recognition, speech, natural language processing, rendering videos, helping the hearing impaired and eventually bringing augmented reality to the palm of your hand. It's quite incredible. So what does this mean for other parts of the IT stack? Well, we recently reported Satya Nadella's epic quote that "We've now reached peak centralization." So this graphic paints a picture that was quite telling. We just shared the processing powers exploding. The costs consequently are dropping like a rock. Apple's A14 cost the company approximately 50 bucks per chip. Arm at its v9 announcement said that it will have chips that can go into refrigerators. These chips are going to optimize energy usage and save 10% annually on your power consumption. They said, this chip will cost a buck, a dollar to shave 10% of your refrigerator electricity bill. It's just astounding. But look at where the expensive bottlenecks are, it's networks and it's storage. So what does this mean? Well, it means the processing is going to get pushed to the edge, i.e., wherever the data is born. Storage and networking are going to become increasingly distributed and decentralized. Now with custom silicon and all that processing power placed throughout the system, an AI is going to be embedded into software, into hardware and it's going to optimize a workloads for latency, performance, bandwidth, and security. And remember, most of that data, 99% is going to stay at the edge. And we love to use Tesla as an example. The vast majority of data that a Tesla car creates is never going to go back to the cloud. Most of it doesn't even get persisted. I think Tesla saves like five minutes of data. But some data will connect occasionally back to the cloud to train AI models and we're going to come back to that. But this picture says if you're a hardware company, you'd better start thinking about how to take advantage of that blue line that's exploding, Cisco. Cisco is already designing its own chips. But Dell, HPE, who kind of does maybe used to do a lot of its own custom silicon, but Pure Storage, NetApp, I mean, the list goes on and on and on either you're going to get start designing custom silicon or you're going to get disrupted in our view. AWS, Google and Microsoft are all doing it for a reason as is IBM and to Sarbjeet Johal said recently this is not your grandfather's semiconductor business. And if you're a software engineer, you're going to be writing applications that take advantage of all the data being collected and bringing to bear this processing power that we're talking about to create new capabilities like we've never seen it before. So let's get into that a little bit and dig into AI. You can think of AI as the superset. Just as an aside, interestingly in his book, "Seeing Digital", author David Moschella says, there's nothing artificial about this. He uses the term machine intelligence, instead of artificial intelligence and says that there's nothing artificial about machine intelligence just like there's nothing artificial about the strength of a tractor. It's a nuance, but it's kind of interesting, nonetheless, words matter. We hear a lot about machine learning and deep learning and think of them as subsets of AI. Machine learning applies algorithms and code to data to get "smarter", make better models, for example, that can lead to augmented intelligence and help humans make better decisions. These models improve as they get more data and are iterated over time. Now deep learning is a more advanced type of machine learning. It uses more complex math. But the point that we want to make here is that today much of the activity in AI is around building and training models. And this is mostly happening in the cloud. But we think AI inference will bring the most exciting innovations in the coming years. Inference is the deployment of that model that we were just talking about, taking real time data from sensors, processing that data locally and then applying that training that has been developed in the cloud and making micro adjustments in real time. So let's take an example. Again, we love Tesla examples. Think about an algorithm that optimizes the performance and safety of a car on a turn, the model take data on friction, road condition, angles of the tires, the tire wear, the tire pressure, all this data, and it keeps testing and iterating, testing and iterating, testing iterating that model until it's ready to be deployed. And then the intelligence, all this intelligence goes into an inference engine which is a chip that goes into a car and gets data from sensors and makes these micro adjustments in real time on steering and braking and the like. Now, as you said before, Tesla persist the data for very short time, because there's so much of it. It just can't push it back to the cloud. But it can now ever selectively store certain data if it needs to, and then send back that data to the cloud to further train them all. Let's say for instance, an animal runs into the road during slick conditions, Tesla wants to grab that data, because they notice that there's a lot of accidents in New England in certain months. And maybe Tesla takes that snapshot and sends it back to the cloud and combines it with other data and maybe other parts of the country or other regions of New England and it perfects that model further to improve safety. This is just one example of thousands and thousands that are going to further develop in the coming decade. I want to talk about how we see this evolving over time. Inference is where we think the value is. That's where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, based on the previous example. Now this conceptual chart shows the percent of spend over time on modeling versus inference. And you can see some of the applications that get attention today and how these applications will mature over time as inference becomes more and more mainstream, the opportunities for AI inference at the edge and in IOT are enormous. And we think that over time, 95% of that spending is going to go to inference where it's probably only 5% today. Now today's modeling workloads are pretty prevalent and things like fraud, adtech, weather, pricing, recommendation engines, and those kinds of things, and now those will keep getting better and better and better over time. Now in the middle here, we show the industries which are all going to be transformed by these trends. Now, one of the point that Moschella had made in his book, he kind of explains why historically vertically industries are pretty stovepiped, they have their own stack, sales and marketing and engineering and supply chains, et cetera, and experts within those industries tend to stay within those industries and they're largely insulated from disruption from other industries, maybe unless they were part of a supply chain. But today, you see all kinds of cross industry activity. Amazon entering grocery, entering media. Apple in finance and potentially getting into EV. Tesla, eyeing insurance. There are many, many, many examples of tech giants who are crossing traditional industry boundaries. And the reason is because of data. They have the data. And they're applying machine intelligence to that data and improving. Auto manufacturers, for example, over time they're going to have better data than insurance companies. DeFi, decentralized finance platforms going to use the blockchain and they're continuing to improve. Blockchain today is not great performance, it's very overhead intensive all that encryption. But as they take advantage of this new processing power and better software and AI, it could very well disrupt traditional payment systems. And again, so many examples here. But what I want to do now is dig into enterprise AI a bit. And just a quick reminder, we showed this last week in our Armv9 post. This is data from ETR. The vertical axis is net score. That's a measure of spending momentum. The horizontal axis is market share or pervasiveness in the dataset. The red line at 40% is like a subjective anchor that we use. Anything above 40% we think is really good. Machine learning and AI is the number one area of spending velocity and has been for awhile. RPA is right there. Very frankly, it's an adjacency to AI and you could even argue. So it's cloud where all the ML action is taking place today. But that will change, we think, as we just described, because data's going to get pushed to the edge. And this chart will show you some of the vendors in that space. These are the companies that CIOs and IT buyers associate with their AI and machine learning spend. So it's the same XY graph, spending velocity by market share on the horizontal axis. Microsoft, AWS, Google, of course, the big cloud guys they dominate AI and machine learning. Facebook's not on here. Facebook's got great AI as well, but it's not enterprise tech spending. These cloud companies they have the tooling, they have the data, they have the scale and as we said, lots of modeling is going on today, but this is going to increasingly be pushed into remote AI inference engines that will have massive processing capabilities collectively. So we're moving away from that peak centralization as Satya Nadella described. You see Databricks on here. They're seen as an AI leader. SparkCognition, they're off the charts, literally, in the upper left. They have extremely high net score albeit with a small sample. They apply machine learning to massive data sets. DataRobot does automated AI. They're super high in the y-axis. Dataiku, they help create machine learning based apps. C3.ai, you're hearing a lot more about them. Tom Siebel's involved in that company. It's an enterprise AI firm, hear a lot of ads now doing AI and responsible way really kind of enterprise AI that's sort of always been IBM. IBM Watson's calling card. There's SAP with Leonardo. Salesforce with Einstein. Again, IBM Watson is right there just at the 40% line. You see Oracle is there as well. They're embedding automated and tele or machine intelligence with their self-driving database they call it that sort of machine intelligence in the database. You see Adobe there. So a lot of typical enterprise company names. And the point is that these software companies they're all embedding AI into their offerings. So if you're an incumbent company and you're trying not to get disrupted, the good news is you can buy AI from these software companies. You don't have to build it. You don't have to be an expert at AI. The hard part is going to be how and where to apply AI. And the simplest answer there is follow the data. There's so much more to the story, but we just have to leave it there for now and I want to summarize. We have been pounding the table that the post x86 era is here. It's a function of volume. Arm volumes are a way for volumes are 10X those of x86. Pat Gelsinger understands this. That's why he made that big announcement. He's trying to transform the company. The importance of volume in terms of lowering the cost of semiconductors it can't be understated. And today, we've quantified something that we haven't really seen much of and really haven't seen before. And that's that the actual performance improvements that we're seeing in processing today are far outstripping anything we've seen before, forget Moore's Law being dead that's irrelevant. The original finding is being blown away this decade and who knows with quantum computing what the future holds. This is a fundamental enabler of AI applications. And this is most often the case the innovation is coming from the consumer use cases first. Apple continues to lead the way. And Apple's integrated hardware and software model we think increasingly is going to move into the enterprise mindset. Clearly the cloud vendors are moving in this direction, building their own custom silicon and doing really that deep integration. You see this with Oracle who kind of really a good example of the iPhone for the enterprise, if you will. It just makes sense that optimizing hardware and software together is going to gain momentum, because there's so much opportunity for customization in chips as we discussed last week with Arm's announcement, especially with the diversity of edge use cases. And it's the direction that Pat Gelsinger is taking Intel trying to provide more flexibility. One aside, Pat Gelsinger he may face massive challenges that we laid out a couple of posts ago with our Intel breaking analysis, but he is right on in our view that semiconductor demand is increasing. There's no end in sight. We don't think we're going to see these ebbs and flows as we've seen in the past that these boom and bust cycles for semiconductor. We just think that prices are coming down. The market's elastic and the market is absolutely exploding with huge demand for fab capacity. Now, if you're an enterprise, you should not stress about and trying to invent AI, rather you should put your focus on understanding what data gives you competitive advantage and how to apply machine intelligence and AI to win. You're going to be buying, not building AI and you're going to be applying it. Now data as John Furrier has said in the past is becoming the new development kit. He said that 10 years ago and he seems right. Finally, if you're an enterprise hardware player, you're going to be designing your own chips and writing more software to exploit AI. You'll be embedding custom silicon in AI throughout your product portfolio and storage and networking and you'll be increasingly bringing compute to the data. And that data will mostly stay where it's created. Again, systems and storage and networking stacks they're all being completely re-imagined. If you're a software developer, you now have processing capabilities in the palm of your hand that are incredible. And you're going to rewriting new applications to take advantage of this and use AI to change the world, literally. You'll have to figure out how to get access to the most relevant data. You have to figure out how to secure your platforms and innovate. And if you're a services company, your opportunity is to help customers that are trying not to get disrupted are many. You have the deep industry expertise and horizontal technology chops to help customers survive and thrive. Privacy? AI for good? Yeah well, that's a whole another topic. I think for now, we have to get a better understanding of how far AI can go before we determine how far it should go. Look, protecting our personal data and privacy should definitely be something that we're concerned about and we should protect. But generally, I'd rather not stifle innovation at this point. I'd be interested in what you think about that. Okay. That's it for today. Thanks to David Foyer, who helped me with this segment again and did a lot of the charts and the data behind this. He's done some great work there. Remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen, just search breaking it analysis podcast and please subscribe to the series. We'd appreciate that. Check out ETR's website at ETR.plus. We also publish a full report with more detail every week on Wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, so check that out. You can get in touch with me. I'm dave.vellante@siliconangle.com. You can DM me on Twitter @dvellante or comment on our LinkedIn posts. I always appreciate that. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. (bright music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of SUSECON Digital brought to you by SUSE. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of SUSECON Digital '20. I'm Stu Miniman and happy to welcome to the program one of SUSE's partners, we have Marc O'Regan, he is the CTO of EMEA for Dell Technologies. Marc, it is great to see you, we all wish, I know when I talked to Melissa Di Donato and the team, everybody was really looking forward to coming to Ireland, but at least we're talking to you in Ireland so thanks so much for joining us. >> Stu, thanks very much for having me. I'm delighted to be here. You know, really looking forward to getting you guys here, unfortunately it wasn't a beaver, once we're all safe and well, great to talk. >> Yeah, absolutely, that's the important thing. Everybody is safe, we've had theCUBE a couple of times in Dublin. I'd actually, you know, circled this one on my calendar 'cause I wanted to get back the Emerald Isle but, Marc, let's talk first, you know, the Dell and SUSE relationship you know, disclaimer, you know, I've got a little bit of background on this. You know, I was the product manager for Linux at a company known as EMC back before Dell bought them, many moons ago, so I know that, you know, Dell and the Dell EMC relationship with SUSE go back a couple of decades, but, you know, bring us into, you know, what your teams are working together and we'll go from there. >> Yeah, sure, Stu, so, quite correct, nearly a two decade long relationship with SUSE and one that we hold very dear to our heart. I think what both organizations have in common is their thirst and will to innovate and we've been doing that with SUSE for 16, 17 years, right back to, you know, SUSE Enterprise Linux sitting on, you know, PowerEdge architecture way, way back in the day into you know, some of the developments and collaborations that we, that we worked through with the SUSE teams. I remember back 2013, 2014 doing a pretty cool program with our then Fluid Cache technology. So, when you look at, you know, OLTP kind of environments, what you want to kind of get away from is the, you know, the read-write, commits and latency that are inherent in those types of environments. So, as you start to build and get more users hitting the, hitting the ecosystem, you need to be able to respond and SUSE has been absolutely, you know, instrumental to helping us build an architecture then with our Fluid Cache technology back in the day, and the SUSE technology sitting around and under that and then of course, in more recent times, really extending that innovation aspiration, I guess, has been absolutely a pleasure to, to watch and to be involved with, see it mature so some of the cool platforms that we're developing with SUSE together it's a, it's pretty neat so I'm, you know, one of those being-- >> So, Marc, yeah, well, you know, bring us up to speed, you know, right in the early days, it was, you know, Linux on the SUSE side, it was, you know, servers and storage from the Dell side, you know, today it's, you know, microservice architectures, cloud native solutions. So, you know, bring us up to speed as to some of the important technologies and obviously, you know, both companies have matured and grown and have a much broader portfolio other than they would have years ago. >> Yeah, for sure, absolutely. So, I mean, what's exciting is when you look at some of the architectures that we are building together, we're building reference architectures. So we're taking this work that we're doing together and we're building edge architectures that are suitable for small, medium, and you know, and large environments. And the common thread that pulls those three architectures together is that they are all enterprise grade architectures. And the architectures are used as frameworks. We don't always expect our customers to use them, you know, by the letter of the law, but they are a framework and, by which they can look to roll out scalable storage solutions. For example, like the Ceph, the SUSE Enterprise Storage solution that we collaborate with and have built such a reference architecture for. So this is, you know, it's built on Ceph architecture under the hood, but, you know, both ourselves and SUSE have brought a level of innovation, you know, into an arena, where you need cost, and you need low latency, and you need those types of things that we spoke about, I guess a moment ago, and into, you know, this new cloud native ecosystem that you just spoke to a few moments ago. So on the cloud native side, we're also heavily collaborating, and near co-engineering with SUSE on their CaaS technologies. So here it's really interesting to look at organizations like SAP and what we're doing with data hub and SAP, it's all part of the intelligent enterprise for SAP. This is where SUSE and Dell Tech together really get, you know, into looking at how we can extract information out of data, different data repositories. You know, you may have Oracle you may have, you know, you may have HDFS, you may have Excel and you're trying to extract data and information from that data, from those different siloed environments and the CaaS technology brings its, you know, its micro, capability to the forum in that regard, our hardware architecture is the perfect fit to, to bring that scalar platform, cloud native platform into the ecosystem. >> So, you know, Marc, you've got the CTO hat on for the European theater there. When we, we've been talking to SUSE, when they talk about their innovation, obviously, the community and open-source is a big piece of what they're doing. You were just walking through some of the cloud native pieces, give us what you're seeing when it comes to, you know, how is Dell helping drive innovation, you know, and how does that connects with what you're doing with partners like SUSE. >> Yeah, well, you know, innovation is massively, massively important. So there's a number of different factors that, you know, make up a very good innovation framework or a good innovation program. And at Dell Tech we happen to have what we believe to be an extraordinarily good innovation framework. And we have a lot of R&D budget assigned to helping innovate and we get the chance to go out and work with SUSE and other partners as well. What SUSE and Dell Tech do really, really well together is bring other partners and other technologies into the mix. And, you know, this allows us to innovate, co-innovate together as part of that framework that I just mentioned. So on the Dell Tech framework, we'll obviously, you know, take technologies, you know, we'll take them, perhaps into the office of the CTO, look at new, you know, emerging tech and look at, you know, more traditional tech, for example, and we will blend those together. And, you know, as part of the process and the innovation process, we generally take a view on some of the partners that we actually want to get involved in that process. And SUSE is very much one of those partners, as a matter of fact, right now, we're doing a couple of things with SUSE, one in the labs in Walldorf in Germany, where we're looking at high availability solution that we're trying to develop and optimize there right now at this point in time. And another good example that I can think of at the moment is looking at how customers are migrating off, you know, older, more traditional platforms, they need to look at the cloud native world, they need look at how they can, platform for success in this cloud native world. And we're looking at how we can get smarter, I guess about migrating them from that, you know, extraordinarily stealthy world that they had been in the past but that needs to get from that stealthy world into an even stealthier scalable world that is, that is cloud native world. >> Yeah, Marc, you talk about customers going through these transformations, I wonder if you can help connect the dots for us as to how these types of solutions fit into customers overall cloud strategies. So, you know, obviously, you know, Dell has broad portfolio, a lot of different pieces that are on the cloud, you know, I know there's a long partnership between Dell and SUSE and like SAP solutions, we've been looking at how those modernize so, you know, where does cloud fit in and we'd love any of kind of the European insights that you can give on that overall cloud discussion. >> Yeah, sure, so, again, ourselves and SUSE go back on, in history, you know, on the cloud platforming side, I mean, we've collaborated on developing a cloud platform in the past as well. So we had an OpenStack platform that we both collaborated on and you know, it was very successful for both of us. Where I'm seeing a lot of the requirement in this multicloud world that we're kind of living in right now, is the ability to be able to build a performant scalable platform that is going to be able to respond in the cloud native ecosystem. And that is going to be able to traverse workloads from on-prem to off-prem and from different cloud platforms with different underlying dependencies there. And that's really the whole aspiration, I guess, of this open cloud ecosystem. How do we get workloads to traverse across, across those types of domain. And the other is bringing the kind of, you know, performance that's expected out of these new workloads that are starting to emerge in the cloud native spaces. And as we start to look to data and extract information from data, we are also looking to do so in an extraordinary, accurate and in an extraordinary performant way and having the right kind of architecture underneath that is absolutely, absolutely essential. So I mentioned, you know, SAP's data hub a little earlier on, that's a really, really good example. As is, a matter of fact, SAP's Leonardo framework so, you know, my background is HPC, right? So, I will always look to how we can possibly architect to get the compute engineering as close to the data sources as possible as we can. And that means having to, in some way get out of these monolithic stacks that we've been used to over the last, you know, for a number of decades into a more horizontally scaled out kind of architecture. That means landing the right architecture into those environments, being able to respond, you know, in a meaningful way that's going to ultimately drive value to users and for the users and for the providers of the services, who are building these type of, these type of ecosystems. Again, you know, as I said, you know, data hub, and some of the work that Dell Tech are doing with the CaaS platform is absolutely, you know, perfectly positioned to address those types of, those types of problems and those types of challenges. On the other side, as I mentioned, the, you know, the story solutions that we're doing with SUSE are really taking off as well. So I was involved in a number of years ago in the Ceph program on the Irish government network and, so these would have been very big. And one of the earliest to be honest, Ceph firm I was involved with probably around five, six years ago, perhaps. And the overlying architecture, funnily enough, was, as you probably have guessed by now was SUSE Enterprise. And here we are today building, you know, entire, entire Ceph scale out storage solutions with SUSE. So yeah, what we're seeing is an open ecosystem, a scalable ecosystem and a performant ecosystem that needs to be able to respond and that's what the partnership with SUSE is actually bringing. >> So, Marc, I guess the last thing I'd like to ask you is, you know, we're all dealing with the, the ripple effects of what are happening with the COVID-19 global pandemic. >> Sure. >> You know, I know I've seen online lots that Dell is doing, I'm wondering what is the impact that, you know, you're seeing and anything specific regarding, you know, how this impact partnerships and how, you know, tech communities come together in these challenging times? >> Yeah, that's a great question to end on, Stu. And I think it's times like we're living through at the moment when we see, you know, the real potential of, I guess of human and machine collaboration when you think of the industry we're in, when you think of some of the problems that we're trying to solve. Here we are, a global pandemic, we have a problem that's distributed by its very nature, and I'm trying to find patterns, I guess, I'm trying to model, you know, for the treatment of, you know, COVID-19 is something that's very, very close to our heart. So we're doing a lot on the technology side where we're looking to, as I said, model for treatment but also use distributed analytical architectures to collaborate with partners in order to be able to, you know, contribute to the effort of finding treatments for COVID-19. On the commercial side of things then Dell Tech are doing a huge amount so, you know, we're, for instance, we're designing a, we're designing a financial model or framework, if you will, where our customers and our partners have, you know, can take our infrastructure and our partners infrastructure and those collaborations that we spoke about today. And they can land them into their ecosystem with pretty much zero percent finance. And so it's kind of a, it's an opportunity where, you know, we're taking the technology and we're taking the capability to land that technology into these ecosystems at a very, very low cost, but also give organizations the breadth and opportunity to consume those technologies without having to worry about, you know, ultimately paying up front they can start to look at the financial model that will suit them and that will, that will, that will, hopefully, accelerate their time, their time to market, trying to solve some of these problem that we've been speaking about. >> Well, Marc, thank you so much for the updates. Definitely good to hear about the technology pieces as well as some of these impacts that will have a more global impact. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Stu, my pleasure. Thank you, take care and stay safe. >> Thanks, same to you. All right, I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more covered from SUSECON Digital '20. Thank you, for always, for watching theCUBE. 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(upbeat music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We are joined by Chhandomay Mandal, he is the Director of Solutions Marketing for Dell EMC. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Happy to be here. >> Direct from Boston. This is a Boston panel, I love it. >> Yes, and we were on the same flight yesterday. >> (laughing) There you go! >> Ah, so half of Hopkinton. >> Yeah. So, we're here at Dell Technologies World, but you're here to talk to us about SAP. Explain to our viewers a little bit about the connection between your companies. >> Sure, so SAP connects a lot of our customers. They are running their ERP, CRM, digital procurement, HR systems, and many other workloads on SAP, and we, Dell Technologies, as a company, have a portfolio of solutions to support SAP workloads. So, that's the big connection. SAP and Dell EMC, we are big partners, and we work hand in hand as well. >> Talk a little bit about what SAP customers are doing. You know, everybody knows the stories of SAP multi-year implementation, very complicated, although driving business value, but today people want to be more agile, cloud, Hana, who's been around now for quite a number of years. SAP obviously pushing hard for a number of reasons. What are you seeing in the customer base? >> Yeah, SAP customers are in a journey. As you mentioned, the SAP landscapes implementations. In fact, in 2016, greater than fifty percent of SAP landscapes were running on Oracle. SAP has come up with the in-memory database, SAP Hana, and there is a mandate that by 2025, the customers need to be running on SAP Hana to run any SAP workload. So, customers need to go through that transition, and as the data explodes from IoT, Big Data, BlockChain, our next gen intelligent applications, they are driving a lot of analytics, and SAP has come up with a platform called SAP Leonardo for mission learning. So, customers are trying to consolidate their old SAP landscapes on an agile, modern infrastructure. They are planning to migrate all the older databases to SAP Hana. At the same time, they are looking into deploying SAP Leonardo to take advantage of IoT, AI, BlockChain, all those things. >> So SAP is dangling the carrot. With Hana, it's in memory, performance, efficiency. With Leonardo, it's the promise of machine intelligence, but there are challenges in migrating off of Oracle. How are customers dealing with that? Are you guys in a position to help with the partnership with SAP? Can you talk about that a little bit? >> Yes, SAP implementations, as you know, is fairly complex, takes many months, years, and customers have been running SAP for a long time, so their challenge are, "How do we keep our businesses running while we need to transition from what we have to these SAP Hana based deployments." They are looking into modern infrastructures that will be able to consolidate all of this around their applications with the same SLS, and at the same time when they migrate one application to the next on SAP Hana, that platform should be able to add up and deliver all the SLS. So, refactoring what they have into this SAP Hana is really big for all of our customers, and how to have a better performing platform, how to deliver the agility's simplification, as well as lower the TCO. These are the projects that CIO's are running for our customers. >> So, as we know, simpler is always better. Can you talk about some of the ROI? What are companies actually seeing in terms of these benefits? >> So, let's take specific examples. Dell EMC PowerMax is the backbone of running SAP applications for a long time. Our previous generations in terms of VMAX, VMAX All Flash, now with our PowerMax, it has the highest skill ability of SLP Hana. It can actually run 162 SAP Hana nodes on a single array, but that's not the end game. The thing is, it can consolidate SAP, traditional SAP workloads, SAP Hana, as well as other mixed workloads while delivering the same performance masking the SLS, with it's built-in mission learning capabilities. Now, what does that translate to? We have several customers seeing benefits out of this. For example, a big sports equipment manufacturer, when they move to this platform, there are software quality assurance process. It used to take like ten days in all the infrastructure. Now they could run on this new platform in two days. That's literally eighty percent improvement, because of the higher performance, the more consolidation that they were able to access. So that's one example just from the performance perspective, but if you take a consolidation simpler to run, there are other examples I can actually walk you through. >> So, I want to double click on that, because every storage company wants to partner with SAP, target that stuff, because Oracle's not that friendly these days. They have their own hardware, right? They're trying to elbow you out with Exadata. So, talk a little bit more about the differentiation that Dell EMC brings relative to some of your other storage competitors, specifically within SAP environments. >> Sure, so first Dell comes in with a portfolio of solutions. As you are mentioning, these are fairly complex deployments, and customers are looking for cross state partner, with professional services, experience, and a portfolio of solutions, not just one solution fits all. Just to continue on that aspect, I talked about Dell EMC PowerMax. It's great for consolidation, for running Hana and the existing workloads, but then when you look at the next generation of applications, the IoT, AI, BlockChain, the unstructured world, Dell EMC Isilon is a great platform which has already been in the market and in the forefront of AI workloads. Dell, as a company, offer a portfolio of solutions, and it's not piecemeal. We see the broader picture, and plug in all the right pieces with the right consulting surfaces as well, so that the customers can run their applications day in and day out, and transition as well as bring in new deployments like SAP Leonardo. I'll give you one example here. Another big service provider, their analytics, their SAP APOs, used to take like 32 hours of run time, and they could only do in weekends. Now, with this Dell EMC storage solutions, they are actually down to, give or take, seven hours. So that's like 78% improvement in terms of how fast they can run this analytics, and this is turning into better decision making for the procurement manager, for the business analyst, and they are able to drive value from time to market, time to value, from all the data that's captured in these SAP landscapes. >> And these are realtime or near realtime analyses that are going on, right? But then ultimately you have to persist the data, that's where things like PowerMax come in, and then sometimes you got to bring it back in, and so are you guys architecting high speed interconnects and InfiniBands and all kinds of crazy stuff? >> All kinds of things-- >> NVMe's... >> And actually, you brought up a very good point. SAP Hana is an in-memory database, so everything is running in the memory speed. Why do you need high performing array like Dell EMC PowerMax? Guess what? Everything is in memory, but this is all critical databases. Everything needs to be persisted back to the storage array, and then when something reboots, you cannot stay still til all the data is back from the storage array into the memory. So, persisting the data quickly and fast reboots are also necessary. Driving the needs of throughputs like what PowerMax provides, 150 gigabits per second throughput, so that's where the connection comes in. >> So the throughputs you're describing really were unthinkable five years ago. Can you reflect on that a little bit in terms of what you've seen the technology do that you really couldn't have even imagined it doing, even in very recent times. >> In fact, that's a very good point. One of the customers that participated in this TOI study, they mentioned they wanted to go to the cloud, public cloud. When they wanted to go to the cloud at the time the maximum size of our database you could do was 2.5 terabyte, and they already had a 4 terabyte SAP database, so there was no way they could go to a public cloud. What they were looking into, the cloud operating model, so that you can actually be flexible with your infrastructure, consume as you go, and we were able to help in that transition with all of the solutions. >> Great. So where you think we're going to be going? I mean in terms of next year's Dell Technologies World 2020, which will be big just because it's a cool number. What do you think we'll be talking about next year's conference? >> That's a very good point, and as you mentioned 2020, we are already seven billion people, and by 2020 it's predicted to be like 30 billion devices generating 44 zettabytes of data, so managing all of this data, putting the data at the right tier, the data that needs to be accessed quickly to make realtime analysis process. The data that's seven days old, putting them in the right tier, accessing them, and driving the value from your data, from this past amount of data, so that you can make decisions, you can gather intelligence, and take this value to drive competitive differentiation will be where we are. And the form factor? Yes, everybody will be able to do all of this pretty much like realtime in phones or even smaller devices. >> It's the march to 2025, when everybody's going to be off Oracle. >> Well exactly! You're right. >> Oh, that's your mandate. >> Anyway, @dvellante if you want to talk about that. We've got a lot pf research on it, so... >> Exactly. >> Not trivial. >> Well Chhandomay, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you. >> Same here. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have much more of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat electronic music)

welcome to the cube I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we are in Orlando sa piece sapphire now 2018 we're very proud to be in the NetApp booth now that sa very long standing partnership with sa PA welcome to Cuba thank you we're so glad you guys are here over a million people are expected to engage with the SH the experience both in person and online that's enormous yes sa P is the cash register of the world 70% of the world's transactions go through si people most of us don't see it a lot of the SI p products like Hybris like Arriba success factors are built on meta meta is 26 years young now and has undergone a big transformation from traditional storage company to more cloud we're gonna be now that data management company for hybrid clouds every customer has a different rate of motion to the cloud that's why we have to spend an awful lot of time listening to our customers don't and then talkative the c-level executives in the business side to say what are your what are your expectations about the technology right whether if the reduction of labor improved quality again overall equipment effectiveness and help them understand what the treaty chuckles on choice we're hearing for customers is I need choice I need to move my data around on-prem into whatever hyper hyper scalar environment you want fast efficient with analytics readouts everybody looks at their phone when we make a deposit we expect to see that deposit instantaneously right the business needs to operate just as instantaneously and a company like NetApp could build this data fabric to connect them seamlessly so that the customers have choice it's interaction of sensors and to way taking IOT data in and then also feeding it back into signals but that's part of the interface of the software people can deploy much more effectively with a lower skill set right so there's not that hurdle really allows the administrators to configure dream workspace where you can get all the data that you need to work with in one place 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 sa P is serious about this C for Hana move of being able to say you know what we are going to create an ecosystem of truck if you have a developer and your enterprise and you say you know what I'm a big sa p user but I actually want to develop a custom map or are there some things I might do then s ap makes available to Leonardo a machine learning foundation and you can take advantage of that and develop a customized again not just a products company but an ecosystem company on C sapphire in Orlando is a great example of how they're expanding the brand is that say P can't do everything so we work with a lot of specialists we were critiques we couldn't do this without hardware partners with storage Annette app has proven you know to be one of those partners that could deal with a myriad of data types from a myriad of applications that forces the stretch into voice recognition that voices the data mining and data analytics and the like augmented intelligence to augment humanity this connection of humans and machines working together they're doing all this genomic research personalized medicine for cancer patients throughout Europe using Hana I even know about it public safety if you could think about that that's a big thing to focus on thinking about using drones for first responders smart farming throughout all the Netherlands reducing pesticide use water usage dramatically down and they increased yields by 10% helping customers change their business change industries save lives pretty cool stuff yeah SAV has a little ways to go yet that that's kind of you talk to any HDI customer validated and certified for Hana is a bad word today but s ap understands it in their there they're moving to certify the pot platform for HDI so I thought that was a great example of them listening to customers and continuing to transform over the years we'd love to hear you know from customers hey can I eat with a buddy could I put this object you know on that object together and build a process basically there's almost everywhere place where the net up product will fit but again we have to make session where's the place to start step back and look at what perhaps other competitors have done in their space or in completely different industries are compared to making great content the cute makes great content that content would be found people will take notice you make a great product that impacts people's lives it's no wonder that s ap is near the top of that brand recognition brand value seventeenth on the list so if you want to become a leader or a thought leader in your own specific industry join the SMP HANA community make the investments in SP Leonardo work with SP work with net after and like Bill says let's get it done thank you all for being here we're a static for having the cube in our booth Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend on the cube from the net out booth at SVP sapphire now 2018 thanks for watching [Music]

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We are just wrapping up day two at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018. Keith, this event is enormous. We were just comparing our step goals. This event size is 16 American football fields. Enormous, 20,000 people. I think, combined, we have around 15,000 steps today. >> That sounds about right. >> Quite a few of them go to your longer legs than mine but this event is really been incredible, the energy that SAP's CEO Bill McDermott kicked off with yesterday morning has really been carried through this event and with our guests on the show for the last two days. >> No, we did 23, 24 interviews and every last one of them was high-energy. The guests were extremely excited about the products, the solutions, and the problems they're solving for, not just enterprise, but for society. I thought that was a really great theme of the guests today specifically. >> It's amazing, and you talk about, you know, the impact on society and SAP wants to be one of the top world's most valuable brands like Apple, Google, Coca Cola, who are all customers of SAP's and who all sell products that we can interact with, that we can taste, you know, Mercedes Benz, we can drive. They've got this invisible software product. They've been around for 46 years. And to your point, the stories that we have heard about how these invisible product, products, are transforming industries, are saving lives, was really something that I did not expect. >> Well when you make a great product that impact lives or... I compare it to making great content. theCUBE makes great content, that content would be found, people would take notice, you make a great product that impacts people's lives. It's no wonder that SAP is near the top of that brand recognition, brand value, 17th on the list. If they continue to do that, if they become the product, the ERP solution that you can talk to and you can ask a question, you know, not just business questions of what were the numbers the last quarter for Chicago, but you can ask a question, you know what, where is the best place to take my family to live in Eastern Europe during the summer months? That becomes value-add that people wouldn't be able to ignore. >> They've done a tremendous job building this partner ecosystem. There were hundreds of partner sessions alone. We've heard from a lot of their partners. We're in the NetApp booth, thanks to NetApp for having theCUBE here. NetApp is a customer and a partner of SAP and we heard a lot about how SAP is transforming to the cloud dramatically with the help of this massive partner ecosystem. >> You know what, we've had Microsoft, Fujitsu, SAP, NetApp, Nvidia, the list goes on and on of customers and partnerships of examples of companies that have come together and they've been consistent. In some areas, obviously Microsoft competes with SAP. In some areas, Microsoft competes with NetApp. But they recognize that without these alliances, without these partnerships, they can't solve these large, complex problems of ridding parts of Africa with mosquitoes. SAP can't do that by themselves. Microsoft can't do that by themselves. And this week was a great acknowledgement and a example of how the ecosystem works. >> They also talked a lot at this event about the intelligent enterprise where it's, you know, it's not just about digital transformation as table stakes. Companies that do it well have, or are working towards getting, this true 360-degree view of the customer which is essential. They talked about enabling that via certain things that they're leading in, or pioneering, which is connecting the demand chain and the supply chain. They really talked about enabling this new, this current SAP that's built for this fourth generation customer experience. Our lives as consumers have dramatically influenced business. We expect to have the ability to, you know, try and buy an app if we want it, right? And they're using that model very well to give customers in many industries, they have 390,000 customers, choice and flexibility. And the partner ecosystem is just part of that flexibility that they have to give. And they do a great job of listening to their customers who really are helping with a lot of the co-development in a very symbiotic way. >> Yeah, SAP is reentering this people-centric view of ERP, CRM, of data, saying that their relationship is about people. Bill McDermott spent a lot of time talking about trust. One of the reasons why people trust the brand of theCUBE is because we're on the ground, we're talking to the users, we're talking to the people. People can reach out and touch and feel you, there's a personal relationship between that brand and the community. The same thing with, got the same feel for what SAP is trying to do of, you know, obviously with over 20,000 people, I dunno if the number is 21,000, 22,000, but more than 20,000 people, a million people online watching the event, SAP the serious about this C/4HANA move, of being able to say, you know what, we are going to create a ecosystem of trust. We talked about trust with the app center and being able to validate applications on the platform. SAP has long been one of those companies that's serious about their partnerships and validation and certification of platforms. So whether it's HCI, storage with NetApp, the deep relationship with NetApp, SAP is going to put its brand upfront and say that if you're going to engage with one of our partnerships, there's a transient trust that goes from SAP to their partners. >> And we talked with a number of folks working in different groups within SAP focused on the customer. This morning we had on their Chief Customer, a guy from their Chief Customer Office who talked about these, kinda top 100 strategic accounts that they partner with who then also they take that information, those learnings and don't just improve the technologies but they also use them to influence much greater than a hundred customers. They're strategically utilizing that data. We talked yesterday with one of the gentlemen running the SAP four, S/4HANA community rather, and the Leonardo community and the amount of engagement that they have in that community, especially in Leonardo which has only been around for a year. The customer engagement is key but also their reaction to it, and I would say even, I think we heard a lot of how they're being proactive with creating content and enabling their customers to be able to learn at the same time as they're learning from their customers. >> Yeah some hero numbers that we heard this week: 6,000 people in that HANA, the S/4HANA community. While the Customer Success Group focuses on the top 100 customers, there were, I think 38,000 people following the Twitter account, so there's obviously outreached stretch. The Leonardo and S/4 communities have created a thousand videos on how-to. So obviously the impact of and the reach of SAP has ambitions of not just raising brand awareness and getting into that Top 10 with Apple and Google, they also have the ambitions of becoming a platform, a ecosystem. You know, we look at Microsoft as kinda one of the ultimate platform companies. Microsoft partners make more money off of Windows than Microsoft makes off of Windows. SAP seems to have the same goal of their partners, there's a hundred partners on the show floor, that should generate more revenue than SAP which would be impressive. SAP, I looked the other day, $136 billion market capital, not a small company at all. >> So you have an interesting perspective, for many reasons, but one you've run large SAP infrastructures before. And here you are now at SAPPHIRE from the press and media, the analyst perspective. What are some of the things that really surprised you in all of your experience as a user of SAP to now covering it from this angle. >> You know what, I don't know if it was a year ago. It was not even a full year, my anniversary for running my company is August. So less than a year ago I ran SAP for a large pharmaceutical. And we're in the throes of selecting where our next platform was gonna be hosted. Cloud was a possibility and it is amazing how the conversations have changed from my peers a year ago, or a year and a half or even a year ago, to now to how readily acceptable customers are of running mission-critical, the core of the business, 77% of the world's transactions, we heard today, goes through SAP, how willing customers are at running those work goals in the cloud. Second piece, which was probably a proof point, how much SAP has improved SAP in the cloud. SAP has marketed SAP HANA and SAP as cloud-ready applications, it was more of something that you... I took legacy application, I installed it on VMs in the cloud, cloud-ready. No we've given examples from the hyperscalers, specifically Google, of how, and Microsoft of how, customers are coming whipping their credit card up, spinning up instances of HANA, spinning them down. Google talked about how you can migrate your whole ECC on HANA to the cloud within 30 minutes to two hours, amazing movement in cloud. I think it's by far my biggest surprise coming to this show. I didn't expect SAP to accelerate their cloud adoption as fast as they have. >> I'm curious to your thoughts too about simplicity, simplicity of message, you know, what's their best-run businesses campaign? Best-run businesses run on SAP. Simplicity has long been part of their messaging. As we look at the SAP cloud platform and some of the announcements there today and you look at, they've got Ariba, and Concur, and Fieldglass, and SuccessFactors, with the C/4 announcement from yesterday, what is your impression on, have they been able to sort of simplify and kind of reduce customer confusion in terms of this breadth of products and technologies that SAP now delivers? >> You know, SAP is a big company and they have a lot of products. They've been around for 46 years. You know, we didn't talk about any legacy database stuff. They still own Siebel so they still own a traditional database company. It's easier said than done to simplify the message. When you come to... You know, we talked to interviewee after interviewee, customers are still overwhelmed when they look at a overall problem. They can even identify SAP as the potential partner to solve it, but 300 products is still 300 products. It's very... You can help simplify the message by throwing those products in categories, sales force, which product you lead with, so new customers, you know, sales force will help you with that. Traditional customers that don't have deep relationships with their sales force and solution providers, maybe, I think there's still a little difficulty around understanding the messaging around all of 300 products. I mean, it's 300 products. >> Well, there's always work to be done and well we have... There was a lot of product announcements, a lot of energy, and evangelicalism that you and I heard consistently throughout the event and on-set here. A third area that I think really struck me is, SAP has been very vocal about having an initiative to raise the profile of women in technology. They did an excellent job of getting women onstage during both keynote sessions, yesterday and today. From their CMO, Alicia Tillman, to Lindsey Vonn and a whole suite of women Olympic athletes that were yesterday in the general session, to some of the women that were doing some of these outstanding demos and I, I really tip my hat to SAP because for being as large and as lengthy of an incumbent as they are, they're really able to focus on some of these key areas and we at theCUBE love to cover that because it's something that really needs consistent awareness. >> Well, I dunno if people would notice but we probably, both of us, are very vested in diversity and Silicon Valley, in general, is always appreciated when companies go, not just acknowledge the challenge of diversity, it is a very, very difficult problem. It's probably one of the most difficult problems in our industry. So to actually put some meat on a bone, announce the problem, announce the challenge, and go forth and put, you know, obviously, extremely capable women and minorities in the forefront. >> Yeah. Well Keith, always a pleasure hosting with you. Thanks so much for working with me the last couple of days, it's been-- >> I always enjoy it. >> I do too. It's really been a really fun, energetic show so thanks for all of your help. >> Thank you. >> Keith and I wanna thank you for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin for Keith Townsend, we're from SAP SAPPHIRE 2018. Thanks for watching. (energetic music)

>> From Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE! Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018, brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we are in Orlando at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018, where we're in the NetApp booth and talking with lots of partners and we're excited to welcome back to theCUBE, distinguished alumni Jim McHugh from NVIDIA, you are the VP and GM of Deep Learnings and "other stuff" as you said in the keynote. (all laugh) >> Yeah, and other stuff. That's a lot of responsibility! That other stuff, that, you know, that can really pile up! >> That can kill ya. Yeah, exactly. >> So here we are at SAPPHIRE you've been working with SAP in various forms for a long time, this event is enormous, lots of momentum at NVIDIA, what is NVIDIA doing with SAP? >> We're really helping SAP figure out and drive the development of their SAP Leonardo machine learning services so, machine learning, as we saw in the keynote today, with Haaso as a key component of it, and really what it's doing is it's automating a lot of the standard processes that people did, in the interactions, so whether it's closing your invoices at the end of the quarter, and that can take weeks to go through it manually, you can actually do machine learning and deep learning and do that instantaneously, so you can get a continuous close. Things like service ticketing, so when a service ticket comes in, you know, we all know, you pick up the phone, you call 'em and they collect your information, and then they pass you on to someone else that wants to confirm the information, all that can be handled just in a email, because now I know a lot about you when you send me an email I know who you are, know what company you're with, I know your problem 'cause you stated it, and I can route it, using machine learning, to the appropriate person. I can not only route it to the appropriate person I can look up in a knowledge database and say hey, have we seen this answer a question before feed that to the customer service representative, and when they start interacting with the customer they already have a lot of information about them and it's already well underway. >> So from a practical technology perspective we hear a lot about AI, machine learning, NVIDIA obviously leading the way with GPUs and enabling development frameworks to take advantage of machine learning and that compute power. But the enterprise, we'll at that and we're like you know that, we see obvious value, but I need a data scientist, I need a programmer, I need all this capability, from a technical staff perspective, to take advantage of it. How is NVIDIA, SAP, making that easier to consume? >> So most enterprises, if you're just jumpin' in and tryin' to figure it out, you would need all these people, you'd need a data scientist and someone to go through the process. 'Cause AIs, it's a new way of writing software, and you're using data to train the software, so we don't have, we don't put programmers in a room anymore and let 'em code for nine months and out pops software, you know, eventually. We give 'em more and more data, and the data scientist is training it. Well the good news is we're working with SAP and they have the data scientists, they know how SAP apps work, they know how the integration works, they know the workflows of their customers, so they're building the models and then making it available as a service, right? So when you go to the SAP cloud, you're saying I wanna actually take advantage of the SAP service for service ticketing or, you know, I wanna figure out how I can do my invoice processing better, or I'm an HR representative, and I don't wanna spend 60% of my time reading resumes, I wanna actually have an AI do it for me, and then it's a service that you can consume. There, that we do make it possible, like if you have a developer in your enterprise and you say you know what, I'm a big SAP user but I actually wanna develop a custom app or other some things I might do, then SAP makes available the Leonardo machine learning foundation and you can take advantage of that and develop a custom app. And if you have a really big problem and you wanna take it off, NVIDIA's happy to work with you directly and figure out how to solve different problems. And most of our customers are in all three of those, Right? They're consuming the services 'cause they automate things today, they're figuring out, what are the custom apps they need to build around SAP and then they're, you know, they're figuring out some of the product building products or something else that's a much bigger machine learning, deep learning problem. >> So yesterday during Bill McDermott's keynote he talked about tech for good, now there's been a lot of news recently of tech for not-so-good and data privacy, GDPR, you know, compliance going into affect last week, NVIDIA really has been an integral part of this AI renaissance, you talked about, you know, you can help loads of different customers there's so much potential with AI, as Bill McDermott said yesterday, AI to augment humanity. I can imagine, you know, life and death situations like in healthcare, can you give us an example of what you guys are doing with SAP that, you know, maybe is transforming healthcare at a particular hospital? >> Yeah, so one of the great examples I was just talking about is, what Massachusetts General is doing. Massachusetts General is one of the largest research hospitals in the United States, and they're doing a lot of work in AI, to really automate processes that, you know, when you would take your child in to figure out the bone density scan, which basically tells you the bone age of your child, and they compare it to your biological age, and that can tell you a lot of things, is it just a, you know, a growth problem, or is there something more serious to be concerned about. Well, they would do these MRIs, and then you would have to wait for days while the, the technician and the doctor would flip through a textbook from the 1950's, to determine it. Well Massachusetts General automated all that where they actually trained a neural network on all these different scans and all these different components and now you find out in minutes. So it greatly reduces the stress, right? And there's plenty of other project going on and you can see it in determination if that's a cancer cell, or, you know, so many different aspects of it, your retina happens to be an incredible venue into whether you have hypertension, whether you have Malaria, Dengue fever, so things like, you know what, maybe you shouldn't be around anywhere where you're gonna get bit by a mosquito and it's gonna pass it to your family, all that can now be handled, and you don't need expensive healthcare, you can actually take it to a clinician out in the field. So, we love all that. But if you think about the world of SAP which is the, you know, controls the data records of most companies, right? Their supply chain information, their resource information about, you know, what they have available, all that's being automated. So if we think from the production of food where we're having tractors now that they have the ability to go over a plant and say you know what, that needs insecticide or that needs weeds to be removed 'cause it's just bad for the whole component, or that's a diseased plant and I'm gonna remove it, or it just needs water so it can grow, right? That is increasing the production of food in an organic way, then we improve the distribution centers so it doesn't sit as long, right, so that we can actually have drones flying through the warehouses and knowing what needs to be moved first, go from there, we're moving to autonomous driving vehicles and, where deliveries can happen at night when there's not so much traffic, and then we can get the food as fresh as possible and deliver it. So if you think that whole distribution center and just being in the pipeline as being automated, it's doing an incredible amount of good. And then, jumping into the world of autonomous driving vehicles, it's a 10 trillion dollar business that's being changed, radically. >> So as we think about these super complex systems that we're trying to improve, we start to break them down into small components, smaller components, you end up with these scenarios, these edge scenarios, use cases where, you know, whether it's data frequency, data value, or data latency, we have to push to compute out to the edge. Can you talk about use cases where NVIDIA has pushed the technology far out to the edge to take in massive amounts of data, that effectively can't be sent back to the core or to the data center for processing, what are some of these use cases solutions? >> So it's, the world of IOT is changing as well, right, the compute power has to be where it's needed, right, and in any form, so whether that's cloud based, data center based, or at the edge and we have a great customer that is actually doing inspection, oil refineries, bridges, you know, where they spot a crack or some sort of mark where they have to go look at it, well traditionally what you do is you send out a whole team and they build up scaffolding, or they have people repel down to try to inspect it. Well now what we're doing is flying drones and sending wall crawlers up. So they find something, they get data, and then, instead of actually, like you said, putting it, you know, on a truck and taking it back to your data center or trying to figure out how to have enough bandwidth to get there, they're taking one of our products, which is a DGX station, it's basically the equivalent of a half a row of servers, but it's in a single box, water cooled, and they're putting it in vans sitting out in remote areas of Alaska, and retraining the model there on site. So, they get the latest model, they get more intelligence and they just collect it, and they can resend the drones up and then discover more about it. So it really, really is saving, and that saves a lot of money, so you have a group of really smart you know, technicians and people who understand it and a guy who can do the neural network capability instead of a whole team coming up and setting up scaffolding that would cost millions of dollars. >> That reminds me of that commercial that they showed yesterday during general session SAP commercial with Clive Owen the actor, talking about, you mentioned, you know, cracks in oil wells and things like that it just reminded me of that, and what they talked about in that video was really how invisible software, like SAP, is transforming industries, saving lives, I think I saw on their website an example of how they're leveraging AI and technology to reduce water scarcity in India or save the rhino conservation and what you just described with NVIDIA seems to be quite in alignment with the direction that SAP is going. >> Oh absolutely, yeah, I mean we believe in SAP's view of the intelligent enterprise and people gotta remember, enterprise isn't just like the corporate office whatever, enterprises are many different things, alright. Public safety, if you can think about that, that's a big thing we focus on. A really amazing thing that's going on, thinking about using drones for first responders they actually can know what's going on at the scene and when the other people are showing up they know what kind of area they're going into. Or for search and rescue, drones can cover a lot of territory and detect a human faster than a human can, right? And if you can actually find someone within the first 24 hours, chance of survival is so much higher. All of that is, you know, leveraging the exact same technology that we do for looking at our business processes, right, and it's not as, you know, dramatic, it's not gonna show up on the evening news, but honestly, streamlining our business processes, making it happen so much faster and more efficient makes businesses more efficient, you know, it's better for the company, it's better for the employees as well. >> So let's talk about, something that's, that's taboo, financial services, making money with data, or with analytics or machine learning from data, again we have to, John Furrier is here, and we have someone from NVIDIA here, and if we don't bring up blockchain in some type of way he's gonna throw something at his team, so, >> Let's give a shout out to John Furrier. (laughing) >> Give a shout out to John. But from a practical sense, let's subtract the digital currency part of machine, of blockchain, do you see applications for blockchain from a machine learning perspective? >> Yeah, I mean well, if you just boil blockchain down or for trusted networks, right? And you know you heard Bill McDermott say that on stage he called his marketplaces, or areas that he could do for an exchange, it makes total sense. If I can have a trusted way of doing things where I have a common ledger between companies and we know that it's valid, that we can each interchange with, yeah it makes complete sense, right, now we gotta get to the practical imitation of that and we have to build the trust of the companies to understand, okay this technology can take you there, and that's where I think, you know, where we come in with our technology capabilities, ensuring to people that it's reliable and work, SAP comes in with the customer relationships and trusted in what they've been doing in helping people run their business for years, and then it becomes cultural. Like all things, we can kid ourselves in technology that we'll just solve everything, it's a cultural change. I'm gonna share that common ledger, I'm gonna share that common network and feel confident in it, it's something that people have to do and, you know, my take on that always is when the accuracy is so much better, when the efficiency is so much better, when the return is so much better, we get a lot more comfortable. People used to be nervous about giving the grocery store their phone number, right, 'cause they would track their food, right? And today we're just like okay yeah here's my phone number. (Keith laughing) >> So. (laughs) >> Give you a 30 cent discount, here's my number. >> Exactly. We're so cheap. (laughing) >> So we're in the NetApp booth and you guys recently announced a reference, combined reference, AI reference architecture with NetApp, tell us a little bit more about that. >> Yeah, well the little secret behind all the things we just talked about, there's an incredible amount of data, right, and as you collect this data it's really important to store it in a way that it's accessible when you need it. And when you're doing trainings, I have a product that's called DGX-1, DGX-1 takes an incredible amount of data that helps us train these neural networks, and it's fast, and it has an insatiable desire for data. So what we've worked with NetApp is actually pool together reference architecture so that when a data scientist, who is a very valuable resource, is working on this, he's ensured that the infrastructures are gonna work together seamlessly and deliver that data to the training process. And then when you create that model, we use something that's called inference, you put it in production, and again same time, when you're having that inference running you wanna make sure that data can get to it and can interact with the data seamlessly and the reference architectures play out there as well. So our goal is, start knocking off one by one, what do the customers need to be successful? And we put a lot of effort into the GPUs, we put a lot of effort into the deep learning software that runs on top of that, we put a lot of effort into, you know, what's the models they need to use, etc. And now we have to spend a lot more time of what's their infrastructure? And make sure that's reliable because, you would hate to do all that work only to find that your infrastructure had a hiccup, and took your job down. So we're working really hard to make sure that never happens >> So I have this theory that, well I don't have the theory, David Curry came out with this theory of data has gravity, but I've come up with this additional theory, now that we look at AI, and the capability of AI and what people are and what the hyper scalers are doing in their data center is that individual companies think, have a challenge replicating in their own data center, this AI and compute now has gravity. You know, I can't well, at least before today I didn't think well I can take my data center, put it on the road, and do these massive pieces of injection on the edge, sounds like we're pushin' back on that a little bit and saying that you know what sure if it's, I don't know what the limits are, and I guess that's the question. What are the limits of what we can do on the edge when it comes to the amount of data, and portable AI to that edge? >> Well so, there's again the two aspects of it, the training takes an incredible amount of data that's why they would have to take a super computer and put it there so they could do the retraining, but, when you think about when you can have the pro-- something the size of a credit card, which is our Jetson solution, and you can install it in a drone or you can put in cameras for public safety, etc. Which is, has incredible, think about looking for a lost child or parents with Alzheimer's, you can scan through video real quick and find them, right? All because of a credit card sized processor, that's pretty impressive. But that's what's happening at the edge, we're now writing applications that are much more intelligent using AI, there are AI applications sitting at the edge that, instead of just processing the data in a way where I'm getting a average, average number of people who walked into my store, right, that's what we used to do five years ago, now we're actually using intelligent applications that are making calculated decisions, it's understanding who's coming in a store, understanding their buying/purchasing power, etc. That's extremely important in retail, because, if you wanna interact with someone and give them that, you know when they're doing self checkout, try to sell 'em one more thing, you know, did you forget the batteries that go with that, or whatever you want it to be, you only have a few seconds, right? And so you must be able to process that and have something really intelligent doing that instead of just trying to do the law of average and get a directionally correct-- and we've known this, anytime you've been on your webpage or whatever and someone recommends something you're like that doesn't have anything to do with me and then all of a sudden it started getting really good that's where they're getting more intelligent. >> When I walk into the store with my White Sox hat and then they recommend the matching jersey. I'm gonna look, gonna come lookin' for you guys at NVIDIA like wa-hey! I don't have money for a jersey, but things like that, yeah. >> We're just behind the scenes somewhere. >> Well, you title VP and GM of Deep Learning and stuff, there's a lot of stuff. (all laugh) Jim thanks so much for coming back on theCUBE sharing with us what's new at NVIDIA it sounds like the world of possibilities is endless, so exciting! >> Yeah, it is an exciting time, thank you. >> Thanks for your time, we wanna thank you for watching theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAP SAPPHIRE 2018, thanks for watching. (bubbly music)

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin, with Keith Townsend, and we are in Orlando at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. We're in the NetApp booth, and we are excited to welcome to theCUBE, Ray Russ from Fujitsu, the Senior Director of SAP Solutions. Ray, this is your 21st SAPPHIRE. >> That's correct. >> This event is enormous. There's upwards of 20,000 people here, in Orlando, but what Bill McDermott, their CEO, said in his key note, is they're expecting about a million people to engage. For a software company, that sells an invisible product, that's really incredible. You've been involved, you've been at Fujitsu for a few years, but you've been involved with SAP for a long time. Talk to us about your, kind of the history that you've seen with SAP, and now what you're doing with them at Fujitsu. >> Yeah, so you know I go back 20, 22 years ago as an end-user. Started in the manufacturing space, a company that was implementing SAP for the first time, and then my second end-user, before I got into consulting. I'd seen a lot of change in the companies I worked for and wanted to go and help other companies go through the transition. I really got involved right before Y2K, and if you think about digital transformation, I kind of think of it that way. Digital transformation, when talks about it, is like this new buzz word, but as an SAP expert and as a company, we've been doing digital transformation for years, we just didn't quite call it that, right? To the point where CIO's say, "Stop calling it digital, just tell me how I'm gonna, "fix my business, "or help me become more efficient in my business." So I've seen it change quite a bit. One of the, you know, some of the big things that have changed now is technology that's allowing companies to actually get out outside their four walls, and extend that enterprise, to supply chains, or assets. So that's something that we focus on at Fujitsu. You know, my background has been in manufacturing, and while Fujitsu focused on a lot of different industries, a big part of our business is in the manufacturing space. We're a manufacturer, we run SAP in our own plants, as well as 84% of our customers globally are in the manufacturing space. So we work very closely with companies in this particular space, helping them understand the journey for S/4HANA, what does that mean for them? Would there be operational efficiency? But also extended beyond their enterprise. Some of the challenges that we see with companies right now is that over the years, they've continued to upgrade their SAP systems. My first implementation was 3.1I, I believe, and now it's ECC 6.0, before S/4HANA. They've continued to upgrade, and maybe not take advantage of new functionality, and the new version of SAP, the enhancement packs, and that. So they've kinda still got some custom code going on, and now they are asking SAP, and partners like us, okay, S/4HANA, we really wanna see the value, not just an IT business case, but what is the business to the company's and organization's strategic goals. So part of our job, and part of our role is to go and help these companies understand the business value, whether it be reduction in closing the books, or overall equipment effectiveness in their plant, right? You see, those overall outcomes to the business and help them define the business case, and when the move to S/4HANA would come. The other area of expertise for us, Industrial IoT. We've been doing this, we've been really one of the global leaders in SAP, in what they call digital manufacturing, which is now part of the Leonardo family. We've been doing Leonardo IoT for years, we just, no one called it that, okay, right? (laughs) And that's one of the things we're showcasing here. We work very closely with SAP's Leonardo team, that's in the digital manufacturing space. Some of the solutions customers might know is MII or ME. We're doing co development with our customers, I'm sorry with SAP, as well as our customers as well, in innovation projects, and seeing what they can get out of Industrial IoT for their projects. We were here, at the Leonardo event on Monday. Some of the things we're showcasing in our booth this week, and talking to customers about, is something we call our Smart Factory. Many times we've seen IT-led IoT projects, whether it be a shop-floor application, or something at a plant-level, and I said it last year, I spoke in SAPPHIRE last year, and I said it, I go, "I hear from CIOs all the time, "If we're going to fail, fail fast." And I really believe now that, why fail at all? And actually, talking to Gartner this week, as well, he said the same thing, C-level executives don't wanna hear that anymore. They wanna understand the roadmap, and there was this concept of throwing a project to a developer, having them develop something without the business, and then taking that down to a plant, or something to a user, they were like, this is not exactly what we wanted, we don't see the business outcome. So what we do now in our framework is actually help these companies build their long-term roadmaps. So going in and talking to the C-level executives in the business side and saying, what are your expected outcomes? Let's start with the outcome, not the technology, right? Whether it be reduction of labor, improve quality, again, overall equipment effectiveness, and help them understand what their strategic goals are, and then work with the business units, and the users as well to help define what their needs are, at the plant level or at the corporate level. And part of our methodology and approach is build a maturity model, where they sit at that time, and then also using a result chain process to actually build in every initiative or IoT project, with the business cases, or where is the real value, right? And then making sure there's outcome based approach to this, and build that long-term roadmap. >> So yesterday on stage, Bill McDermott talked about the value of augmenting people with technology, but the importance of process. So Fujitsu, obviously, big manufacturing and operations, outside of servers and IT equipment, there's always been this battle, traditionally, between what we call OT, traditional manufacturing operations, and IT. Obviously, as part of this transformation, organizations need to go through CIOs, plant managers, that traditional line of business has to have this new way of working together. Can you shed light on how that's changed within Fujitsu, and then with customers? >> You hit it right on the head, and IT-OT integration has been a challenge for a lot of companies over the years. In fact, I think one of the biggest challenges CIOs have had with shadow IT is at the plant level, right? Because maybe the IoT projects weren't being rolled out fast enough as corporate was trying to focus on the ERP application. I think the plants didn't think of SAP as an OT-type application. >> And so there are a lot of challenges, next thing you know you had major companies, with multiples plants, having multiple different applications, but none of them rolled up, so a COO could actually see the operations of all of his plants, right? With this, some of the acquisitions SAP's done and some of the development they've done, and the advances in IoT, now when I talked about some of those problems with the CIOs, trying to, failing fast, what we do is go and work with these companies, and actually go down to the plant level and work with them. So we talk to them, what you are your business process like? When you got a developer up in corporate, trying to design something for a plant operator, or a plant manager and doesn't know the process, you're never gonna give them what they need, or what they want. >> You can't automate a process that doesn't exist. >> Exactly, exactly. So working with them, we helped define what those processes are and then actually build applications that fits their needs. Whether it be condition-based maintenance applications, which you need to do before you can do predictive analytics. Some of the innovative things we're doing, and we're showing today, are we've augmented a HoloLens, into the process where, for example, even in our own plant, down at Richardson, Texas, we make network communication equipment, which is a complex assembly, and an operator has to look at a manual sheet, and actually look at the numbers and figure out what slot it goes in. With the HoloLens augmented reality, I can see a digital overlay, and pick up a part and plug it right in, it tells them, and we've been able to reduce cycle time on that assembly by 42%. So, I mean, that's huge. >> That is huge. So you mentioned business outcomes a number of times, and you're talking to the C-Suite, and the CDO who needs to drive digital transformation, and cultural change, and the CMO who needs technology to drive marketing and align it to sales. Give us an example of one that you think really articulates what Fujitsu and SAP are delivering, that's impacting a customer's business, whether it's developing a new product, increasing revenue, increasing profits. >> So good point. So a good example of one we've just done recently, and I actually spoke on this recently, the four major outcomes this customer is looking for in this roadmap was reduction in labor hours, right? Reduction of machine time, right? The big two areas for them was improvement in quality. So, by being able to monitor and get real time information, on our application for the plant, we're getting information to plant managers real time, it's not the next shift or the next day, right? We were able to actually improve quality in a lot of our customers' plants by anywhere between 30 to 40%. And then customer satisfaction is huge as well. You mentioned customer again. One of the things we're doing too, now, is actually being able to, servitization is kind of a new buzzword, it's been around for awhile actually, right, but as companies are looking, in the manufacturing area, how do we create new routes to market, right? There's a customer of ours, we actually put sensors in some of their high-end assets, they sell to their customers as well, we're able to get that information now, and actually help them monitor their equipment. And we can actually help them, then, reduce their customers' maintenance costs and so forth, and that's adding value to not only our customer, but our customer's customer. Those are some of the big things we're seeing in manufacture right now. >> So, talk about the value of partnerships, especially with a company like, we're in a NetApp booth, so NetApp would be a great example. When we're talking edge, which is where all IoT data is happening, industrial data happens at the edge, core, where some of that data needs to be processed, and then back to cloud. How does Fujitsu partner with SAP, NetApp, the customer, to bring value from all three of those end-points? >> You got it, and you know, it's interesting, over the years, somebody asked me the other day if I ever worked, I never worked for SAP, but I've been in the ecosystem forever. I get accused, if you caught me I'd bleed blue, and I've found over the years is that every company is realizing they can't do it all. You gotta do what you do well, right? And so, SAP realizes that we work, and NetApp's been a strong partner of ours for a long time, right? So you know, I talk about Smart Factory framework, one of the things we try to do when we go in is actually look at the business outcomes and then the domain areas, line of business we're gonna focus on and that, but then we look at the technology. And if it's technology that's not our core competency, we want to make sure we bring in the right partner. NetApp's one of those partner, SAP is one of those partners, and we have a group of partners that we bring in, to make sure we're bringing the best solution to our customer, right? If we can't do it well, then we're gonna make sure we work with a partner that has strength in that area. >> I may expect that choice, that, flexibility, right? That word is used, flexibility, agility, at every, you can't go to a trade show without hearing those at least 50 times each, but it's really the customers that are driving that, and their needs. We've heard a lot of that in the last day and a half that we've been here, a lot of that value articulated through the customer, as well as the importance, and it sounds like SAP does this well, of listening to the customer. What are you needing that we're not doing? Who should we be partnering with, to be able to deliver this solution that you need, to your point, that's going to drive these business outcomes, because that's where the conversation, this day and age, needs to be. >> Exactly, yep. >> Well Russ, Ray. Ray Russ. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing what you're doing with Fujitsu. Fujitsu and SAP have been partners for 40 years, you've got 8,000 plus customer and counting, and I imagine that you're going to carry the momentum forward that you're feeling here at SAPPHIRE, and your 22nd SAPPHIRE next year. >> Absolutely, I appreciate it. Have a great show guys, thank you very much. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you so much. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, we are at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW, in the NetApp booth in Orlando. Lisa Martin, Keith Townsend, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018, brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, and we are in Orlando at SAP Sapphire Now 2018. We're very proud to be in the NetApp booth. NetApp has a very long standing partnership with SAP and we're joined by Roland Wartenburg, the Senior Director of Global Strategic Alliances at NetApp. Roland, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So NetApp and SAP have been partners for 17 years, very strategic. Let's talk about the role of NetApp in the SAP ecosystem. >> Yeah, happy to do that. So as I said it goes back to I think 2001 when the official partner contract was signed. Actually my role is, I would say it was special because I used to work for SAP, and the first time I worked with NetApp was in 1999. It was actually back then when the whole thing started, it's more than 21 years now, oh time is flying. And NetApp was always and is still a global technology partner. So when you look back at that time over the last 15 years was really about running SAP solutions on top of our technologies, started with F3, went over to SAP Enterprise Suite with Netweaver but now these days when you look at the whole SAP portfolio, there are so many new things. Not only SAP Hana, there is the whole SAP cloud movement with the cloud software service solutions with Hypres, Eribar, Conqueror, you name it, Feedclass, there's so many solutions out there which run now, either operated by SAP or done by SAP with one of their partners in the public cloud space like Google, Microsoft, AWS, for example. In addition you have the new areas with Leonardo covering IOT, Blockchain, machine learning, artificial intelligence and the nice thing is your assio from NetApp is really moving forward from the traditional role as a pure storage provider into so many new ways covering this with entry and data management so that we can offer our joint customers the solutions to cover actually, oh let's say offer solutions to solve the customer's problems in these areas. And IOT, for example, is a really interesting power because you have so many devices in the IOT space, everyone is talking about Etch computing or far computing and when you see how important it is to have data really transferred in a secure way, for example, in healthcare, no question about it, then it's clearly visible that a partner like NetApp offering service in this area for entry and data management, there's no better partner than us to do this with SAP. >> So can we talk about some of the larger ecosystems, NetApp, big partner with SAP, NetApp, big partner with Microsoft. You guys have your NFS service running in Microsoft. Can you talk about how NetApp has moved into a data driven company now. You're in all the major clouds. How important is that to the SAP relationship? >> Oh that's actually my daily business to, to not only cover the so called multi-partner strategies, but also to drive forward because when you look at the SAP, NetApp strategy in general what we do in the Cloud, what we do with Hybrid Cloud scenarios for example, driven by topics like GDPR. That went just live a couple of days ago. Data privacy protection really really important so then you look now at SAP customers where still the big majority runs systems on premises, no question about it, you saw the numbers Bill McDermott showed in the keynote, how many Es Vahana customs they have now. You see that there's a movement from on premises to the Cloud, but not completely. I would say it's also a Hybrid Cloud scenario, specifically what I just said, the whole GDPR topic for example, that customers really want to make sure they're still, have their own data under control either in the Cloud or on premises and this makes not only the challenge for us as a partner but it's also the very interesting part too as a partner to work now with more and more partners which were, before when you looked back at the last five, 10, 15 years, were not part of the SAP ecosystem at all. And that is really, for me in alignment with my daily business to extend this ecosystem in a way that we can offer customers in, almost like a metric you know we have all these partners and you say okay for this specific use case we work together with partner A, in SAP, here with partner B and whatever your name put in there, Microsoft, Skuli, etc. And then have this portfolio offered to the customer in a very comprehensive way. >> SAP has such a wide range of customers from Coca Cola to McLaren Formula One to NetApp as a customer and and Bill McDermott said during his keynote 390 thousand customers in 25 plus industries. They have this lofty goal of becoming one of the top ten most valuable brands globally with an Apple, a Google. They are now 17 on that list and one of the things that struck me yesterday outside of the convention center was seeing a bus that said ERP that you can talk to and hear from. And as they have this ambition to be up there with the Apples that have products and technologies that we interact with and, you know, now they're wanting ERP to become something that you can talk to, how does that help, kind of, lift NetApp? Does it open doors for you guys in new industries where SAP has this almost household brand name? What's the influence there on NetApp? >> Oh definitely, I would say when you look at the role of SAP in this industry it's growing growing. From a branding point of view, from how important you are, not only for Enterprise customers, also for normal end users like you and me and the interesting part is that SAP being the backbone of all these Enterprise business processes sometimes they're not so very known for the normal end users though, if I would ask my daughter hey, you know, of course she knows SAP, no question about it, but do you know any application SAP offers? She probably said no, not really. If I ask her do you know any applications Apple is offering, Microsoft, she would say yes of course so because these big partners with their solutions are actually more at the end user of the consumer user so but when you look now at what SAP is doing you just have to look at a show floor and which areas are SAP getting active in multimedia analytics, etc. You see a lot more branding of rareness all over the place. And as Bill McDermott said that that they really want to increase that and that's the great opportunity for us because when you linked us now from the solution business process level to an area where we are actually the leader in the space of data management. Data is everywhere, everyone knows that and data is created at such enormous speeds that you have to have customers, and end users have to have solutions in place either on a, in an Enterprise environment maybe on the desktop on the tablet or the normal end user on a mobile device to have the opportunity to manage this data. When I look, take my daughter as an example again. Of course she is on Instagram etc., all these things. And whenever you make a picture that's data created >> Right >> And stored somewhere, and it has to be handled. And of course you can talk about security, the different protocols, I think there is a really big need for a partner like NetApp to work together with the key to offer these entry and data management solutions. No question about it. >> So I'd like to hear your thoughts on as we look at all these challenges, whether it's data privacy, smart contracts, the ability to enable supply chain tracking, you know, the formulation of a medicine from the formulation to the manufacturing to getting it on the shelf to being injected, one of the big parts of that conversation is to become Blockchain. SAP announced that their part of a Blockchain initiative How do you view technology like Blockchain in the relationship of NetApp, which is a a data driven company with data storage products, data management products, security concerns and enabling these types of technologies or capabilities through something like Blockchain in your relationship with SAP. >> Blockchain is a really interesting topic for me because when you look at the history of Blockchain go back 20 years ago, it was actually developed for data management in a way, then someone figured out oh this can be used for financial services and the Bitcoin thingy started, and well everyone when you talk about to people what is Blockchain, everyone will think this is financial services, for banking, etc. But now SAP actually invited us last, um October, November last year to join the SAP, Blockchain co-innovation program because, you mentioned that when you use Blockchain now in supply chain management, specifically for smart contracts in manufacturing, automotive, shipment, wherever you have different partners working together in such a chain, and that's the word already, you have different blocks you put together because imagine we three would create a Blockchain, it probably wouldn't be that secure because three pieces can attract right flat away. But in a moment if you have a really more complex, longer chain of ecosystem partners working together like, for example, render producing some products having supplies, shipping that, up to the end user and you want to put this in a smart contract environment so that you as an end user could say oh today I want to have this part of the product enabled. Tomorrow I want to have this part, but not this one anymore. And so it goes back to the original vendor to enable a disfuntion almost like with cell phone technology. You can imagine that the data flow in such Blockchain environment is really really essential because you as a end user, you're gonna have to secure because at the end of the day you pay for it and you want to pay only for that featured function you ordered, so data management and Blockchain goes hand in hand here. So that's why we actually decided okay we want to work here together with SAP. It's a fairly new topic for many many customers so I see this coming for next years more and more and more the customers really see where this can help them to advance from a business point of view but yeah, we are part of that ecosystem. >> So as customers keep their eye on futuristic technologies such as Blockchain, they need these types of capabilities today. Like they still need to be able to do great supply train management. They still need to do data management. What are some of the highlights from a customer's perspective, between the relationship between NetApp technology, and SAP capability as it pertains to digital transformation? We had the NetApp CIO on theCUBE yesterday where he talked about the ability to have empower George, the CEO of NetApp with data driven decisions through that relationship. Are there relationships that you're seeing specifically between the alliances you work with that your like, you know what, no other company could do this other than NetApp and SAP? >> Of course, as I've said we have really the perfect partner for this new world because when you look at the history of NetApp there's a lot going on in terms of digital transformation. We're working much more now with the Cloud service providers We have a Cloud strategy. So we have this and now comes the word, the end to end data management strategy and that's really important for SAP and customers because the customers, they, when you look at SAP customers who've been with SAP for many many many years, they went through this history of free, Enterprise free, now to the Cloud, they still have to manage all the system and you have to make sure that the data is consistent wherever it sits has to call secured, it has to be manageable, it has to be archived, so all this functionality of this features with data you have to have in place and for us is then to report to offer the state of measurement really from the back end on premise over Hybrid Cloud scenarios to the Cloud up to the device the HTY's up to your mobile devices so that we have this whole, and it comes to it again, the chain enabled and that's, I think that is really our competitive advantage here in this partnership with NetApp of SAP for NetApp to offer really this complete entry and data management. >> I think the NetApp marketing team likes to call that the data fabric, the ability to create, whether it's ONTAP or Hybrid Cloud solutions, cloud value, etc., having that underlying technology. >> Exactly, and that's my responsibility the alliance media to look at the complete NetApp portfolio, every product and to make a decision together with other partners with product management, with marketing where it fits in the SAP product portfolio because I don't know if you've ever had the chance to look at the complete SAP portfolio. It's quite large. >> Extensive. >> Yesterday's numbers they have 330 solution, 2300 class of product, and of course in alliance media we can't do all the things, that would be crazy. So as an alliance media we usually have to make clear decisions where are the best opportunities to create business with SAP? What are your customers asking for? So looking at our complete product portfolio with ONTAP, ONTAP Select, the AllFlash technology, ACI, the whole Cloud services, Cloud volume, to make decision where this fits in this SAP world. And that's actually the nice thing that, over the time as I explained it, SAP portfolio increased so much from a portfolio functionality point of view that there is almost everywhere a place where the NetApp product will fit. But again, we have to make a decision where is the place to start because you don't want to boil the ocean but that's what we're working on at SAP to play this overall portfolio for the data frapping and entry and data management. >> One of the things Hasso Plattner talked about in his keynote this morning is that they were hearing, you've mentioned that the sheer volume of products that SAP alone had. You can imagine customers going, where do I start? And he was talking about, you know, hearing from customers who are sort of confused, if you look at the SAP Cloud platform all the different integrations, they talked about, kind of, working to sort of simplify, even naming conventions so the customers can understand better. How does that help NetApp be able to, as you said, kind of make the right decisions on you can do so many different things with SAP? Where do you focus the business and also make sure the customer really can clearly understand the different choices that they have from NetApp to work in SAP environments? >> Oh great question, because a short story, when I look back, as I've told you I was working long time for SAP and when you're an employee of a company you always look at your portfolio, your... And the moment when you leave, and I did this in 2010. I was then six years with Citrix. The first, I remember the first Monday when I was, I was sitting at the Citrix desk, the first time ever I looked at the complete SAP portfolio and I said wow, okay this would be a lot of work. And Hasso was totally right because there's so many solutions for different industries and then they have also different solutions for N Class Enterprises for the SAP, down to, for example with SAP Business One, down to the small chaperone to call on, maybe with 10 employees, and when you look at this whole solution package you wonder, okay, how we fit in there? And this whole run simple, make it simpler this really helps us a lot because at the end of the day we have to make sure that we can tell the customer where the NetApp product fits to the over as a people solution. If that piece appears already difficult to understand it won't be easy if we fit to that more or less in a meshful environment so the easier the SAP colleagues from SAP marketing and product management, the easier they make it for their customers to understand how this whole solution would flow to work, the easier for us to explain how our products fit in the same picture, no questions about it. >> So we are at a massive location. The size of this convention center is 16 American football fields. Huge, tons of partners, tons of customers. As this conference comes to a close in the next day, what are some of the things that you are most energized about, that you've heard from SAP with some of the big announcements in terms of, you know the NetApp, SAP relationship continuing? What are some of the things that you just went, yeah? >> I would say, I come now to Sapphire since 2003. Time is flying. But this one is, as we especially, just enormous as you mentioned, enormous space of the show floor and the number of customers be here. The number of partners, if you come to Sapphire for a long time you go to show floor and see right away ah that's a large one, we have more partners. This year it's unbelievable. It's really large, and the nice thing for us here to be part of this ecosystem is that SAP bring all these customers to Sapphire and inviting us to be part of this ecosystem will enable us also to win more customers, no question about it, this is what we really want to do together with SAP here, go into new business areas, winning new customers for new environment, especially in new world of the whole IOT space, Hybrid Cloud scenarios, when in the past when you look at new ways like automotive, IOT space essuvitive, when you look at what we did in the past and then I was not as active in areas as SAP I so that's a great opportunity for us and when you look at whatever SAP announced here at Sapphire it really, everything fits in this strategy so really excited to be here with you too. >> Well Roland we thank you so much for being part of enabling theCUBE to be in the NetApp booth here at Sapphire and we thank you for stopping by and sharing some of the things that you're working on. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAP Sapphire Now 2018. Thanks for watching.

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to the CUBE we are in Orlando, at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018, I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend as my co-host. We're in the NetApp booth, and we are very excited to talk to the VP of the Chief Customer Office at SAP, Mark Marcus, Mark, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, glad to be here I appreciate it. >> This event is enormous. One of the things that really struck me in Bill McDermott's key note was, you know, we always here about, oh we are expecting 20 thousand people, he talked about a million people engaging with SAP SAPPHIRE this week, via the in person, and the live, and the on demand video experiences. Massive! 390 thousand customers, hundreds of customer sessions the voice of the customer validating SAP as one of the world's most valuable brands is not only pervasive here its palpable. So talk to us about the Chief Customer Office. What is it, what's it's mission, why was it created? >> Yes, okay that's a great, a great way, so first of all thank you, I appreciate you being here, I live in Orlando so it's great to see this event in my-- People wonder why SAPPHIRE is actually in Orlando, it's because I live here. (all laughing) >> You're the reason! >> You're the reason. >> I'm the reason SAPPHIRE is in Orlando, Florida. >> Okay, you heard it, Mark Marcus, you're the reason. >> No, so what happened is, when Bill McDermott came to SAP, he was a different type of leader, and what he wanted to do immediately is start meeting with customers. So what he did is, he started meeting with customers, and he said if you have any questions or problems, give me a call. And so what happened is, his phone started ringing, people needed help, so he needed somebody that could help him with the customers when he ran North America. And so that was the genesis to Chief Customer Office. So we started off, first, we were extremely reactive. And so what I mean by that is, if the customer had a problem, we'd have to go in, and we'd have to help them. And it's much more difficult when you have a problem, then try to prevent a problem. So what we've been doin' the last several years, is trying to be much more proactive, so instead of waiting for the phone to ring, we've been getting with customers, and making sure, you know, as their project start, begin their steering committee meetings and make sure that things go well. >> So, you've taken that more proactive approach, it's almost how the organization's evolved. What is the focus today? >> Yes, well the focus has always been the customer, but I think it's more of, taking the best practices that we've learned, and actually sharing those with the customers, and helping them explain how other people have done their journey, because what you'll find, is people are in different phases of their journey, and what they like to hear more of is, you know, what did other customers do, what did they do right, what did they do wrong, and how can we be more successful? So we've been able to, over the years, if you think about, just to put it in perspective again, there are, SAP North America has 158 thousand customers, and we're only on, my particular team only has about a hundred of those customers, that we have. So it's a very, very small amount, they're are ones that, you know, are strategic to SAP, that we get involved in. But what we're able to do though, is, through social media and other areas is, customers wanna hear what happened, again, in the past, and how we can, you know, learn from that and move forward. >> So, I'm a big social media fan. Twitter handle has 38 thousand followers, which a lot for your focus on a hundred customers, so I think that, that you're echoing the, the theme very well. Talk to us about how it's changed over the past, 14 or so years, shift has focused from on-premises solutions to hybrid-cloud, to cloud analytics, AI, what's the, what are customers talking about? >> I'll tell you what, you're talkin' my language now, (Keith laughing) okay, because what happened is what we did is, actually what I'm in part, what I'm a part of is actually the cloud ambassador program. And so what that is, is it's focusing on our cloud customers so, you know, success factors, Ariba, Concur, and those kinda things, and so, really what happened, is, you know, when SAP, when I came to SAP 14 years ago, it was all on-premise ERP, alright? So it's very contained, very controlled with what people had now there's Cloud's, we're not really sure what customers are doing, how they're interacting with the solutions, and so what we have to do is we really focus, and again, my group is 100% focused in on that, so. What part of our mission has been is, we're not necessarily know what customers are doing, so we're helping to understand what they're doing, and trying to help educate groups inside SAP to be more responsive and help them. >> So you mentioned having responsibility for some strategic accounts, about a hundred. Do those represent kind of a subset of some of the key areas in which you're looking for the voice of the customer, and their practice using your technology to influence the direction of some of the key technologies? >> Yes, 'cause I'd say they're some of the biggest, most strategic customers that we have, and so what we do a lot of is, we're able to, we align directly with the executives, at the customer, so one of things with Chief Customer Office, is we're aligned at the C level, so it's, the CIO, the CEO, the CFO, at that level, so we're able to say we heard directly from the leaders of the companies, our most important customers, key customers, and we're able to take that back the other areas of SAP, and say, this is the what the leadership's demanding, and that's what we're able to help them with. >> So, as we're going through this phase of digital transformation, through a lot of organizations, that audience is even more important than, what?! (chuckles) Tell me how, as digital transformation has become, more than just a buzzword but a imperative from the C-suite, from CEOs to CIOs, CMOs, CDO, all the C's, CXO! How has the conversation between those groups changed, from the SAP perspective? >> Yeah, I'll tell ya, that is, again, I'm not just sayin' that you are, you're hitting exactly what we focus in on because, traditionally SAP has been focused more on the CIO level, so it's more the IT groups of implemented ERP, it's been more of a back-office type solution, well now, what we're finding is the line of businesses are the people that are actually making the decisions. So what we're finding out is that, it's not necessarily so much that the, technically, how they work, it's more the business processes they have, and how we can help actually, basically automate, and help them run more smoothly. >> Yeah, Hasso Plattner actually, and some of the guys this morning during the keynote talked about that, in terms of, customers were saying, you know, I'm getting kind of confused, there's so many different product names, a lot of acquisitions, he was talking about that, we heard from customers that there was confusion there. So when he was talking about, in the context of C4 for example of, making things simpler to understand, but also to your point, the back office and the front office now has to be connected so they also talked about that, in terms of, the integration with SAP Cloud, and how they really focused on enabling wholistic integration because it's the processes that have to now communicate together, so that, a whole, kind of proactive, customer responsiveness, that was really apparent this morning. 46 years young SAP, you have a new initiative about the customer for life, tell us about that. >> Okay, so customer for life is a new initiative that we have, so what I told you, at the Chief Customer Office we've done, we're able to touch very few customers, but, you know, again, you know we have 156 thousand, in SAP North America, you know, multiply that all over the world, I mean, it's many customers, okay. So what we've tried to do, is take what we've done on a small scale in the Chief Customer Office, and make that pervasive throughout the whole company. And so what we're really good at too is actually, you know, understanding what the customers do, finding them a solution, but now what we wanna do is go through the whole life-cycle of what we do so, I mentioned, you know, having a customer executive assigned to every customer. Being able to be part of the steering committees that we have, and being able to follow them through so we can help guide them, so it's not only selling the solutions but actually helping them through all the way, so the new initiative we set is customer for life, it's something that we're rolling out right now, and we've had, and again, it's taking what we did in the Chief Customer Office and, you know, propagating that through the rest of SAP. >> So, this facility, you like to say it, 16 football fields, American football fields, so that's a big facility. I walked the facility this morning, got in about three thousand steps. Hundred plus partners on the floor, ranging from system integrators, technology partners, and infrastructure space, software SIs. Help us understand as SAP, 20 thousand plus people here at the show, a million people online engaging on SAPPHIRE, SAP is becoming a platform company. How has that changed your role, your conversations? >> Well, I think what has happened a lot is, especially in the cloud projects, again I'm gonna focus more on what I'm a part of is, you know, there's a lot of new partners that come up. Because what happened is that, you know, we acquired several companies, we did, you know Concur, Ariba, SuccessFactors, a lot of big companies, and a lot of different partners. So really what our role is, in the Chief Customer Office is, to basically, to help these partners to understand how to work together, and we do a lot of things in meetings, we have, what we do, is, it's usually like the three legged stool, it is, you know, it's SAP, the partner, and the customer together, and we all do that together. And what I've found is, some of the problems that we've had is not neces-- you know, I always say like, how can take the exact same solution, and it works well in one company, and it doesn't work in another company? And what it is, to your point, with all the partners here, is it's communication, are they working together, you know, is the partner, and SAP, and the customer all working together, and so that's what I'm really focused on today is meeting with all the, you know, do the SAPPHIREs, to meet with the partners, to make sure we're aligned, you know, talk about our key customers, and make sure that we're all working together. >> We talked to one of the gentleman yesterday who was running some of the communities around HANA and Leonardo and, just the massive amount of content that is being generated to enable and educate customers across 25 plus industries, was massive, as well as, leveraging that peer validation from customers, like you're saying, you know, some customers in certain industries have a ton of success with the same thing that others customers struggle, depending on a lot of different variables. So that sort of collaboration and communication, even within the SAP communities alone, was very apparent yesterday that that's one of the big drivers, of I'm sure, the customer for life initiative is, as you have evolved, so have your customers. One thing that struck me yesterday was, you know, looking at, you're now number 17 of the World's top most valuable brands up there with Apple, you know, products that we can engage with and, I saw on a bus yesterday some of the messaging, and ERP you can talk to, and hear from. (Keith laughing) So SAP really set a very lofty ambition of being up there with the Amazons, and the Coca-Colas, and the Googles, and now you have technology that people can, you know, like at home with their digital assistant, talk to and communicate with. I thought that was very powerful message. >> And I'd say that's, I'd say too that, you know, I've worked with SAP for 14 years, and when I came to SAP, nobody had really heard of SAP and what they were, they thought maybe, you know, sometimes on TV when you see SAP when it's translated in other languages or something, that's what they think of SAP, they don't really know what the company is but, yeah, it's been great to see how, you know, people would stop you, you know, whether you're wearin', you know, they'll see somethin' on your laptop, on your shirts or somethin' like that, yeah so it's been good. I think that's been a big focus of getting it out because, one thing is is we have 150 million cloud users, that's a lot of people, so a lot of people use SAP, so. Again, one of the cloud products that we have is called Concur, it's for expense and reporting, and so a lot of times people might not've heard of SAP, but they've heard of Concur, because they all do their expenses, that kinda stuff. So, exactly right, it is pretty good, you know, when you have even family members know who SAP is now. They've done a great job, you know, hiring, you know, with the market department and the people they've hired, it's been great, it's been good. >> So, okay, we talked a little bit about analytics and the customer experience as we're looking at intelligent business. Is that a message that's actually resonating with customers in that top 100 strategic accounts, are they using analytics to actually power business, What are some of the data analysis success stories? >> Yeah, I would say that, what I would say is that, what I've found a lot of times is that, you know, people can get the information in, but they need to be able to get the information out. And so, everybody across that has done it, so, I would just say almost every customer we have has basically needed to get that out, and do reporting and those kinda things, you know? So, part of what we do at the Chief Customer Office is, you know, not only, you know, help them with the reports that they have, but to be able to run that kinda stuff. >> You guys also have, you know, some really interesting use-cases, I'm a Formula One fan, I've worked with Formula One before, I'm, I understand it from a fan perspective. You guys are really involved in McLaren Motorsport, for example, from finance, to procurement, to manufacturing. How are you seeing some of these really big use-cases like Formula One, or Coca-Cola, infuse into some of the, you know, the mid-sized businesses, who, you say, might be using Concur for example. What is some of the value that a small company can get from the massive users? >> Yeah, well I'd say there's a lot of things, because what happens is that from those big massive customers that we have, we're able to put together as we call model company. And so what a model company is, is it takes the best practices you have and puts it into more of a, I'd say nothings out-of-the-box, but makes it much more easier to implement, to be able to do it, so what we're able to do is, you know, with the massive amounts of info like McLaren, I think Hasso mentioned what, there's 400 sensors that they're getting on their cars, and that kind of stuff. So basically being able to take all the information that we have, and then from that, distill it down into where it's a very, repeatable type instance we can use for other customers. So there's a lot, I mean that's what we do with a lot of the, what the customers have, we try to get that back to where other people can use it. >> A Formula One car is basically an IOT device. You said 400 sensors, generating a ton of data, per race weekend, times three days, times 20 events a year. I read from Gartner just the other day that by 2020, which is around the corner, there's expected to be 20 billion IOT devices. What are you hearing from your customer base regarding IOT and being able to synchronize this, you know, modern next-gen data center with myriad devices? >> Yeah, so that is one of our top initiatives that we have right now. Because, one of the things that we've done is, we have an offering that we have called Leonardo, and what Leonardo is, it was named after the inventor Leonardo da Vinci, alright? So, you know, in his time he was, you know, a great innovator, actually went and saw his house and went over to Europe, and I've done a lot with Leonardo, you know what I'm sayin'? To be able to do that, right? But what that is, is that's basically all about, you know, getting devices to be able to get that information in. Because what you do is, you have you know, thousands of sensors and stuff like that and a good, you asked me earlier about a good success story on that, is one of the ones that I think resonates the most on that is in Buenos Aires, they have a massive problem with rain, you know, it rains a lot, and they have severe flooding, and the architecture is antiquated. But what they've found, is the reason that they were having these flooding problems, is because the sewers and the drains were all getting clogged up. So what they did was, they put a sensor in every one of the drains to be able to make sure that they were unclogged and they were flowing freely. So what they did is, they were able to, if the water flow started going down they were able to empty out the drains, even with an antiquated sewer system, because they were keeping it aligned with, you know, using Leonardo now, they can go and keep it cleaned out, they've had massive rains and the flooding hasn't really been there where it is, so now, what's interesting is every time I go by and see a gutter that's all clogged up, I think, you know, they need Leonardo to be able to help! >> I was reading as well about Alicia Tillman, your CMO, who's been at the helm for about nine months now and, in the context of this desire to become one of the top global brands with an invisible product, she said, you know, that one of the most important things for SAP right now is brand narrative, messages and campaigns will change quarterly or, every six months as they should but, she said, you know, to be able to show the value of basically under-the-hood software, you've gotta be able to show how it transforms countries, lives, industries, and that's one of the things that I think is very, very palpable here at the event is how much impact SAP is making in, whether it's rhino conservation in Africa or, you know, helping water scarcity in India, the impact, which is really the most, the biggest validation that you get, right from the voice of your customers is massive. >> Yeah, and I'd say to that, you know I like to say that, you know, it sounds like, you know, yes we're a software company, and, you know, that kinda stuff, but, it is really a noble endeavor, because we are doing a lot of things to help people's lives, and to run their businesses better, and what you realize is that, Chief Customer Office sometimes we see that other side when the systems aren't running properly at times, you know, they're usually runnin' right, but sometimes they have problems, and when they do, you can just see the impact you have on, you know, people's lives and businesses and stuff like that, that it is really running, you know, it is core to what you have, you know. So I'll tell you one of the interesting things that SAP's involved in is, they do a lot with instant messaging, so they have a part of, one of the acquisitions we have does instant messaging, well, you don't think about that but like, when you use, let's say, Facebook Messenger, or something like that, those messages go inside an SAP infrastructure at times, right? So imagine, you know, if you can't change messages, or doin' those kinda things, you know, so. You're exactly right, it definitely does, what we're doing does really impact a lot of peoples lives, so it's important. >> Well mark, thanks so much for taking some time to stop by theCUBE and chat with us about what SAP is doing with customers, how they're really symbiotically working together with you to evolve and transform this company. >> I wanna say one other thing too, it's great to work with two professionals here, you guys have really helped me a lot. >> Aww! >> I don't do this a lot, but it really made me feel comfortable, so you, I appreciate your help, thank you. >> Our pleasure, thanks so much! And, so you're the reason SAPPHIRE's in Orlando, are you also the reason they got Justin Timberlake tomorrow night?! (Mark laughing) >> I would like that. But I would like to say real quick, one thing before we cut real quick, I would like to say one thing just about the NetApp partnership we have. So RJ Bibby is the person that I work with at NetApp, and, just what he's done to basically, because NetApp really helps run a lot of our infrastructure inside SAP, so it's success factors, some of the high-availability in things that we have, and just working with RJ, and kinda learning how we, how we work and can help other customers, they've really volunteered to help a lot of our customers, and so, I just wanna thank NetApp again for helping us sponsor this. >> Great, great closing. We wanna thank NetApp for having theCUBE in their booth. Lisa Martin, with Keith Townsend, we are at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018, thanks for watching! (bubbly music)

>> 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.

>> From Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we are in Orlando Florida, at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018 in the NetApp booth. We're excited to welcome to theCUBE from SAP the SVP of global technology partners Joe Zarb. Joe, welcome to theCUBE. >> I am so happy to be here. Thank you for having me, excited to share with you all the great things that are going on here at SAPPHIRE and with SAP. >> This event is huge. Bill McDermott was saying this morning in his keynote that it's the biggest SAPPHIRE that you guys have ever done, and one of the numbers, he gave a lot of numbers this morning, I always geek out on numbers, >> Right. (laughs) >> He said you guys are expecting about a million people to engage with SAP related to SAPPHIRE. That's incredible. >> It's incredible, it's incredible. A million people, think about the global reach a company with 70% of the world's commerce transactions going through our systems, people want to know what's next? What's coming out next from an innovation point of view, what are our leaders saying? What are our partners saying about where the future is and it really speaks to the whole concept of digitizing business processes. Every company wants to be a startup and I think what you're seeing here is a lot of that excitement that SAP, we just consider ourselves a very big startup with a broad reach. So, I think Bill was able to capture that excitement, convey that excitement and I think the ecosystem is reflecting that. >> A 46 year old startup nonetheless, right? >> Yeah, right exactly. >> So as the leader of the technology partners, talk to us about how those technology partners have been fundamental in SAP's transformation. >> Totally fundamental, particularly as SAP starts to transform into really a platform company. The platform provides a level of abstraction that customers can leverage to simplify their infrastructure and their access to applications, and it also creates extensibility and it's all about the partner ecosystem. So one of the biggest agenda items that we have in terms of that is really the whole hyper-converged infrastructure play, and it's really going to be something that is going to help customers innovate, drive down costs and drive up ROI. There's very few plays that are a triple whammy and this is one of them. So the partner ecosystem to us that spans our global service providers, our technology partners which are both hardware and software partners, but we also have data syndication partners, and we have other partners in the management consultant fields, et cetera. They all contribute to expanding and enhancing our digital platform and our applications. >> So, one of the areas I like to challenge infrastructure companies on, NetApp is a data-driven infrastructure company, and when you're talking to enterprise, application-centric people, infrastructure's one of these things that's an afterthought. >> Right. >> But HCI is really changing the game. NetApp's SolidFire Division along with some of their now compute innovations to form this new HCI story. Can you provide some color? What's the significance of having an HCI based infrastructure for your SAP deployment? >> Yes, that's a great question. First let me back up and I completely agree with you, when you talk to most customers, their eyes glaze over when you start talking about storage, what have you, but when you start talking about the sophisticated customers that are driving innovation and trying to transform their business, there's really three technical elements that they're very focused on. One is connectivity. They're trying to connect to all kinds of devices, business processes, and aspects of their business that haven't been connected. They're connecting because they want to retrieve signals from areas in the field and areas of customers and products they've never collected before, as they connect these signals, they're creating tremendous storages of data. And so, until you get over that, realize the enormity of that problem and the scope of "How do you now take this data "and turn it into a collection "of perishable insights that you can act on?" Until you've reached that level of sophistication, you don't understand why a company like NetApp is critical to your entire digital infrastructure and story. And that whole hyper-converged area is really the ability to promise, it's a promise to the customer that their workload can scale essentially infinitely on premise, in the cloud, cloud to cloud, back to on premise. And so at SAP, as an application provider, we look at applications that are going to run at the edge, at the core and on premise, and in the cloud. HCI helps us deliver that vision at the application tier but you have to have the platform and the infrastructure there. And NetApp is a great partner to help us fulfill that vision as well as other partners, but they're very key. >> So you have your business applications, you have SAP HANA from a database and memory database capability. Now we're talking about the Leonardo stack. You have this, what's becoming a platform, and as a platform provider, you look towards your ecosystem to extend the capability of the platform, to create more value. Where are you seeing the value generated in the partnership with NetApp? >> That's a great question, so all of our partners have the ability to one, reinforce the dominance in those markets we choose to serve and those applications we choose to deliver. However the real value of the ecosystem and a company like NetApp, is when they take us out of our comfort zone, and by taking us out of our comfort zone, they're taking us to roll your own applications, custom applications, or third party non-SAP applications where they're storing and managing the data yet making it accessible to Leonardo for machine learning, to create block chain scenarios where we can create trusted relationships, leveraging data that may not be SAP data, and also in the whole internet of things. Connecting to sensors and using that data from sensors in ways that really have nothing to do with SAP's core applications per se, but may have benefits to the customer in ways that really needs to be co-innovated. So our partners are a critical player to put us outside of our comfort zone, force us to grow, force us to learn, force us to expand, and NetApp has proven to be one of those partners that can deal with a myriad of data types from a myriad of applications that force us to stretch into voice recognition, to force us into data mining and data analytics and the like. >> So as we talk about pushing out of your comfort zone, SAP has been extremely steady in being able to provide a mixture between hardware partners, whether it's appliance model for deployment of HANA to a partnerships with first level support through partners such as NetApp. Talk through where you guys are at in the partnership, specifically with a technology that's killer, that Bill talked about which is SAP HANA on HCI. Are we going to see HANA on HCI in the near future? Customers are really interested in it and it seems like a slam dunk. >> It seems like a no brainer, right? >> Yeah, like no brainer, yeah. >> And it is, it is a no brainer. We're going to see HANA on HCI, not because SAP wants HANA on HCI, it's because our customers want HANA on HCI, and we're slaves to our customers. So where we are right now is we know that we are a trusted supplier and provider to our customers and they know that the SAP brand stands for integrity and all of the -ilities that go with running a large complex enterprise, reliability, serviceability, maintainability et cetera. So we're actually working very closely with all of our HCI partners to go through a rather arduous certification process. Through that certification process it's a commitment that we're asking them to make and they're asking us to make for the long term. I don't like the word certification, I prefer new product introduction, because what we're asking them to do is build their products, tune it to our products, we're going to do the same and we're going to continuously innovate and continuously introduce new products. So the word, the former word, is certification. All I can say is, we don't like to pre-release or announce anything so watch this space, but I am so excited to be a tech head. >> What are some of the, if we look at a retailer, for example, who has to work with, say it's an apparel manufacturer and they've got a designer they've got to work with, textiles, all these different sources of information and it might take a year from a design to go from concept to actual product that they can sell. So you mentioned and I really like that you talked about insights as perishable, it was something about actionalbe insights, but for a company like an apparel company who has such a long cycle from concept to delivery, how will HCI facilitate them being able to link and sync, what Bill McDermott said this morning is, synchronize the supply chain with the demand chain? >> Right, yes, that whole value chain, value proposition. So, the beautiful thing is, all of those companies have a track record and a history of data. A lot of that data is right now in NetApp. So there's a lot of learnings and knowledge that haven't been mined and pooled out of that data that exists today. HCI is going to enable a couple of things. One is when you look at a distributed supply chain, we have probably the industry's leading distributed supply chain solution, track and trace capabilities, to be able to follow that product throughout it's life cycle. As we capture that data with HCI infrastructure, we're going to be able to analyze and transform those business processes, candidly, in ways that we haven't thought of yet. The beauty of HCI is, when you talk about retailers you're often times dealing with companies that have wire thin margins, so they want to be able to create products quickly, get them to market quickly and do it within the cost constraints. HCI is one of those rare platform and enabling technologies that delivers on that. It's going to allow you to rightsize your workload in the cloud or on premise or on the right size servers et cetera. And it's going to allow you to scale up as needed and manage a more efficient yet effective infrastructure. So I see HCI playing a role not only in retailers, but really across all industries. It's one of those really beautiful horizontal technologies that adds immediate value to those people that have reached that maturity curve. >> So as we talk about these advanced applications, can't help but get into topics such as ILT, edge in general, applications as we look at SAP as a platform company, applications SAP may not build directly but have to integrate with. How do you see HCI and your global partners figuring into those advanced applications and the infrastructure around that? >> Yeah so that's a great question, thank you. If you really look at those new emerging applications that are edge, core and cloud, lots of moving parts. Lots of moving parts gives you the opportunity to rightsize the workload and the processing at the edge or at the core at the cloud, but it also creates a tremendous amount of complexity. So to really create a breakthrough, you have to radically simplify and standardize the processes that manage that core, cloud, edge relationship. If you can create that environment, then people can deploy, manage, monitor, maintain these environments much more effectively with a lower skillset, right? So there's not that hurdle. I kind of think of it as today's IT infrastructure is kind of like a manual car and as you get bigger IT it becomes an 18-wheeler, it's a little hard to, unwieldy. You've got to be really good at driving in reverse and stuff like that. When you add HCI you're not necessarily going to an autonomous car but you've definitely got an automatic transmission, you probably could do a couple of things pretty well automatically right? And that allows a whole new class of drivers to get in the car. And so I think that's what HCI is going to do, as the architectures and the deployment methods get more complex, it's going to keep it manageable and within a skill base and price point that people can live with. >> I like that analogy, I think that's very simple to follow speaking of simplicity. I wanted to ask you about when you guys are going to market with partners. Bill McDermott has been very vocal, as we talked about when we kicked off this segment, about wanting to be one of the top ten most valuable brands. Among the likes of Apple, Coca-Cola, Mercedes Benz, Google, who sell products that we can touch and wear and feel and see. With technology like SAP and even, say, what you're doing with NetApp on hyper-converged, what's the conversation like when you're talking about products that people may not even know are under the hood? How do you ignite a customer to be excited? What are some of those exciting customer examples that you see that really show how this technology from SAP and your partners can change a company, change an industry, change a life? >> Right. That's a great question and it's really the essence of a brand right? So first I would encourage all of your viewers, go play Bill's keynote from SAPPHIRE today, I mean, I think he was totally evangelical and I think he painted the picture so. From my perspective the brand, so first all of those brands that you mentioned, right, Apple and Google, these are all loyal SAP customers. They're also SAP partners so we're punching with the heavyweights. We're at, I think, number 17 in brand equity and we're working our way up. I think our focus isn't so much touching and feeling our products. I think it's more about trust, making a promise and a commitment to the market and that market validating that commitment and statement with money. Basically buying our products, deploying our products, and basing their business on our products. And so, when I think of SAP becoming that brand as more and more companies continue to rely on us, trust in us and as we become a more integrated economy and society, they're going to realize Apple is going to be able to trust Google because they're using SAP and they know there's integrity of the data and their processing. Google's going to be able to trust their suppliers, like NetApp and HP and et cetera because they're using SAP as well. So there's this, basically this movement of trust and brand identity that will be validated by our customers. We create the message, the customers create the brand. So I think that's our approach. >> Like trust is the new currency. >> It is, it really is, particularly in the data-based, data-oriented society and economy. >> My good friend Tom, on Twitter said that the future is data, the future isn't databases. So, I thought it was a brilliant quote, so shout out to Tom. So as we look at that, the future is data and not databases, and you guys have rolled out an established database in HANA, but how do you refocus, not on the actual technology but on the data itself as it relates to, you know NetApp has started to market themselves as a data-driven company. What's the relationship between the infrastructure, the database, the application and the actual data? >> So, good question, it's a long answer, so let me try to net out a couple of key areas there. So if you kind of look at data, data plays a point of origination where you're going to enter data and capture the transactions of the business. It's also the source of innovation. After capturing all that data there are these perishable insights and there are these anomalies and signals that are trapped in there that you're going to pull out. So when you look at the infrastructure itself, our belief is that consumers and the consumer experience with technology has created a very real time society. We chat in real time, we post images in real time, we message in real time and we believe that level of performance is what enterprises are going to demand. Batches going away. People, they don't want to hear, "Oh no it takes hours "to sift though a petabyte of data." They don't want to hear it. So they want to move to, they want their answers now, and so that's what we've really focused on is that whole real time experience, and we believe that data, like you said data, it is going to be both the source of insight, it's going to be the system of record and then it's really going to be the basis of the next generation products and services. So if you look at all the companies that people are trying to copy and mirror, they're giving away their software products and they're monetizing the insights that they glean from that data, right? So Facebook makes their money off of advertising that is based on your likes and preferences and shares, et cetera, like that. So their business isn't software, it's how do I monetize that data, that behavior that is trapped in that data, how do I surface those behaviors? So we think that's very core to us. We have a group within SAP that works with our partners and customers to help them build data-driven business models, data-driven business products and data-driven solutions and NetApp is core to all that. I think once you get and start to deal with the order of magnitude of data that we're talking about here, you have to move to an HCI and you have to move to a trusted player like that. >> The Facebook example as we wrap things up, you kind of just alluded to one of the things that I've heard some of your execs saying, including your CMO, Alicia Tillman, where, our customers don't care about the technology, they care about their customers and you kind of just articulated that really well. That that's what you need to be able to enable is what Facebook is delivering, what Apple is delivering, or what Google is delivering. So thanks so much Joe, for stopping by and sharing what you guys are doing with partners to really kind of fundamentally change the direction that SAP is going in. >> Thanks, it's great to be here and thanks for having me. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAPPHIRE 2018, thanks for watching. (digital music)