>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering Boomi World 2018. Brought to you by Dell Boomi. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are continuing our coverage of Boomi World 2018. I'm Lisa Martin in Las Vegas with John Furrier and we're welcoming to theCUBE, Pragnya Paramita, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Dell Boomi. Pragnya, welcome. >> Hi, nice to meet you guys. >> So second annual Dell Boomi World, we had Mandy Dhaliwal, your CMO, on shortly, ago who said doubled from last year. Some of the really cool stats that caught my ears and eyes this morning during the general session are 7500 plus customers globally that Dell Boomi has now. You're adding five new customers everyday. There are about close to 70 different customers speaking at this event. The customers are coming together to share how Dell Boomi is helping them on this nebulous, daunting transformation journey. Talk to us about some of the news coming out in the last couple of days, and as a product marketing manager, what are some of the things that excite you? >> I think, after the last few weeks, what we've been able to put out in the market with our partnership with the Blockchain consortium has been really exciting. To be working for a company that's always been at the cutting edge and looking to do things at the cutting edge, just as an employee, that's like a really cool thing to be a part of. But what I'm really excited about is tomorrow's Keynote. And I know we've probably been teasing everybody through the day about tomorrow's Keynote but I'm really excited to unveil what we are going to be showing you guys tomorrow. >> So one of the things that's exciting about you guys is that the product market fit is clear with customer traction. As you guys look at, say, Blockchain smart contracts, this is about business, so you're messaging around, connecting businesses with developer integration as a starting point with low code is a productivity question, it's a foundational question. As you have this platform, what's some of the product positionings that you guys are looking to expand on? Obviously we heard Michael Dell today say, data tsunami, scaling AI. These are questions that people want to have answers. Is that how you guys see the positioning when you go to market? >> So, at first positioning I think the true value that we do provide our customers is fast time to market, so I think speed and the ability to do things efficiently and being the first to market is what our customers really value and we want to be able to power that so that's goal to our positioning in the market. The other one is flexibility. I think with each vendor and consolidation happening around in the market, people are marking their turfs and territory and in this day and event, at Boomi, we really want to be an open ecosystem. You bring your data, you bring your application, you bring your cloud. You could have a hybrid environment as you operate your business, Boomi will connect to everything, and I think that is a cool part of our messaging that we want to make sure customers understand, we want to make sure the market understand that we'll be true to that. >> As you got the cool technology with the Cloud-Native, you guys are born in the cloud, still operating at cloud scale, as you sit at the product marketing meetings and think about the customers, you're solving a lot of problems, there's a lot of check boxes on the solving customer problems but you also want a position for the future. So I got to ask you, when you look at your customer base holistically, what's the core problem that you guys solve for your customers? >> I think unlocking the value of the data, customer data. So it resides in siloed application, it resides in parts of business that some... So if you're not the American business, your ability to interact with your Australian counterparts is not only restricted by time zones but it's also restricted by laws and data protection and all of those things which governments are waking up to. And to be able to do that securely, to be able to do that at a scale, is something that we want to be able to deliver to our customers. And I think our ability to be a Cloud-Native platform allows us that flexibility to do it in a way that customers feel comfortable and again, are able to get some value back from their data. >> So about six months ago, the Gartner Magic Quadrant for IPAAS came out and once again I think, John, we've heard today for the fifth year in a row Dell Boomi is a strong leader. I'm curious, six months later, now, today, you guys said we are re-imagining the I in iPaaS. From a market that's well established, highly competitive, that now customers, it's not just about integrating applications, it's integrating data from new sources, from existing sources, to be able to identify new revenue streams, new products, new services. What is it about this re-imagining the I to be intelligence, that, in your opinion, is going to further really kind of elevate Dell Boomi's competitive differentiation. >> So, the true differentiation is that in the market, we were the first who were a Native-Cloud application. So the value of that single instance multi-tenant cloud application is what we are really leveraging as part of our intelligence in the platform. So many of our competitors and other vendors in the market have probably caught on to this whole cloud thing in the last couple of years. But at the end of the day, we have 10 years of a lead with them, that would be hard for them to match. And again, it is value from what customers have been doing on our platform, so our ability to look at that enormous amount of data anonymously and then provide value back to them has been really critical to our success in how our customers have found value and I guess with the ability for us to leverage AI and machine learning capabilities within the platform, we want to be able to make it much more easier for our customers. >> So in terms of business initiatives, some of the key ones that Dell Boomi targets are e-commerce, order to cash, Customer 360, as well as onboarding. Talk to us, I really like that Chris McNabb, in the general session this morning kind of opened the kimono and said, "Hey, we found, "through the voice of our own employees, "we weren't so great in this particular area." Talk to us about the Dell Boomi employee onboarding solution and how it was really born based on your own internal needs for improvement. >> So I joined a year ago, I was employee number 300 something, and this year we are at employee number 700 plus, maybe going onto 800 at the last we heard, so you can imagine the scale that the company is growing at and for us and I guess what Chris articulated this morning, employee onboarding was becoming a choke point, not only in making sure employees are productive faster, but are also enjoying this new company that they've decided to, you know, become a part of. We, at Boomi, as Boomers ourselves, do really value our culture a lot, but that didn't quite reflect in the employee onboarding experience that we were providing, and I think that was a big stimulus, Chris shared the numbers of our NPS scores that he saw, for him to say that hey, we are running at a really fast pace but this is critical issue. >> Pretty big negative number a year ago or six months ago on that end. >> And as a CEO, he decided this is a priority, but then as we went through this exercise, what we were able to find out that it's not only a challenge that we are facing, but our customers, both large and small, continue facing that issue. So the approach that we took was while we were solving our own employee onboarding challenge, we were able to productize that entire solution and create an accelerator. And the value of that accelerator, it's a common problem, we know it is a problem that happens at scale, and at a certain scale it becomes really detrimental to your business. But then your business is really unique so we cannot give you a one-size-fit-all solution that you can go and turn on on day one and it'll work. What we are giving you here is a framework, we leveraged it, we had great results, we are more than happy to share that back, that something that took like 92 days for an employee to get access to 27 applications now takes minutes, like literally five minutes. What took about 19 admins across the organizations who were doing this as a second job almost, because we're a small company, the guy who bought the license for this new software that he wanted his team to use, became the admin for that product, and now his team is, from seven people, it's now 52 people. But he's still the admin of that product, along with managing that solution, so all of that effort was consolidated from 19 people to like two people, that's real gain there in just employee productivity that we have been able to standardize. And what we are doing now is taking the solution and the accelerator package to our customers and we are having some great conversation with many of our customers who had initially looked at Boomi and said like, hey, you guys provide us an integration solution to our problem. But at the end of the day, onboarding, as within an organization, is a cross-functional issue. It ties together workflows from your finance team, from your benefits team, from your recruiting team who is getting the candidate to your HR, who is going to make sure-- >> Facilities where you sit, all kinds of data. >> All kinds of things, and making sure you have your laptop and your badges and all of those things on day one. So a lot of people in the organizations are like these silent heroes who are making sure that every employee who shows up on day one has a good experience but there's only so far that a manual process can go, and being able to automate that process, and a good reason why we are now able to do this is because of Boomi Flow. The ManyWho acquisition that we did last year, it has opened doors for us to have conversations with our customers where we are like, you have cross-functional processes, you need to be able to automate them as much as possible and let your employees actually do more value added work instead of being, you know, sending emails and then collating emails with data from every place, putting it in a spreadsheet, adding that to your SAP, or your workday system and-- >> So that sounds like that's the consequence of two problems, I hear this right, one, data silos and manual or purpose-built applications that are dependent upon data silos. No data silos allows for automation, and then everything kind of goes away and solves the problem. Is that right? >> Yeah, absolutely. So cross-functional workflows are something that when people try to solve, they end up causing the integration problem at the end of the day. So you try to solve for one thing but then integration is always at the core of it. With Boomi, because we are coming integration up, we sort of automatically solve for that, but then with Boomi Flow, what we are able to do is we are able to abstract that away from users who don't really care about how you're going to get two applications to work together, so if you are in the HR team, you just want to make sure that here is the value proposition for the organization that I hired these employees for, they get to see that. I don't really care if your 15 applications need to work together at the backend. (cross talking) >> American Airlines example's a good one, they've hundreds of integrations, some will ship it and forget it. They won't have to remember it, hey, number 52, what was that again? Solved the problem but broke this over there. That's kind of the problem that is the core issue, right? >> It's a core issue. So we have a session later today with American Airlines, and MOD Pizza. So, both of them are a study in contrast. MOD Pizza is an organization that was founded a couple of years ago, around the same time that American Airlines and US Airways merges was happening. So the session is very interesting because you get a perspective from a company that started in 2011 or 2013, and took an approach of being a Cloud-Native infrastructure. So they make choices where all of their applications are in the Cloud but then when they grew at a certain scale, employee onboarding became an issue, they came to Boomi and how they are solving it, and on the flip side of it, you have a perspective from a large organization that around the same time relogged that their employee onboarding issues and then looked at Boomi and then said that, hey, how can we solve this? And as they said in the Keynote, good is not good enough, you need to have a great experience. >> Well you've also raised your NPS score 168 points, and now you've got an opportunity to reach customers in a different way, like you said to be able to integrate these functions and have to work together, that abstraction layer is critical for the business being more efficient and more productive. Finding new revenue streams faster, being more competitive, and really unlocking the value of that data so it can be used across multiple business units within organizations at the same time. Pragnya, thanks so much for stopping by and joining John and me on theCUBE today. >> Yeah, it was great talking to you guys. >> We appreciate it and have a great time at-- >> Hope you have a great Boomi World. >> Absolutely, off to a great start. Thanks so much for your time. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE, Live from Boomi World 18 in Vegas, stick around, John and I will be back with our next guest. (light music)

>> Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering Smartsheet ENGAGE '18. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Smartsheet ENGAGE 2018 from Bellevue, Washington, I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm sitting here with a couple of Smartsheeters. We've got Steven Branstetter, the VP of customer and partner success. And, Mike Andrews, you are the VP of strategic accounts. Guys, welcome! >> Thanks for having us. >> You're Smartsheeters! >> That's right. >> We are. >> I have to say, I was very scared to say that on the air, and I did it twice now, and I'm going to stop, 'cause I didn't mess it up. So, Steven, running customer and partner success. I want to start there, because customer success as a term can mean different things to different companies. Something that I read that you wrote recently was customers' feedback saying, "Guys at Smartsheet, you need to be operating a different playbook for customer success." So, first question: How do you define and deliver customer success at Smartsheet? >> Right, so, first of all, customer success is often looked at as a single department, and it's not. It is a whole company effort. You've talked with our product folks, talking with sales, everyone in the organization is part of that customer success. What they're telling us, what the customers are telling us is customer success primarily is about change management. We're going through a transformation that has a lot to do with your product, not everything to do with your product. But, we need help with that transformation. And, what you saw on the keynote was you saw three folks standing up who said, "I, at my organization, signed up "to do this really hard thing." And, we didn't have a playbook as to how to do that thing. What we try to do as a customer success organization, as a company, is make sure we're standing behind that person. So, when that person comes out and says, I can accomplish that thing, that unsolvable thing for our organization, and I can do that on Smartsheet, we want to make sure that person is successful. And so, sometimes, that's the customer success team. Sometimes, that's the training team. Sometimes, that's our consulting team. Sometimes, it's elements of product helping to come alongside them, showing them what's possible. So, customer success at Smartsheet is holistic. It's not meant to be a single department. This is a company effort, so that when folks do raise that hand and take on that impossible task, that we're with them to make sure they can accomplish that. And, that creates the stories that you heard earlier today. >> And, what Steven's talking about is, during the general session this morning, the CEO, Mark Mader, actually went down to the audience and just randomly asked several, maybe three customers to talk about how Smartsheet is empowering them. And, it was really interesting how articulate they were, being put on the spot. But, how they were able to speak so eloquently to how they are facilitating this transformation. You mentioned change management. That's a hard thing to do. >> It is. When you're looking at an enterprise that has a ton of applications, and, Mike, you know this well, being a sales leader, they're comfortable with certain applications, yet companies grow organically by acquisition, and there's a lot of different tools that some groups are married to. Other groups are, eh, I'm not so sure. To transform digitally, cultural transformation is probably step one. So, how are you seeing, and, this is the second part question to you, Mike. How have you evolved CS in Smartsheet to be facilitators of that change management, not only for customers, but for you guys as well? >> So, one of the things we thought early on was, we tried this new thing, it was called Office Hours, and we did it at one of our largest customers, and it was a huge success. Literally, the first day we do it, 400 people show up on this webcast, and it was fantastic. And so, I talk with Mike, and we talked with organizations saying, we have this new thing, Ii's going to be amazing. The feedback was fantastic. We go to that next organization to roll out the same thing, and four people show up instead of 400. >> Wow. >> And so, one of the things that's been really important for us is understanding not all organizations are the same, especially in the enterprise. That, as we create that playbook, there's certain elements that absolutely resonate at, maybe, our tech customers, that don't resonate at all in the manufacturing space or organizations, and that each of those organizations are different. So, we've built a lot of that playbook with an understanding that different elements of it are going to be applicable at different organizations. And, that's the way we've approached it, which has been really successful, where we know there are elements that have to happen. We know there are elements where we need to have scalable programs. Not everything can be one-on-one. But, at most organizations, there has to be some level of one-on-one connection as well. And, whether that's a big Smartsheet day which we'll run, which folks will fly their own folks into, it's almost like a mini ENGAGE conference at their own organization. Or, whether that's all over the Web. So, we'll go to some customers. We'll show up in person, and there's a big meeting room, there's only four people there. And, they tell us, well, there's actually 200 people watching this. And so, it's figuring out that motion, at least at the enterprise, that's different for every organization. But, as you also know, we have a long tail through our organization as well. So, while we have those really large customers, we also have this long tail where we need to meet those customers at scale. We need to provide programs. So, our Center of Excellence is a good example of that. Our Webinar series is good example of that, where we provide these motions that at a scaled element, so even our smallest customer can take advantage of it. >> Awesome, so, Mike, transitioning over to you. So, I love stats. Geeky, very geeky, but I admit it freely. I was looking at Smartsheet, 75000 customers. Here, you have about 1100 companies represented over 20 countries. You guys have presence in half the Fortune 500, 90% of the Fortune 100, lot of customers, pan industry. Some of the things that they were hearing from you guys, or, rather, you're hearing from them is, we want you to build for scale, as you were talking about, Steven. We want you to teach us how to phish. And, they want you, also, to help them do it right and do it fast. How are you helping customers do it right and do it fast? Can you do both at the same time? >> Absolutely, we're proving that. And, I think, something that's really unique about how we go to market, and really the basis of our ethos as a business, is we're obsessed with keeping the software easy to use. And, as we add functionality to not get it heavy and put friction in place. So, when we think about engaging with the biggest companies in the world, we have the benefit of starting from organic adoption, where individuals and teams are using the software. They're experiencing value, they're sharing. They're collaborating. And what we see happen, the dynamic we see happening is, as individuals share and go to directors or VPs, we start from sort of work execution, project management, task tracking, and the next step is often these line of business solutions, whether MNA or product planning or employee engagement. Literally every function in the business can benefit from the ability to configure the software. And, keep in mind, we've already taken off the table the biggest issue. I've been in enterprise software for 30 years. I've sat with a lot of CIOs who've written seven figure checks. And, when they're honest with me, the biggest thing they worry about is: Is this software going to get used? We take that issue off the table. We turn it on its head. And, that ability to have that basis of adoption, to have raving fans who love using the software, and then the added benefit of being able to go higher in an organization with senior leaders who want transparency. They want speed. They want accountability. That configurability to solve bigger and bigger, more complex, more strategic flows is a huge advantage for us. It's, frankly, what fuels us, sort of our passion around serving our customers, because we get such great feedback. >> That configurability that you mentioned, Mike, kind of seems to be how customer success is set up. To be configurable, sort of modular, to be able to adjust it with the agility that's needed to deliver what these customers are needing. So, sounds like, maybe, land and expand. I know we've got a gentleman from the office of the CIO at PayPal who's going to be on shortly with us, really helping the C-Suite at PayPal, which everyone uses to be able to see things more clearly, have that transparency in terms of managing projects. >> Absolutely. >> So, I know Cisco's a customer as well. So, is it pretty typical to start with a function within marketing, for example, where there's a team that, hey, this is innovative. This is going to integrate with Jira and Slack, and all these things. Is that kind of a common sales conversation? >> Absolutely. We practice the principles of the challenge your sale and challenge your customer. And, one of the key elements of the challenge your customer is this idea of a mobilizer. And, the mobilizer does two things. They drive change, and they build consensus. And, what we find is those individuals who are change agents often times love our software, because they can do things that they wouldn't otherwise, they'd have to depend on a consultant or IT. So, we find those individuals and we work with them, and they coach us up on: what are the priorities, who are the key players?" And, that becomes a common play we run to get higher in the organization. The other thing that's happening now, I'm seeing it, really, over the past year, is organizations are starting to choose to sort of play offense with us. So, we'll continue to have that bottoms-up organic growth. But now, we're seeing VPs of marketing or CMOs, or CFOs or COOs realize, hey, you know what? I love the fact I have this base of users who love the software, and I can do things, I can enable priorities or initiatives that span the organization, get away from side-load apps, and have the kind of visibility and speed that's been unheard of. And, we're starting to see that our customers wanting to play offense with us. >> That speed to value element has just been critical. So, you heard in the stories this morning, we have MOD Pizza. Their first solution, the gentleman probably built that in a day. And, that was just to roll out one store, and then they rolled out eight the next year. And, I'm sure they made some modifications there. And then, they need to go from eight to around 200 in a year. And, they were able to do that very quickly. They were able to take an existing solution and make the modifications, add in one more element, which is control center for us, to make it that much more scalable. So, when you talk about the land and expand motion, it's both within the customer as a whole, but on a solution as well, where we have story after story where someone starts a new initiative. They don't know whether it's going to work out. It works out really well, and that effort they put into the initial solution isn't lost. They don't have to switch over to a different application, because it's now gotten too big, or some element like that. The software and the application is able to grow with their growth as a business, which eliminates a lot of those things that often happens in business, where you have to pause something that's growing to replace a software. >> Right, so, in terms of the feedback loop, you obviously, as you were describing, Steven, the customer success program you're running here is very cross-functional, very collaborative. It's product management. It's marketing, it's sales, it's IT. It's all these groups that need to come together. What is the process like, maybe from both of your perspectives, Steven, starting with you, of getting customer feedback when they're engaging with their customer success manager, for example, and they want a feature that is not quite there yet, How do you take that feedback from the customers, from the field, and start to really prioritize that internally? >> So, let me start. So, one of the things we've introduced this year is, as we've grown the field organization, is we're using our own software, and we've built these territory hubs. So, the account exec, the SC, the CSM, the SSR, the internal team, everyone is on the same page, as it relates to what we're doing in the account. And, we run weekly meetings. We check off on priorities and to-dos. So, you have that visibility by use of our own platform. So, everybody's on the same page. And, that idea of signal that we talk about, that Gina Mark talked about, it starts with that team that is right there with the customer, and then we feed it. Often times, I'll let Steven take the hand off. So, we have that signal. We have the pulse right with the customer with these field teams, and then that gets fed. And, I'll let Steven talk about how we drive it here sort of in Bellevue. >> Yeah, so, there's two elements of getting that signal, and I'm sure there's more, if you think about it. But, one is from the internal team, and one is the feedback from the customer. And, we, not surprisingly, have used the Smartsheet application to do that. But, any time we're getting a customer signal. That could be from our community, that could be coming in from a support ticket, that could be a conversation with a customer success manager, could be from any site. That feedback then goes into a Smartsheet form, and that goes directly to the product management team. And, anyone who has submitted that from a support rep perspective, for example, gets visibility to where that stands in the progress. So, is it something we're looking into? Is it in progress? If there's a date to it, what does that look like? So, we get all that. And then, the other element is we are huge users of Smartsheet internally. And, Mark likes to talk about that he is the biggest user of the mobile application across our whole customer base, and he probably is. But, we absolutely eat our own dog food there, or drink our own champagne. >> I like that one better. >> Probably a better one. And, that motion really helps us understand how to use the application, so Dynamic View, which was launched this week. We're going to be one of the biggest users of that right out of the gate. For the example that I just brought up, what Dynamic View allows us to do is it allows us to provide a view of all of those submissions of request, and the right view to the right company, or the right internal stakeholders, so they know exactly what that status is. So, those are two ways that we get that feedback back into our producting. >> Mike, you said you've been in sales for a long time. How helpful in a sales situation is the fact that you do drink your own champagne? >> Huge, it's huge. >> On Smartsheet, I imagine, a lot of companies don't show that. >> It's a really big deal; anybody who's, really anybody in the company. Anybody's who's touching the customer, When I hire people, the ability to have that confidence and understand how to use and speak from personal experience that fuels passion, it fuels credibility, and it's authentic, which is one of our core values. And then, so much of it is the art of the possible on the whiteboard with the customer. This ability to move from an idea, we've literally mapped out processes, and within 30 minutes, the essay's in there, and we've prototyped a solution. And, not only is it a quality solution, but the customer's blown away by the speed with which we've done it. But, that starts with that deep understanding of the platform and all the functionality, and what you can do with it. >> Right, I'm sure that breeds that authenticity that Gene actually talked about. Well, we're almost out of time, but I want to quickly, Steven, talk about the Partner Success Program. You guys partner with Amazon, Oracle, NetSuite, Salesforce, Slack, Google, I'm probably leaving out a few. Talk to us a little bit about the partner evolution as you compete with some of these partners as well. >> Well, I'm going to switch that a little. So, we have two elements of partners. So, we have those technology partners that you're speaking to. And then, we have the solution provider partners and resellers; that's more in my world. But, what's been really exciting about those folks and, we had a big partner day yesterday, so I'm kind of coming off the high of talking with all these folks. And, one of the things that we hear over and over again is whatever their focus is. So, sometimes, that's a geography focus. Sometimes, that's an industry focus. They tell us how much we're missing already. So, they'll say, if I'm focused on the accounting industry, they'll say, you guys don't even know how great your off the shelf application is in the accounting world. And, what they're so excited about is being able to configure it, being able to build the applications on top of Smartsheet. That then, they can bring to that world, so that, from a scale perspective, we don't have to be experts in accounting. We don't have to be experts in any of those different verticals or in those geographies. We can leverage those partners, their expertise, their relationships, in order to bring that to market in each of those areas. >> Any feedback, I know we're out of time. But, any feedback on some of the announcements that came out today from some of your key partners, besides two thumbs way up? >> They were extremely excited about Dynamic View and seeing what's possible from a new solution perspective. They were just like the rest of the customers. So, when there was the final slide showing all the new features we're bringing, all the phones came out to take pictures. It was a great scene, and they were definitely in that mix. >> Excellent, well, Steven and Mike, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing with us how you're transforming, how the customers are able to evolve and transform with your technology. We know you have a lot of meetings to get to, so we'll let you go to that. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin live at Smartsheet ENGAGE 2018. Stick around, I'll be right back with my next guest. (techno music)

>> Narrator: It's theCube, covering Sapphire Now 2017, brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform and Hana Enterprise Cloud. >> Hi, welcome to theCube, I'm Lisa Martin, with my cohost George Gilbert, we are covering SAP Sapphire Now 2017. George, we've just watched the keynote, the very dynamic keynote with quite a few characters, I want to get your take on some of the things we heard in the keynote today, Bill McDermot kicked it off very lively, one of the first things that was interesting to me, and I'd love to get your opinion, that the journey to the club requires empathy and transparency. It's not often something that we hear from an CEO. What were your thoughts on his vision as to what SAP is doing around empathy and transparency. >> I guess I would take it in the soft skills that it might have been intended which was, empathy in that there's going to be changed management, not just because you're moving the operational capabilities from on-prem to the cloud, but because you're exposing new capabilities that will impact how people do their jobs. And transparency I think is part of the program of migration where you're going to break some things as you move them, and this is going to call out in the process of migration what few things you need to change. I think that's what he meant by transparency, because it's not a complete seamless lift and shift. >> Definitely. I think another thing that kind of jumped to mind is that, not only are these firsts changing, they talked about the digital core and the essential elements of that, but also the fact that they are listening to their customers, customers saying we want transparency, we want to see how things are going like you said, it's not a lift and shift, we need to get more understanding, but I think the undertone of we're listening to our customers was quite strong, when they talked about the new SAP Cloud Trust Center, that seemed to really bring it home in terms of what he was talking about, where not just customers of SAP, but that they're using Hana, can see what's happening within their cloud infrastructures, but also people who aren't using it yet, so really broadening transparency to foster new customers, and acquiring new customers going forward. >> Yes, I guess with the transparency, the footprint for enterprise applications is just growing and growing, and he talked about at one point, we're not just talking to the CIO, the CEO has to be involved, the head of sales, head of procurement, head of supply chain, and I think it is related to the idea of the digital core, and then the what they call the sort of win applications around them, which is the core where the traditional systems of record and the win, they're like the AI in machine learning and Internet of Things and Blockchain, these are strategic new capabilities that enable applications, not just about efficiency, but about opening up new business models, new product and service lines, things like that. >> And they talked about, you mentioned, they talked about openness as the game changer with the nucleus of a digital enterprise being that digital core. You talked about machine learning, AI, blockchain, give us a little bit of an insight as to this expansion of Leonardo, they talked a lot about Leonardo, what were some of the things that really stuck out in your mind as the new capabilities, and who's their audience here. >> Okay, great questions, because their audience is not the typical, their typical buyer was the CFO, because it cost so much, so he had to be involved. IT, the CIO, because he had to sort of standardize the infrastructure on which it ran. And then between the two of them, they were essentially putting in a platform for business process efficiency, and that's what they called the core, and then Leonardo is now the win that surrounds that And that has, they see that having transformational capabilities, and that impacts then not just the departments that were looking for efficiency, but looking for transformation, so that's why they have to get involved, the head of sales, the head of procurement, supply chain, things like that. It's a different sell, just to offer an example, the best description I ever heard for trying to sell enterprise software is like trying to get a bill through both houses of congress, and congress just got a lot bigger. >> So from a target audience perspective, we know that they work with small medium sized businesses, Enterprise, we had Google on stage, they're partnering with Apple, with Facebook, etc, looking at Leonardo, from a target audience perspective, are they talking to mostly the large enterprise north of 1500 employees? >> Those customers come first, because they always have the more sophisticated, greater number of more sophisticated skillsets in place, and as these systems mature from the early adopters, they work the kinks out they're able to generalize things better, and then it's more easily absorbed into the main stream. McDermot said something interesting, which was you're either an early adopter or an also ran. I think he's trying to motivate people to get started, but the adoption curve doesn't really change just because we're doing more advanced technologies. >> One of the things that interested me, is if you look at a small to medium business, and they mentioned a number of businesses, Mod Pizza for example, during the intro, and there's a great video about them on their website, but if you look at an SMB or SMBE about, as a competitor, they're much smaller, typically, much more agile, much more nimble, that was one of the things I was sort of expecting to hear in some sense in the keynote about the small enterprises really becoming the disruptors because they can react and move faster than a larger legacy incumbent. What were your thoughts there? >> In Tech we look at the smaller to mid sized companies as being more nimble, but that's changed in the last few years, where the big incumbents, the rich just get richer, partly because, partly because they have these data assets that they can keep turning into newer and newer products. That may change in the next few years, but right now, the more data you have the more your advantage. And the capital intensity is for the most part so low that they can use all their profits just to buy the little guys who look promising. That's in tech, outside tech, I think the answer to your question will be, how easy can SAP make it to absorb and install and implement and run their system. In the past it was so flexible that you really needed extremely sophisticated implementation advice to get it up and running. If they've taken that out and simplified it, and made it like just, you know, configure these buttons, then that would make a difference. I'm not sure we have seen the answer to that yet. >> Okay, playing on the incumbency theme if you will. Google, Diane Green was on stage, and, at Google Cloud Nexus just a couple of months ago here in San Francisco, they announced a partnership with SAP to deliver Hanna on Google Cloud platform, and today they talked about kind of the expansion of that, they had a customer, a consulting agency that was their proof in the pudding. And one of the things Bill McDermot did say was we are now partnering with Apple with Facebook with Google, so they're talking about some of these incumbents, looking at Google as an incumbent, but also as a competitor of Microsoft Azure, of AWS who SAP also works with, what was your take on the conversation that Diane Green had in announcing this expansion and hey here's a consultancy that's leveraging SAP Han into Google Cloud. >> Well Diane Green had to talk about both, because just running SAP on the Google Cloud platform, without sentient systems integrated to help, a customer who might want to buy it in, implement it, and then integrate it with their existing systems, they probably can't do that on their own, because SAP is still complex enterprise software, even if some of the operational capabilities are offloaded to a cloud vendor, so she needed both SAP and an implementation partner to say hey we're serious, but I guess I would add that when you're evaluating SAP there's more than just the core app, the core app is sort of the center of the universe for a customer who is looking to take their systems of record into the cloud, but there's an ecosystem on each cloud that surrounds that that makes it easy to build applications that leverage, that ecosystem's richest on Amazon, it's not far behind on Azure, and Google is still booting that up. >> So what advantage does this SAP partnership with Google give to Google, but also what advantage of any does it give to SAP? >> Okay, great question, so on the advantage to Google, it puts them as a peer, or more closer as a peer to Azure and Amazon, and then to SAP they can say we're cloud agnostic, I believe their infrastructure technology is both made up of Cloud Foundry which is cross cloud technology coming from Pivotal, and then Open Stack as a sort of infrastructure technology that's coming from a whole bunch of the legacy IT vendors who didn't want to be beholden to Amazon. >> What are the other things today, if we look at future trends, and that's kind of what I was expecting to hear, and we heard about a lot of them, big data block chain, we heard about IOT, industrial IOT, IOE, Deep Learning, they talked a lot about how Leonardo was going to facilitate machine learning, artificial intelligence, really help deliver automation, but one of the things that I was wondering if we were going to hear about was mobile. So a few months ago, I look at my notes here, they announced, I believe it was at Mobile World Congress, this partnership with Apple, so SAP opened their cloud platform to iOS developers with the goal of really establishing a bigger presence in mobile apps to power iPhones, etc, with Hana. Curious about did you expect to hear things about mobile today, or was that not part of the plan. >> If I had expected to hear more it would have been from a partner like IBM. Because with Apple they were essentially creating a toolkit for people to be able to build user interfaces on an iOS phone, and I think they've done Android as well, but in other words, the developer is left to their imaginations to fill in the functional capabilities of whatever app, they just have a frame work that makes building an Apple UI accessible. What IBM did with Apple was actually more significant, which was, hey we have all these industry solution groups, and we all these bright ideas functionality in the cloud, but we dont' have an accessible way to deliver it. SO what IBM teamed up to do with Apple, wasn't just give me, tell Apple give me an iOS UI development kit, it was let's collaborate on building some real apps that pilots need, that delivery folks or field servers folks need. So, I guess, I wasn't blown away by what they did with Apple. >> Okay, maybe that's a to be continued. One of the other themes that we heard today from Brad Luker, was software needs to become a strategy and that openness in that respect is an absolute game changer, allowing machine learning integration, social data integration for customer profiling, and really helping these user of SAP understand customer behaviors. He also said that every company today regardless of size needs to drive innovation by connecting all these business processes when software becomes strategy. What was your take on that from a thematic perspective, as well as a real world implication perspective for SAP customers from the small enterprises to the large. >> You know, I would have through that that would be the whole focus, you know the famous Mark Andersen SA from several years ago, Software's Eating the World. It's now really kind of data is eating software, it's data programs the machine learning algorithms that increasingly make up software. But he was a little bit, he talked at a high level about it, the only example I recall was Hybris, which is their commerce front end, where they're going to link marketing sales service, support, customer experience, and they're going to open this up through micro services, so that other developers can easily leverage these capabilities. That to me was end to end processes integrated on a SAP platform, but I would have liked to have seen a lot more examples of that. >> So you talked about Hybris, and on the Leonardo front, the expansion of that, they really talked about this expansion of Leonardo giving companies the ability to reinvent, that word has been used a lot by a lot of companies including Dell, years ago reinvent, reimagine, that could be used to mean a lot of things, but they talked about that as a facilitator of intelligently connecting lots of things, people, processes, systems, etc, what's your take on Leonardo as an accelerator of innovation as they positioned it to be. >> You know, that was sort of to re-emphasize they called the digital core, which is their legacy, not in a bad way, that's their asset that they can leverage to move in any direction. The traditional apps. And Leonardo was the win capability, how to leapfrog your competition. And they used this wonderful example of a win farm, where they could then look at a particular instance of a winmill and find where the stresses were and a capability I haven't seen yet, they were actually able to put a virtual sensor on that errant winmill and see where the stresses were coming from. But that capability isn't completely unique, there's GE and Predicts, and there's Parametric Technology with their Thingworks, and IBM has their Genius of Things, they're not alone in going after this notion of the digital twin and integrating it within the entire business process life cycle, their value add should be to make it easy to create that life cycle for the digital twin as designed as built as deployed as serviced as operated, to make that possible without tons of programing and to link it in with core business processes like field service, but again, it seemed a little bit more like a scenario than a finished app. >> Okay maybe you're saying for them to be differentiated it needs to be more of a me too, it needs to be much more simpler, maybe this is just the precipice they're on, and just didn't context it that way. >> It felt like a hey this is where we're moving to, as opposed to this is where we already are, and they have a lot of assets to bring to bear to get to that point, it just, they weren't really concrete in saying okay here's the functionality we have today, here's what we're going to add over the next 12 to 18 months, so it felt more like a this is where we're going. >> That's a good point that you bring that up from a road map perspective, and perhaps that will appear in some of the break ads which I would anticipate because they talked about that in the transparency and the empathy part of the keynote when Bill McDermot was first on stage about we're listening to our customers, we need to show you these roadmaps, so they did mention in text having impressed as well that it's for three particular products that they have these three year road maps, and obviously they'll be adding more over time. But if you look at SAP, 45 year old company, their roots in on-prem ERP, looking at their evolution and even kind of getting to the topic we were just on, the virtual reality and understanding sensors, is this a natural progression of an ERP company to transition to completely the cloud, help keep their customers there, establish this nucleus of the digital core, and then expand upon things to bring in machine learning, advanced analytics, predictive modeling. Is that a natural expansion? >> You know it's funny the way you asked that, because I think the answer is yes. But it happened in this wave where first it's completely custom, and you have the excentures, PWCs and the specialized sort of system integrators, the small ones that have boutique capabilities in big data and machine learning. They start building those sorts of apps first for big companies, or for internet center companies who really need to be at the bleeding edge, then comes the IBMs of the world where they have these semi-repeatable capabilities, custom development in the industry solutions groups and in their global business services, and so they're there composing a bunch of semi-finished piece parts, and then when it gets to SAP, it should be pretty much almost packaged and SAP goes in and configures it for the customers, in other words they flip a bunch of switches that make choices, so you go from completely custom to configured and almost fully packaged, and that's a natural progression over time, and every time we encounter newer technology that starts on the back, goes again to the fully custom solution, so I guess I do expect SAP to follow this pattern, their sweet spot, their business model is the repeatable stuff. >> When they talked about running core businesses in the cloud to get the benefits of scale, elasticity, availability, I think this was actually Byrne that was saying that they need to be using intelligent apps to automate as much as possible the hyper connectivity as they were talking about is really going to enable that, and he did predict that 80 percent of business processes will be running through SAP or 80 percent of them running will be fully autonomous in the near future. That's a bold number. >> Yeah, you know and that's the number behind the anxiety that everyone has about so what happens to my job, especially when we have conversational bots, we don't need host on our shows, I mean it's a bit of an exaggeration. There are a lot of people who worry that jobs will get completely automated, and then there are other people who say look, it's not every task I do that can be automated, it's some tasks, and there will be a machine that augments me, and changes the nature of my work, but doesn't replace me. One example is Gary Kasparov, who was beaten by IBMs Deep Blue chess playing program, I forget how long ago, maybe 12 or something like that. The best chess players in the world now, are not the computers, they're the ones who pair with a grandmaster with a computer playing against another grand master with a computer, because there's an intuition as to where to look that is not completely replacing human judgment. It's more like a compliment of judgment and then raw calculating horsepower. >> Interesting accompaniment. Well George, thanks for sharing your insights on the keynote, from SAP Sapphire Now. For George Gilbert, I'm Lisa Martin, stick around, we've got more coverage from SAP Sapphire now 2017. (upbeat electronic music)