>> Narrator: It's the Cube. Covering Sapphire Now 2017. Brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform. And HANA Enterprise Cloud. (electronic music) >> Welcome to the Cube everyone. We're here for the special exclusive Sapphire Now 2017 coverage from Palo Alto studio. I'm John Furrier, three days of Sapphire coverage. Our next guest is Jason Kotsaftis who's with Senior Director Database Solutions at EMC. Who came in here in Palo Alto. You guys have some news down there, full team down there. I know, normally we cover SAP, it's our first year we're doing it from our studio. But EMC's always been on the cube. You guys had a great relationship with SAP. I think our first year we've done the cube in 2010. >> Jason: That's right, yes, I remember. >> You were that SAP Sapphire. >> You guys were. You were on the Cube. You've been with us for awhile, but the relationship with an SAP, and EMC, now Dell EMC, it's pretty significant. What's the big news you guys have going on? >> Yeah, I mean, it's a huge relationship for us. We've been, even before we were merged with Dell, one of our top partnerships. Now it's even bigger. We've been amazed at how much Dell had been doing with SAP, and we're bringing the best of the two companies together right now. So, yeah, we have a huge presence at Sapphire as you mentioned. We saw Michael Dell do a brief speech at the show, and I thought that really helped set the stage for, not just Dell and EMC with SAP, but even some of the words he said were a good microcosm of Dell and EMC talking about the importance of bringing together people and processes. And we're going through that right now, and we're we're going through how we're going to merge the portfolio to go after Cloud, go after HANA, internet of things, data center transformation, all of those major things. >> Well surely SAP, the theme is Cloud, Multi-Cloud is a big message. >> SAP Cloud platform, we had Dan Lahl on the Cube. We also interviewed the HANA Enterprise Cloud group there also, got a huge alliance with Amazon Web Service, Terry Wise, there. We all saw Century Link. So you start to see the industry formation going on. The fog is lifting, you're starting to get some clear visibility on swim lanes, tactics, we'll help people with settling in. Whatever metaphor you want to use, people are finding it. Dell EMC is just absolutely just a monster now. I mean that in a good way, I don't mean that in a bad way. But it's so big. EMC was already very powerful, and winning in the storage business. Great enterprise jobs, the sales force, the culture, really well, great culture as you know, we know them. Dell has been lean and mean, like a speed boat. Great with channels, great with operations, very lean and efficient. EMC, the direct selling, you bring them together and now the supplier relationships are changed. I was talking with your team. Dell brings to the table deep Microsoft Intel relations. Not that you guys didn't have them, but they have deep relationships. >> Correct. >> You guys bring deep relationships. How has that new culture dealings changed your relationship? And specifically, what's the impact to SAP? >> Sure, you know, great question. First of all, it's been very complimentary. And we felt that going into the merger. I've been at EMC for 21 years right. So I had worked with Dell 10-15 years ago. Very, very complimentary, and you nailed it. They're very good at one segment of the market historically, we're very good at another. You know, for the most part I think it's been a really, really good matching, made sense from merger perspective. If we think about SAP for a second, one of the first things that we've been bringing together is, we have two very complimentary HANA portfolios. So, HANA is obviously a huge focus for SAP customers. I was just at Dell EMC world last week, every single customer that I talked to, whether they were running Oracle or Microsoft, they're all asking about HANA. We had a great focus at EMC with our enterprise HANA systems. And at Dell they have a very good packaged appliances and Scale Up bundles. And right now we feel like we can address the whole breath of what people may want to do with HANA. Whether it's, TDI, Scale Up, Scale Out. Very, very strong and >> John: Where does HANA fit in, because I want you to just take a minute to explain this, because it used to be a blanket word, even when they were kind of getting it out early. It was great marketing from the beginning, You know, it has legacy to it, but as the market changed, HANA changed. And as SAP changed, they changed from their positioning. Specifically, they used to call it HANA Cloud Platform. And they have HANA Enterprise Cloud. Now they've renamed it to SAP Cloud Platform, which is the platform as a service, the cloud native stuff. And then HANA Enterprise Cloud, which is really the managed service. So from your perspective, how do you define what HANA is today. And where is is settling in? Is it just the core engine of SAP? But how's it relate to all these new things? >> Yeah, for us it's really a platform. So if we think about where HANA began when we started working with SAP, it was all about analytics. Collecting data, analyzing data, making better business decisions. Now with S4 on the horizon, and the inevitable cut over to that from all the other enterprise applications of SAP, we really view it as a platform. And it's going to have big implications. If we look at our own SAP install base at EMC, there's a lot of customers that run Oracle underneath their SAP apps. So it's part of the HANA transformation, where we're going to be getting them, hopefully, on the road to, not just take advantage of HANA today, but as they go forward how are they going to get ready for S4 and have, hopefully, a smooth migration path to that. >> Obviously their cloud platform, I mean, their cloud strategy, or cloud direction. I don't know if you can have a cloud strategy. As Michael Dell said, Clouds like the internet, it's everything. >> Jason: Right. >> So, there's no real strategy, it's just the way life is. They're going to be on premise and off premise. And they're clearly targeting multiple Clouds, unlike say Oracle, for instance. But neither here nor there. The point is, is that on premise there's still going to be a 10 year plus journey, nothing's going to be disappearing over night. So the on prem Cloud dynamic is interesting, cuz they used the word mission critical. That was a big buzz word with when I talked to Michael Dell, He banged home mission critical. A lot of the teams in Dell EMC World last week was around mission critical work loads and choice. So you guys have that same mojo going on with SAP, how is that translating for you guys? Big new business, new opportunities? >> Great question. So one of the big things that we've acquired and focused on in the SAP space was Virtustream. So they've been a really big off premise cloud provider for us, but at the same time, when you look at what we've been building at EMC even before that we had our own enterprise hybrid cloud offering. One of the things that we're talking about this week at Sapphire is actually bringing those two together. So we can have people have an off premise and an on premise experience, a single view of their data, a uniform way to manage SAP in the cloud, and to the point of mission critical like you said is, as much as we see people moving to the cloud, there are still people that want to have for certain production systems they want to control that. They don't want to give it off to the cloud yet. They may not want to control the hardware but they certainly want to control the data. And with this new relationship that we're blending in the EHC and Virtustream we can actually allow them to have that choice to your point. >> John: What's EHC? >> The EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. So that's our own self service automation of software framework that we put around the cloud. >> Which cloud, your cloud or other people's cloud? >> Right now it's our cloud offering. >> So you have a public cloud. >> We have a cloud offering that's a hybrid cloud offering. That you can deploy on premise or off premise, and Virtustream has been historically used off premise. >> So you use Virtustream as your off premise component of that piece? >> Correct. >> That makes sense. Cuz you bought them in January, I get that. >> That's right, and we had to bring the two together, and that's been a big new step for us. In that regard we think it's very, very complementary for SAP, that's one option we provide, right. We also work through SAP's own offerings to make sure we give them the right and the best infrastructure behind what they're trying to do with their own cloud. I was at a large partner of ours recently, OpenText, and we were talking about content archive, all the things that they do there, they're very deep in the SAP cloud, so we're working with them to start to potentially build the right archiving and capabilities behind that. >> So what's the big news for SAP this year, obviously we saw the coverage, we got some folks calling in, we had some folks down on the floor giving us some input, but from an SAP EMC, Dell, now Dell EMC relationship, what's the big news, what's the big story for you guys? What are you leading with, what's the announcements, be specific. >> The big news is we're all about the cloud. The bringing together of the on premise and off premise EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Virtustream, giving them that uniform way to consume SAP in a cloud based model, whether it be on premise or off premise, that is absolutely our biggest new highlight. >> You guys released that was a hard news that went out for you guys or... >> Yeah it was part of an EHC evolution story that we brought out, the other things that we have that are not necessarily formally announced but are more things that help the day to day administration of SAP applications, we often forget about that. We're pushing people to the cloud and we all talk about cloud. >> So there's no big splash in the pool like, hey we're releasing a new VxRail version of whatever, it's momentum specific. >> Correct. >> What are the big momentum's you plan, you can look back now and we've seen a lot of the evolution, we've seen the relationship with SAP grow, we've seen the converge infrastructure movement, now going to a whole nother level, hybrid cloud and converge infrastructure is happening. What's the new wave that you guys are riding with SAP together besides the cloud, it's generically cloud. What's specifically, can the customer pinpoint that you guys have solved? >> I think you just touched upon it, it's the whole build versus buy model. So historically if you look at where the SAP customers spend the most of their money, it's the op ex. It's the operational expense of administering and maintaining the SAP landscapes. >> You mean like total cost of ownership stuff, just like, easing some of the pain between deployment and costing. >> Workflow automation, copy clone refresh, backup recovery, performance automation, disaster recovery, all the things that you got to do to keep the SAP applications generating value to the business is heavy operational cost to them. That holds them back from doing innovation and investments. >> Those are the details you got to get down and dirty on. >> Yeah. We've done some great studies with you guys on this, one of the things that, there's different ways to go about tackling that. One of the ways that we believe is good is to simplify what you can. And so one way to do that is, well from an infrastructure perspective, you should have the ability to basically buy the infrastructure as an outcome, not have to build all the components and get it together. >> All the provisioning pain that goes with it. >> Yeah, and so when we were just EMC, we had one choice. We had what was called a Vblock, and then we build VxRacks and VxRails. >> Vblock was so successful, it really was, you did a good job of that. >> Yeah, a lot of customers from the SAP. Now that we're Dell though, we have the PowerEdge family, and we've been bringing that in to not only Racks and Rails, but looking at that in terms of building what we call Ready Bundles, where we can actually deliver as a single... >> Think about this ready solution, because the thing that got me at Dell EMC World was two things. The purpose built mission continued, I mean that in a good way. And two, the disruption of data backup protection and backup with the cloud. With the cloud as a new disruptor. For some reason backup and recoveries, clearly different in the cloud than it is on prem. So we've seen a lot of action in there too. Those are the two ready areas, and then also, dynamic changes going on with backup and recovery. >> Yeah, ready solutions was a huge thing, and this is part of the merger we rebranded our solutions organizations into one. Our whole, as the name implies, the whole goal is to deliver a ready infrastructure to the customer that they can just deploy, so they can focus on their applications and their business and not worry about the server, the network, the storage, which ones do I put together for what reason. We want to give them that menu of choice, whether it's a single node, a bundle of components, or an actual system, and deploy that in any way they want. >> What can we expect from Dell EMC, from your team VZB, with respect to SAP? Next couple months, next year, what's the plans, what's the continued momentum playbook? >> Some things that you'll be seeing more of if you go to the Dell blueprints page where we have all our solutions. You'll be seeing some new and refreshed offerings around HANA, you'll be seeing some new things around SAP landscapes, and you'll be seeing much more formal communication around the cloud offering I talked about. >> And cloud seems to be, again, cloud is taking it outside the four walls, which is different, great capabilities, people going in analytics, putting a lot of analytics in the cloud. So seeing that being the first wave beyond dev tests. Dev tests, even though Oracle says dev tests is really going to be around for a long, long time, people are already moving to analytics in the cloud. That's interesting for instrumenting for backup and recovery, what's possible. Quick thoughts on the changes there, in the landscape between the old way of thinking about backup and recovery, and by the way you guys have some of the best solutions out there that will data domain, scratch record goes to history, but now it goes to the cloud. What's the tricky parts that you guys are watching? >> Well I think on the one hand there'll be people that want to worry about their mission critical, like you said we have great integrated offerings to the workload, so you can have a backup team handle it or you can have your workload team handle it, it's really up to you. As people go into the cloud I think they have to decide, what's the tiering strategy they want to approach that, what's the retention data strategies that they need, how's that going to, >> Where the hell is the data going? >> Where's the data going, is it safe and secure, and how does that relate to how they're protecting their on premise data. I mean from our perspective, and back to the SAP example of where we have this uniform cloud approach, we have the backup capabilities built into that. Whether it's long term data retention, short term backup and recovery, yep. >> Question for you, this is a test, a real time cube test. I'm sure you'll pass with flying colors. What is the most, what are the biggest two waves that the customers should be surfing in the enterprise, top two most important waves? >> I think one of them we've already talked about, which is certainly cloud. I think if you look at the whole digital transformation, which I know is related to cloud, but the whole digital transformation wave I think is separate from that. So if you look at big data and analytics and machine data, every customer, whether it's a traditional RDBMS environment or what have you, they're all looking at how to harness that data. I think when you get into that and look at all the data in your data center that you may not be using today, you may not have been trying to take advantage of, with technologies like Splunk and other things that are out there to help you do that, that's a great thing to look at. We're seeing heavy.. >> So data basically, cloud and data are the two big waves. >> Yeah, digital transformation of data and taking advantage of that data. >> Well they go hand in hand, cuz you got the scale of the cloud for compute and other things, data drives the digital chest of digitalized data, digital assets are data, right, everything's data. So you would agree, cloud and data, two big waves. >> Yes. >> Jason, thanks so much for coming on the Cube special coverage and final comment, I'll give you the last word on SAP Sapphire, I know you got a relationship, you're probably going to be like oh yeah, SAP, everything's great. Be straight, what's going on with SAP. What's the outlook for SAP from your perspective. >> I think there's a great opportunity to your point, but there's also a good challenge, cuz we're going through a merger. I think we're making great progress to bring the two portfolios together, and SAP's being a great partner helping working with us. >> And you're cool with them now, you guys feel good about SAP. >> We feel great about them, we use them in our own environment at Dell as Michael talked about, to run our own business. So it's a great relationship >> Jeremy's been a remote telecast performer at EMC World. >> As you know, these partnerships in the industry go up and down, we talked a little bit about Oracle over the years, that's fluctuated. >> I was dating myself the other day on a Cube gig, and I said, oh it's a Barney deal, which my language was, you know, no real deal, cuz Barney was a character that kids watched, my kids watched, you know, I love you, you love me, it's kind of a love fest, but nothing happens. It's called a Barney deal. I need a new meme now because most of the people in the industry don't know who Barney is. >> Oh I remember, we used to joke about him when I was in alliances, we called them Barney meetings. You got a good meeting with a partner, you'd all talk and nothing would happen. >> You guys do not have a Barney deal with SAP, it's pretty deep across the board, SAP has good relationships, I got to say, they tend to do really, really good. They're either in or they're not, it's pretty obvious. Thank you Jason, so much. Jason Kotsaftis, who's the senior director of the database solutions group with Dell EMC joining us for a special three day coverage of Sapphire now from our studio. Great week, we had Informatica World in San Francisco, Google IO going on today as well, we've got live coverage today with Rob Hove, also VeeamOn is in New Orleans, Dave Vellante is there, and I'm in SAP Sapphire. A lot of coverage for events for the Cube, stay with us more for live coverage after this short break. (techno music)

>> Voiceover: The Cube, covering SAPPHIRE NOW. Headlines sponsored by SAP HANA Cloud, the leader in platform as a service. With support from Console, Inc., the cloud internet company. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. >> Okay, welcome back. We are here live in Orlando winding down day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage, of live coverage of SAPPHIRE NOW. This is The Cube, SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract and sift through the noise. I want to give a shout-out to our sponsors who allow us to get here and do all this massive programming, SAP HANA Cloud platform, Console, Inc., Capgemini, and EMC. Thanks to our sponsors, we really appreciate it. Our next guest is Roger Quinlan, Senior Vice-President, global head of the partner-managed cloud at SAP Thanks for joining us, welcome to The Cube. >> Thanks for having me, this is great. >> We love it, so explain what is the partner, partner managed cloud, just to kind of make sure we get the definition out there because you get the partner ecosystem, but this is the managed cloud, the partner managed cloud. >> Right. >> John: Explain what that is. >> So basically it allows, it allows our partners to create cloud offerings, private cloud offerings that they can offer to their clients as software as a service. And obviously SAP technology enables the inside of that, the guts of it. And we typically structure the agreements in, you know, anywhere from two to seven year. Most of them are five year agreements so it's a long-term agreement, good for the partners, helps our clients get into the cloud quickly and easily. >> Explain who those partners are and give an example of how that works because SAP, you had partners, many, many years delivering the apps. But now this platform game with the cloud changes the business models. Who are some of the people that are implementing this? >> Yes, so Capgemini is a great example of one, NTT, Accenture, you know the players that you might think of right there. And there's even some smaller ones, some smaller SIs that are maybe not household names but are doing very good work. >> Specialty boutique kind of, domain expertise. >> Yeah, and even some that are fairly large but are not maybe household names in the US but are big names in Europe, like T-Systems as an example. >> Great, and the vision around this was just to get simplified on the delivery cycle, so with cloud, the goodness of SAP now can be tailored for the end client 'cause these guys are smart, they have data scientists, they have a lot of programming capabilities, they have a cloud knowledge. But they have to deliver a solution to the customers 'cause they are a trusted advisor to your customers. Is that the main reason? What's the push behind all this? >> Yeah, their main reason for us is really to allow us to get into market niches that we don't serve today. So if you think, I'll give you a great example. There was a niche with hospitals, smaller hospitals in southern Africa. And they needed infrastructure to manage the operations of a hospital. They wanted to modernize. They wanted to do the digital transformation, to use the modern buzz-word. And so one of our partners had a very good relationship with a couple of these hospitals and went out and said, hey, you know, if we built a solution, would you use it? And they said sure, so they went out and built it, and you know they started off with one, two, by the time they had it all built they had three. Quickly, they had seven. They're now up to 16 hospitals. It allows us to provide great technology to these hospitals. They can provide better healthcare to their constituents in a market that we otherwise would not be able to serve. So that's one good example of accessing a market that maybe SAP would not have access to. But the integrator, which was T-Systems in this case, that, you know, has great relationships in that community, so it really is leveraging a relationship they already have. >> So I can see the benefits to the customers and the partners 'cause it's clear. Partners can make more money, can have great differentiation to their customers. What's the impact of the SAP sales force? Do they get comped on it? Is there a channel conflict? Because that's going to probably come up. >> It's funny, so you know our market space well enough to know if that's an issue now, right? And it always is, right? So what we've decided to do is, basically the sales organization that has the end customer, they get, basically they get compensated on it. >> So they're incented to play ball. >> Absolutely, there's no disincentive. It's kind of the same if they sold it directly themselves. >> How does the partner managed cloud support the new S/4HANA 'cause that's the big story here. You're talking about ERP, modernized up. It's a big, all the discussions around that, everyone's jazzed up about it. All the hardcore SAP customers are all like, okay, wow. How does that impact this? >> Yeah, so S/4 becomes the technology that most of our partner-managed cloud offerings are utilizing. So what we find a lot is customers out there want, they want to do something new. Maybe they're a Hybris customer today, or they're an Ariba customer today, but now they need to modernize their core. They need to do an ERP. Maybe they didn't have one, or maybe they had an old one and they want to modernize it. S/4 is a perfect way to go deliver that in the cloud to the end client. And so I would say you know maybe a third or 40% of the transactions that we're doin' in the partner-managed cloud space are S/4. >> A lot of your partners, especially some of these big guys, are trying to evolve their business models away from ours-- >> Roger: Yes. >> To IP, so I presume a big part of this is to try to get them to build that IP, proximate to the SAP platform. >> Roger: Yes >> How are you encouraging them to do that? Are you underwriting? Are you financing it in any way? Are you sharing it? How are you getting them, other than just the raw business opportunity, what kind of new business models are you putting in place so the value accretes to your platform from these guys faster? >> Yeah, we're really focusing on verticals and on geographies, so that we don't have overlap. That way it creates a unique differentiator for that particular systems integrator. I talked about the example in southern Africa, but another example would be in Japan in the real estate market. We did a similar thing with a totally different systems integrator, and that allows them to have a unique approach to the real estate market inside of, primarily inside of Tokyo. So what we try and do is try and make sure that we don't have a lot of overlap in geographies and overlap in solution areas, so they get some sort of a competitive advantage and get some runway to run with this for awhile. >> And at what point in time do you find yourself, John asked the question about at least channel conflict with your sales guys but the goal is to have the entire ecosystem work really well together without being encumbered with enormous transaction costs of how these different parts come together. At what point in time does SAP start to have a direct relationship with some of these folks? For example, are you taking responsibility for sending down updates? Are you working to bring new extended or extending the ecosystem into a customer? Or is all that going through the partners that you're working with. >> So I'll answer that in a couple of different ways. So first of all the primary relationship is really between the partner and the end-client. It is their kind of SaaS offering to the client. We provide the technology underneath. So that's one way we do it. The other part of it that kind of keeps this close to SAP is the backend, the maintenance and support. Level one, Level two is still handled by the partner, but we handle level three. So there's still a relationship, when they get stuck and things go wrong or something needs to be fixed, we end up getting involved. But the primary support happens between, with the partner and most of them are very well skilled at being able to handle that level of support. >> But are you also then bringing your ecosystem and your set of partners to them as well? >> Absolutely, yeah, so it's not just the SI world right? So some of these partners really want to be in this game, but they don't have hosting capabilities so we'll do Azure or we'll bring in AWS, and that's a mechanism that's already in a good place for us. >> Well and also, they have a multi-vendor view anyways so they're going to broker the different clouds and intercloud them together. I think, to your point there, I think it's worth double-down on because that was important. Virtustream came out of that concept, so when Virtustream was sold to EMC for billions of dollars, a billion dollars, that ultimately filled the same gap that you guys are doing with this program. They essentially did SAP Cloud and did some tooling up. Now, you're offering, essentially, SAP tech to everybody. Okay, that's cool, so that's just for the folks out there just want to make sure they catch it 'cause that's how big it is in my opinion. >> Can I follow up with one quick point though, John? So let's say the extension, the partner extension programs that you guys have that allow your sales force to sell third-party software from the SAP ecosystem into customers. If a large customer, or if a large partner is a partner of yours and you're standing them up, are they also able to piggyback in those arrangements and start bringing, or do they all have to have separate business arrangements with everybody in the ecosystem, or is there kind of a master agreement that you're bringing to bear so that everybody plays better together because you're kind of overriding the whole thing? >> Yeah, so we like to make this as easy as possible, so we take into the 4,000 items or whatever on our price list, we enable that through this partner managed cloud, that way they don't have to go get individual agreements if they want to, maybe they want to do OpenText or something like that. >> So you're bringing the whole portfolio to their cloud? >> Roger: Yes. >> Tell how the IoT, how this plays in 'cause that's a real sexy market everybody's going after. We heard that's going to be on the second-half of the year. You mentioned some things around that. That's a big focus and a lot of people are using the, I say hype cycle now, which it's legitimate hype, but the apps are coming on a couple of years down the road so the architecture's going on now so people are setting the table for IoT today. Does that fit into this? >> Absolutely, it does, and you heard a little bit about when you talked to Mark right before I came on. He talked a lot about the platform, on a cloud platform that his group is responsible for and really that becomes a leverage point. So on a cloud platform can be a part of this, and oftentimes they want to do the enablement on top of that kind of cloud platform because they want to be able to extend. The great part about S/4 is that it's standard, and it's industry specific, and it's simple to operate. But that also means that some companies have a lot of customizations that need to be part of their solution to their end-clients. And so how do you do that? You do that with HANA cloud platform, and sometimes that becomes an IoT play as well. >> Yeah, that enable them to at least have some headroom. >> Yes. >> (laughs) Future proofing, whatever term they want to use. Okay, tell about the vision of digital transformation because this really becomes an interesting business model question. How does a digital transformation vision that SAP as a company is going down relate specifically to your area, and how does that relate to the business model of the customers? What are you guys doing? Is there any kind of new things? Is it an incentive comp, obviously the sales gets comped but options to the customer? Where's the margins? Is it a discounted sliding scale? All of these are the questions that are popping through my head right now. I'm the partner, what's in it for me? I got to make some cash so-- >> Yeah, so what's in it for the partner is they get a long-term relationship with the end-client, and oftentimes they bring a relationship with that client already, and now they're extending it, and it's a very sticky relationship because when you start on an SAP program, that's not something you switch in and out every couple of years. So that's one of the benefits to the partner. And I will say the part about digital transformation, everyone wants to transform their business. Not everyone is able to, but most companies want to do that. This becomes the digital core, right? You use S/4 as the digital core, and you can get into it quickly. And if it's an industry based solution that this partner is now providing to multiple clients, they can implement it quicker. >> They can standardize on it. >> Yeah, they can standardize on it, and then they can do hospital one, hospital two, all the way to hospital 16 a lot quicker, right? One or two maybe take you some time, but by the time you get to the 16th or 17th, it's going really fast, so it enables a faster time to market for the end-client, and you know that digital is all about speed. >> Yeah, if they're building Lego blocks, and they build their own, they cast it out and they build more of them and just ship them out. >> You mentioned another item. You know there are some customers that have been using SAP Solutions for a long time, and maybe they're not using all of them any more or maybe they've gone off maintenance, that's a topic. We've been able to use this tool as a way to bring the customers back. So maybe they ran ERP way back when it was release four or 4.5 back, you know, back in the 90's. They got away from it for whatever reason, but now they're really excited about S/4 and they want to come back. This is a mechanism to allow us to do it and do it quickly. >> And also they get basically rebooted or reset on the new platform. >> Yep. >> But also you get net new customers out of this. >> Absolutely. >> So it's not like you're recycling the same SAP customers, certainly the churn might be helped a little bit. Now, that's the thing that I'm going to look at is those new customers, and I think they're going to be attracted to things like the Apple announcements. How does that impact you? Are you affected by that? Certainly the glowing afterglow of the announcement will be good. >> It's pretty cool, isn't it? >> John: But does it directly affect your business? >> It will absolutely affect it because the whole concept about that agreement is to develop applications that enhance the user experience and to the extent that we can leverage all of that better user experience, in a faster time to market, get to the cloud quicker, that's all good news for the end client. >> We're finally going to have a remote desktop on the phones that actually works, seamlessly. >> Yeah, real rendering, as opposed to shadow rendering. >> All right, final question, what's your take on SAP this year, thoughts share with the audience who couldn't make it. They might be watching this live or on-demand. What's 2016 SAPPHIRE NOW all about? >> Well 2016 SAPPHIRE NOW, in a lot of the keynotes, was really about kind of exposing a more, you know, a more honest, a more upfront conversation. We saw it in they keynotes. You know, Bill McDermott, our CEO, put his e-mail address out on a keynote with 30,000 people in the crowd and then you know a 100,000 or so watching, right? That's a pretty bold thing to do. And so I think you're trying to see, you're seeing SAP trying to become more human, trying to have more empathy. You know, we're a big company. We do some very cool things. We run a serious business, right? But being able to do that in a very human way is what I'm seeing here on the show floor. >> Final question, final, final question 'cause that was the second final question, what KPIs are you going to look at on the scoreboard to benchmark your success where you say, hey, we hit a grand slam? You know, is it the number of partners? What are the simple metrics that give you an indicator that you're winning, you're achieving your objectives? What are some of the things you look at to kind of get a feel for if it's working or not? >> Yeah, I want to see multi-client agreements that we put together where they have more than one client, where we've established what the multi-client agreement is going to be and we actually are executing against that. That's one. Two, I want to see customers going live and getting productive results out of it. And revenue growth is obviously always something we watch, but that's kind of tertiary to the first two. And if we do the first two, the partners are going to be successful. They'll get sticky with their clients. The clients will be happy because they get a faster time to market and that's how this grows. >> So it's really who stands up what solutions is really going to be the benchmark. >> And focus on, it is all new markets for us I think. >> John: Roger Quinlan, thanks so much for coming on The Cube. Really appreciate the insight. You got a big job, exciting. I think it's going to be a greenfield opportunity with your existing clients in a new way, a new business model innovation, congratulations. >> Great, thanks for having me. >> Okay, we're in The Cube here. You're watching day two coverage of SiliconANGLE Media's The Cube. I'm John Furrie with Peter Burris. Thanks for watching. >> Voiceover: They'll be millions of people in the near future that want to be involved in their own personal well-being and wellness. Nobody wants to age in a way that we're bound to a chair or a bed.