>> 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)