>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the cubes. Live coverage of women in data science, worldwide conference widths 2022. I'm Lisa Martin coming to you from Stanford university at the Arriaga alumni center. And I'm pleased to welcome my next guest. Hannah Sperling joins me business process intelligence or BPI, academic and research alliances at SAP HANA. Welcome to the program. >>Hi, thank you so much for having me. >>So you just flew in from Germany. >>I did last week. Yeah. Long way away. I'm very excited to be here. Uh, but before we get started, I would like to say that I feel very fortunate to be able to be here and that my heart and vicious still goes out to people that might be in more difficult situations right now. I agree >>Such a it's one of my favorite things about Wiz is the community that it's grown into. There's going to be about a 100,000 people that will be involved annually in woods, but you walk into the Arriaga alumni center and you feel this energy from all the women here, from what Margo and teams started seven years ago to what it has become. I was happened to be able to meet listening to one of the panels this morning, and they were talking about something that's just so important for everyone to hear, not just women, the importance of mentors and sponsors, and being able to kind of build your own personal board of directors. Talk to me about some of the mentors that you've had in the past and some of the ones that you have at SAP now. >>Yeah. Thank you. Um, that's actually a great starting point. So maybe talk a bit about how I got involved in tech. Yeah. So SAP is a global software company, but I actually studied business and I was hired directly from university, uh, around four years ago. And that was to join SAP's analytics department. And I've always had a weird thing for databases, even when I was in my undergrad. Um, I did enjoy working with data and so working in analytics with those teams and some people mentoring me, I got into database modeling and eventually ventured even further into development was working in analytics development for a couple of years. And yeah, still am with a global software provider now, which brought me to women and data science, because now I'm also involved in research again, because yeah, some reason couldn't couldn't get enough of that. Um, maybe learn about the stuff that I didn't do in my undergrad. >>And post-grad now, um, researching at university and, um, yeah, one big part in at least European data science efforts, um, is the topic of sensitive data and data privacy considerations. And this is, um, also topic very close to my heart because you can only manage what you measure, right. But if everybody is afraid to touch certain pieces of sensitive data, I think we might not get to where we want to be as fast as we possibly could be. And so I've been really getting into a data and anonymization procedures because I think if we could random a workforce data usable, especially when it comes to increasing diversity in stem or in technology jobs, we should really be, um, letting the data speak >>And letting the data speak. I like that. One of the things they were talking about this morning was the bias in data, the challenges that presents. And I've had some interesting conversations on the cube today, about data in health care data in transportation equity. Where do you, what do you think if we think of international women's day, which is tomorrow the breaking the bias is the theme. Where do you think we are from your perspective on breaking the bias that's across all these different data sets, >>Right. So I guess as somebody working with data on a daily basis, I'm sometimes amazed at how many people still seem to think that data can be unbiased. And this has actually touched upon also in the first keynote that I very much enjoyed, uh, talking about human centered data science people that believe that you can take the human factor out of any effort related to analysis, um, are definitely on the wrong path. So I feel like the sooner that we realize that we need to take into account certain bias sees that will definitely be there because data is humanly generated. Um, the closer we're going to get to something that represents reality better and might help us to change reality for the better as well, because we don't want to stick with the status quo. And any time you look at data, it's definitely gonna be a backward looking effort. So I think the first step is to be aware of that and not to strive for complete objectivity, but understanding and coming to terms with the fact just as it was mentioned in the equity panel, that that is logically impossible, right? >>That's an important, you bring up a really important point. It's important to understand that that is not possible, but what can we work with? What is possible? What can we get to, where do you think we are on the journey of being able to get there? >>I think that initiatives like widths of playing an important role in making that better and increasing that awareness there a big trend around explainability interpretability, um, an AI that you see, not just in Europe, but worldwide, because I think the awareness around those topics is increasing. And that will then, um, also show you the blind spots that you may still have, no matter how much you think about, um, uh, the context. Um, one thing that we still need to get a lot better at though, is including everybody in these types of projects, because otherwise you're always going to have a certain selection in terms of prospectus that you're getting it >>Right. That thought diversity there's so much value in thought diversity. That's something that I think I first started talking about thought diversity at a Wood's conference a few years ago, and really understanding the impact there that that can make to every industry. >>Totally. And I love this example of, I think it was a soap dispenser. I'm one of these really early examples of how technology, if you don't watch out for these, um, human centered considerations, how technology can, can go wrong and just, um, perpetuate bias. So a soap dispenser that would only recognize the hand, whether it was a certain, uh, light skin type that w you know, be placed underneath it. So it's simple examples like that, um, that I think beautifully illustrate what we need to watch out for when we design automatic decision aids, for example, because anywhere where you don't have a human checking, what's ultimately decided upon you end up, you might end up with much more grave examples, >>Right? No, it's, it's I agree. I, Cecilia Aragon gave the talk this morning on the human centered guy. I was able to interview her a couple of weeks ago for four winds and a very inspiring woman and another herself, but she brought up a great point about it's the humans and the AI working together. You can't ditch the humans completely to your point. There are things that will go wrong. I think that's a sends a good message that it's not going to be AI taking jobs, but we have to have those two components working better. >>Yeah. And maybe to also refer to the panel discussion we heard, um, on, on equity, um, I very much liked professor Bowles point. Um, I, and how she emphasized that we're never gonna get to this perfectly objective state. And then also during that panel, um, uh, data scientists said that 80% of her work is still cleaning the data most likely because I feel sometimes there is this, um, uh, almost mysticism around the role of a data scientist that sounds really catchy and cool, but, um, there's so many different aspects of work in data science that I feel it's hard to put that all in a nutshell narrowed down to one role. Um, I think in the end, if you enjoy working with data, and maybe you can even combine that with a certain domain that you're particularly interested in, be it sustainability, or, you know, urban planning, whatever that is the perfect match >>It is. And having that passion that goes along with that also can be very impactful. So you love data. You talked about that, you said you had a strange love for databases. Where do you, where do you want to go from where you are now? How much more deeply are you going to dive into the world of data? >>That's a good question because I would, at this point, definitely not consider myself a data scientist, but I feel like, you know, taking baby steps, I'm maybe on a path to becoming one in the future. Um, and so being at university, uh, again gives me, gives me the opportunity to dive back into certain courses and I've done, you know, smaller data science projects. Um, and I was actually amazed at, and this was touched on in a panel as well earlier. Um, how outdated, so many, um, really frequently used data sets are shown the realm of research, you know, AI machine learning, research, all these models that you feed with these super outdated data sets. And that's happened to me like something I can relate to. Um, and then when you go down that path, you come back to the sort of data engineering path that I really enjoy. So I could see myself, you know, keeping on working on that, the whole data, privacy and analytics, both topics that are very close to my heart, and I think can be combined. They're not opposites. That is something I would definitely stay true to >>Data. Privacy is a really interesting topic. We're seeing so many, you know, GDPR was how many years did a few years old that is now, and we've got other countries and states within the United States, for example, there's California has CCPA, which will become CPRA next year. And it's expanding the definition of what private sensitive data is. So we're companies have to be sensitive to that, but it's a huge challenge to do so because there's so much potential that can come from the data yet, we've got that personal aspect, that sensitive aspect that has to be aware of otherwise there's huge fines. Totally. Where do you think we are with that in terms of kind of compliance? >>So, um, I think in the past years we've seen quite a few, uh, rather shocking examples, um, in the United States, for instance, where, um, yeah, personal data was used or all proxies, um, that led to, uh, detrimental outcomes, um, in Europe, thanks to the strong data regulations. I think, um, we haven't had as many problems, but here the question remains, well, where do you draw the line? And, you know, how do you design this trade-off in between increasing efficiency, um, making business applications better, for example, in the case of SAP, um, while protecting the individual, uh, privacy rights of, of people. So, um, I guess in one way, SAP has a, as an easier position because we deal with business data. So anybody who doesn't want to care about the human element maybe would like to, you know, try building models and machine generated data first. >>I mean, at least I would feel much more comfortable because as soon as you look at personally identifiable data, you really need to watch out, um, there is however ways to make that happen. And I was touching upon these anonymization techniques that I think are going to be, um, more and more important in the, in the coming years, there is a proposed on the way by the European commission. And I was actually impressed by the sophisticated newness of legislation in, in that area. And the plan is for the future to tie the rules around the use of data science, to the specific objectives of the project. And I think that's the only way to go because of the data's out there it's going to be used. Right. We've sort of learned that and true anonymization might not even be possible because of the amount of data that's out there. So I think this approach of, um, trying to limit the, the projects in terms of, you know, um, looking at what do they want to achieve, not just for an individual company, but also for us as a society, think that needs to play a much bigger role in any data-related projects where >>You said getting true anonymization isn't really feasible. Where are we though on the anonymization pathway, >>If you will. I mean, it always, it's always the cost benefit trade off, right? Because if the question is not interesting enough, so if you're not going to allocate enough resources in trying to reverse engineer out an old, the tie to an individual, for example, sticking true to this, um, anonymization example, um, nobody's going to do it right. We live in a world where there's data everywhere. So I feel like that that's not going to be our problem. Um, and that is why this approach of trying to look at the objectives of a project come in, because, you know, um, sometimes maybe we're just lucky that it's not valuable enough to figure out certain details about our personal lives so that nobody will try, because I am sure that if people, data scientists tried hard enough, um, I wonder if there's challenges they wouldn't be able to solve. >>And there has been companies that have, you know, put out data sets that were supposedly anonymized. And then, um, it wasn't actually that hard to make interferences and in the, in the panel and equity one lab, one last thought about that. Um, we heard Jessica speak about, uh, construction and you know, how she would, um, she was trying to use, um, synthetic data because it's so hard to get the real data. Um, and the challenge of getting the synthetic data to, um, sort of, uh, um, mimic the true data. And the question came up of sensors in, in the household and so on. That is obviously a huge opportunity, but for me, it's somebody who's, um, very sensitive when it comes to privacy considerations straight away. I'm like, but what, you know, if we generate all this data, then somebody uses it for the wrong reasons, which might not be better urban planning for all different communities, but simple profit maximization. Right? So this is something that's also very dear to my heart, and I'm definitely going to go down that path further. >>Well, Hannah, it's been great having you on the program. Congratulations on being a Wood's ambassador. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of great lessons and experiences that you'll take back to Germany from here. Thank you so much. We appreciate your time for Hannah Sperling. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the QS live coverage of women in data science conference, 2020 to stick around. I'll be right back with my next guest.

>>LA from Las Vegas. It's the cube hovering AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon web services and they don't along with its ecosystem partners. >>Hey, welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS 19 re-invent Los Vegas. Where else would it be? Why? Because there are about 65,000 people here with Stu Miniman and myself, Lisa Martin and we're pleased to welcome the guests from SAP, Germany, joining us as Glen Gonzalez, the chief technology officer in Germany. Glenn, welcome to the cube. Thank you. Nice place to be. Isn't it nice with XO? So this is day three of all the action. There is not a lull in the attendance of the expo halls. So much going on. So much news, but give us a little bit of an insight. SAP is a customer of AWS. AWS is a customer of SAP. Talk to us about all that you guys do together. >>Yeah, that's, that's interesting about our partnership cause it has so many dimensions and the firsthand, actually SAP is a big customer of AWS. We have huge workloads running on AWS or even our software as a service. Applications like conquer. Maybe the coolest travel a software you can have. For me as a traveler, I use it every day. And on the other hand it's like AWS is a big customer of SAP using conqueror themselves. And you know, I don't know, maybe a lot of people around us, they will know what I'm talking about. And then adding to this we also competitors, which is great because competition drives innovation. Everybody knows this. So, um, and that brings me actually to maybe the last part is like innovation is that maybe the center of our partnership is that we together can do so much more than each of us could do. >>And if we bring these two parts together, then then it's real value for the customers. And that's maybe the most exciting part about this. Clint, it's interesting. SAP Sapphire was actually the second show we ever did as the cube way back in 2010 before AWS reinvent existed. But even back then we started talking about transformation. You know, I think of SAP and SAP is the global ERP company. You started talking about all the different pieces. How should we be thinking about SAP in today's modern transformed cloud environment? Well that's, that's, that's a topic I have every week cause a lot of people perceive SAP as the ERP company and it's, it's so much more due to the changes that are happening around the world now. We stand for our business processes end to end, safe and secure. And business can run only if you have a software that can do this. But these processes are changing, you know, they're expanding and they are technically changing. For example, IOT brings actually that not a human being starts the process. It's a, it's a, it's a sensor but it's still an end to end process or technologies like blockchain and machine learning are changing the process itself. So some people think machine learning is only fancy of its autonomous driving, but put it into a process and it gets autonomous and that's a real value for customers. You can even calculate a business. So it's so much more than ERP today. >>We're at a Sapphire last year, so summer of 2018. One of the things that was interesting was a lot of messaging around ERP. You can talk to, of course here we are at AWS, lots of people know. Alexa, talk to us about some of the innovations and the emerging technologies that SAP is bringing into your flagship products and your other technologies that are really helping to transform way beyond ERP. >>Yeah, that's, that's, that's interesting cause we're doing a lot of this innovation together with AWS. Um, many of our biggest strategic customers are already running their workloads on AWS and, and so many more. I evaluating to do this. It's really exciting times. And as I mentioned earlier, new technologies kick in. So our, um, business technology platform based on SAP cloud platform is that by the customer's need, um, this connection from these new technologies into the businesses and we are developing so many softwares together now, um, like data intelligence or data warehouse cloud, um, and even the SAP custodian as we are now brought out last, uh, two months ago on our ticket. Yeah. So Glenn, uh, you know, SAP has always had a great few point into the productivity of the worker. Um, and there's so many technologies you brought up the autonomous bees. So it brought to mind one of the hardest areas in tech beyond just cloud is RPA, robotic process automation. >>Uh, you know, help us bring inside, you know, SAP is positioning there. Uh, and you know, even broader about just how workforce can be more efficient, not just get cool new tools, guide some, maybe one of the main topics of the ITD ciders around the world is how can I make things more simple? How can I reduce the complexity of my it? And it always starts at the user. Uh, it should at least not always, but it should. And if you can make the work of a user a lot, a lot more simple. And that's what these technologies bring in. Uh, automize or, or posh, partially automized processes. Um, the, the, the user of the software can do different things or you can only confront them with the difficult stuff on. The rest can be done kind by the system. And that's why these things are really important and we may main topic and you can put this new technology in with not such a big effort as others. Maybe >>the end user more productive is critical, right? Cause we're all end users at the end of the day and sometimes it's very challenging to get worked on if you have so many processes, there's so many different applications that you have to work with but to get the end user that productive to really streamline the enterprise software space. A lot of things we're >>hearing about, and Andy Jassy talked about this in his keynote Tuesdays organizations to truly transform a business all the way down to that end user level, you have to start at that senior executive level as the CTO of SAP in Germany, are you starting to see conversations shift up from that more end user space to that C-suite? Is is enterprise transformation really at that level and in your experience? Definitely. Definitely. It's a big topic but you have to see this. There are two to two versions of this. The one is to talk about it. And the other one is the execution on it. So we see a lot of companies are talking about unstop the execution. And it's a real transformational part and it's really hard for many companies because the change is drastic. And what we really see, it only works top down. So if the C level is not in it basically will not happen. And that's, that's something we've really learned within the last years. >>Yeah. Glenn, I always want to get to talk to a CTO. The changing role of technology in business today. Uh, you know, you used to be able to say there are certain industries, well, they might use of technology, but they're not technology companies. Now, you know, the, the, the meme is everyone is a software company and everyone's becoming technology. So you're gonna bring us inside your viewpoint as to, as a CTO about how, you know, how important, you know, this moment in time is, uh, in the technology industry. Huh. >>I think it's, it's, it's master key for, for many companies and even the role of the CTO changes from, for example, my role, I'm really customer centric. I spent many spend time with many customers a week. So I'm not in the machine room fixing things. I'm listening to customers because if you don't understand what they actually have for expectations, you will never fit. They're actually the expectation. So even even putting one on top, some of our customers need help to understand the expectations of their customers and that's the part of this digital transformation and these new businesses coming off. And so it's a lot more exciting than maybe a few years ago where we only talked about tech. I spent most of the time about how to use it and then afterwards how the tech has to be implemented to make this possible. What are your conversations with respect to people on that cultural change? >>As soon as point is, so many companies today have to be absolutely fueled by technology to be competitive because there are startups, right? You know, behind a lot of legacy businesses ready to cannibalize the business. But that cultural piece, it's really difficult. Talk to me about some of the conversations that you have with customers to help them maybe reset expectations but also get them understanding that that cultural transformation is critical to the digital transformation. That's maybe the unfair part. We come in and want to talk about technology and use it and then they, they start about change and not talking about change, their mindset change. It's the critical thing you can, you can have the best ideas. You can have the best technology behind this if you'll own organization but not go with this. You will not stop or you will not start. Sorry. So that's why I just earlier said, if it doesn't work top down, it will never work. >>If if the designer or let's say at the boss, if he's not in, if he doesn't understand the necessity to change this, it will not happen. And the changes is quite heavily. It's not agile. It's a lot more, it's about really thinking a different way or even understanding what the internet is doing to everybody. Some don't even understand that and it's, it's sometimes it's really surreal. You know, you're setting down, someone's telling you, Oh you know, my daughter uses a smartphone all day. I under don't understand her. And I said no. Then start understanding it cause that's how the world is turning out the moment. Right. And there are five different generations that are in workforce today. So businesses, SAP, your partners, your competitors, all have to cater to your point to a really broad level of technology understanding. Yeah, that's can be a big barrier. >>It is a barrier. But don't make the mistake to only get in the millennials and throw the old ones out because that's the biggest mistake you can do. Cause it's, it's about the mixture. It's about diversity in the team. I mean it's even if you can even ask scientists. Yeah. A lot of stuff you can read about this, but if you want to really make it happen, you have to live it. And this is where SAP, we had talked about it upfront that we have actually five generations within one company. And it's so important because the business process had the beginning. There's a reason why we did it this way. And if the new people don't understand this, they may make big mistakes. So that's the magic, bringing them together and making new kinds of teams. >>Yeah. Well Glen, I, I loved a couple minutes to go. You're talking about the requirements that top down leadership to be able to help and that really echoes what Andy Jassy talked about on the main stage. I'm wondering if you could give us a little bit of the global viewpoint, especially being from Europe here because you know very much we talk about that move from the bottoms up to the top down and it coming from both ways here. Is it very similar across the globe? Is there maturity or changes in some of the workforce that might be a little bit different in some geos versus others that you're working with? >>Without big differences, especially in Germany, which is a very mature market. Um, there's a lot of, actually there is a lot more talking about data security and privacy in Europe than we see in other regions of the world. For example, that doesn't matter. That doesn't say that. It doesn't matter that, but it's different talk. So, or even cloud. Uh, for some people it's cloud is like. I don't know. I can't really grab it. So an interesting is a different understanding of cloud of people. So it's, it's, it's regionally totally different how to go in and it's also a difference if you're talking to a big company, which is globally on the, on the road or others that are starting to get global for them, it's also change. Yeah. In other markets it's not a problem to do it that way, but in your own markets, a lot of, you know, say as like, Oh, let's wait. >>We have to discuss this first and that's maybe the wrong the wrong version. Yeah. As we look at how cloud in and of itself as an operating model, but also the technologies that define it, how they've evolved and changed. One of the things too that Andy Jassy talked about with our own John furrier is that, you know, a lot of the businesses that are going to be successful tomorrow are either going to be born in the cloud companies or they don't even exist yet. What are some of the things that you're seeing in the existing enterprise, not just in Germany, but globally? Are you seeing any industries in particular that you think are really right to become reborn in the cloud? For example, web far, especially in Germany where we have a lot of companies building machines, hardware, it's, it's more difficult to get this vision of being a digital company. >>You mentioned it earlier. Companies are becoming a software company, although they're building machines and the machine is only there to enable the service. This is a big change for them. It's of course a lot more complicated to to understand how these new technologies can help them on for them. They are actually in the beginning of understanding, but for others that come from a service side, for them, it's a lot easier for them to understand what these technologies can bring them and agility and flexibility and scalability. It opens totally new doors, but there's still a lot of education you have to do for them to understand that it's really a really the right door to go through and that's part of my job extending these things. Yeah. Glenn would love you. You've been, I'm sure talking to a lot of customers this week. Give us your final takeaways from AWS. >>Re invent 2019 wow. I'm a little bit overwhelmed by the input you can get here. I really tried to go to all sessions. I failed. Maybe next time there's only 2,500 of them figured out. Cloning highly shy manipulations is one of my CTO. Let's maybe I work on it for next time. We'll talk after this maybe next year so I need to be invited again and we can talk about that now. It's, it's a huge input we have here and it's a different stage. If I talk to customers it's a different talk cause we have more input from many sides and they are also open to talk about things that they may not be open to when they're at home cause she are things that there's so much positive input and so diverse input that it really helps to start different conversations. Well 2,500 sessions. That cloning thing will really help out. Not only with that, but also can you imagine how much better ERP would get if we had clones? So you'll have to come back cause we have to figure this out. I bet on that. All right, Glen, thank you for joining steward again for your time. All right, first two minute, man. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube and stick around because later today, Andy Jassy stops by. Thanks for watching.

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi, everybody, welcome to this CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this episode of the Breaking Analysis, we're going to take a look at SAP. Thursday, October 10th, SAP surprised the Street, they announced early, they preannounced their earnings, and at the same time they timed that with the announcement that CEO, longtime CEO Bill McDermot was stepping down, his contract was up for renewal in January of 2020, and he decided that he's going to turn it over to a co-CEO structure that I'll talk about a little bit, so that was big news. Spending on SAP has been holding pretty steady over the last several quarters, I'll share some ETR data with you. It's been quite a run by Bill McDermott, he started out as CEO, I think it was February of 2010, as co-CEO with Jim Hagemann Snabe, and then two years later was named the sole CEO and I'll share some data on that in terms of the performance of SAP during his tenure. But the bottom line is, we expect, based on the spending data, some continued momentum from SAP, I'll show you some data that shows a little bit of a mix in the numbers, ETR basically just dropped a report on Friday that I'll share with you as well, but the bottom line is we see some major challenges ahead for SAP, specifically from a technology integration point that I'll talk to you, and it really is not showing up yet in the spending numbers, but it's something that we're keeping an eye on, and it's something that we want to share with you, our community. So Alex, if you wouldn't mind bringing up the first slide, here. I'll make some key points, really around SAP's Q3 earnings and the CEO news. So as they say, they pre-announced earnings on October 10th after the close, 10% revenue growth, which is a nice, healthy double digit revenue growth, cloud was up considerably, Bill McDermott made the big emphasis when he was doing the rounds on how their cloud revenue is growing faster than competitors, 33%, but definitely from a smaller base, but their license revenue, their traditional on-prem businesses continues to be under pressure and decline, it's got a, SAP is a strong services business, services and maintenance business, and they're up to 12,000 customers with HANA, I'll make some comments on HANA in a little bit later. This may have some implications for Europe, we've been saying that Europe is over-banked, that banking is soft based on the ETR spending data, so this may be a little bit of a bright spot for Europe. Of course SAP with its ERP business of strong manufacturing, anybody who has a supply chain, so this may be a good sign for Europe, that's something that we're watching. And then, say McDermott steps down, we're going back to the dual CEO structure. Jennifer Morgan, who headed the cloud business, is a longtime SAP employee, and she essentially is going to be taking that role of the customer-facing CEO. Christian Kline is really, has history as product development and HANA, he did a stint in finance at SuccessFactors, and is really an operations guru, so back to that dual CEO role that you saw with Snabe and McDermott, where McDermott was really the front-facing, sales-facing individual, and Snabe was the product person. So that's kind of an interesting structure, we see that, we saw that in Oracle before Mark Hurd stepped down with Safra Catz as co-CEO, so it's not a unique structure, although it's not, certainly not common in the industry. The next thought I want to share with you is one that you may have seen before, every time that ETR does a survey, and this is data, fresh data from the October survey, every time they do a survey, they take spending intentions and they ask folks, "Are you spending more, "are you spending less, are you spending the same, "are you adding to the platform, "are you subtracting from the platform?" So they essentially ignore the, for this net score that I'm showing you now, they ignore the people that aren't spending, that are staying the same, flat, and they take the more minus the less, subtract amount, you get a net score, and the net score here is 27%. This is not uncommon for, from the data that I've seen out of ETR for a large company established legacy provider like SAP. Net score 27% is not great, but it's a holding steady score, it's not in the negatives, it's not in the red zone, and so you can see here that 32% of the survey respondents were saying they're going to spend more, 54% basically flat, but only a smaller number, 6%, saying they're going to spend less, so it's reasonable for SAP, but if you look at the trendline, Alex, bring up the next slide, look at the spending trendline from the survey for SAP since the July 16 survey, they do this every quarter, and so the blue is the net score, that green minus the red that I've talked about in the past, and you can see that sort of steady decline, but this is not a disaster, what it is, is it's a sign of spending momentum relative to previous years or previous quarters, and you can see the yellow line is also declining, that's market share, what that means is market share in terms of spend relative to other initiatives, so the categories that SAP participates in, enterprise software, et cetera, spending on SAP relative to other sectors has been in decline. If you look at, Alex, if you bring up the next slide, look at the SaaS business, you'll see that it's a much happier story. SAP's made a number of acquisitions that I'll talk about in a moment, of cloud/SaaS players, so you can see their SaaS position has been holding firm, ETR cites Concur, SuccessFactors, Ariba, Callidus, they kind of remaining stable versus a year ago, and you can see the market share's kind of ticking up, so pretty solid from the new growth, that high growth area, and that's something that the Street really pays very close attention to. The next data point that I want to show you on the next slide is actually quite fascinating, so SAP beat its forecasts, so it didn't beat and raise expectations for the rest of the year, but so what this shows is ETR's regression analysis, what the quants at ETR do, is they crunch the numbers, and they compare them to the consensus on Wall Street, and they actually forecast higher or lower, where they think that earnings are going to come in based on their spending data, so you can see here that green, you see that little RPM meter, they're in the green, that's where you want to be, 359 basis points ahead of the median forecast, so they're saying, so the ETR second half spending 10.4% versus consensus of 6.8%, very positive sign. I think it's no coincidence that SAP records B for the quarter, so based on that data collected in that October survey, it looks like there's some momentum for SAP. Now the next slide I want to show you is the stock chart, this is kind of the scorecard, if you will, for Bill McDermott's tenure, and you can see, so I went back to 2010, as I say, he started in 2010, as a co-CEO with Jim Snabe, and then look at the performance here, I mean it's been pretty solid. And so you see today it's up around 10%, as I say, they announced the earnings beat, they announced their revenue beat, and they basically affirmed expectations, maybe raised them a little bit going forward. The reason why the stock is up is the beat, but also McDermott has put in place sort of an efficiency improvement and a restructuring. They've made a promise to improve operating margins by 1% a year over the next five years. They've made a promise to get cloud gross margins to 75% by 2023. They've done a restructuring, I think it affects around 4400 people, and they're hiring data scientists and AI experts and machine learning people, and RPA folks, they acquired an RPA company a while ago, and kind of just threw that in 'cause it's such a hot space. Software coders all around the world, China, US, Europe, all over the place. And so that restructuring, the Street loves when you restructure, you cut the dead wood, so to speak. With all due respect to the folks that might be affected by this, but the Street loves that. So you're seeing the combination of the beat, and the uptick or the efficiencies taking place in the quarter, and they timed that with the McDermott announcement because they wanted to, I'm sure, time it with some positive news, so you can see the stocks up today, so that's kind of a scorecard on Bill McDermott, I have to say, pretty impressive performance over the last 10 years, or nearly 10 years. But here's the thing, we see some major challenges coming forth with SAP, and I want to talk about that a little bit. Before I do, Alex, if you would play the video from Bill McDermott answering a question that John Furrier asked several years ago, and then we'll come back and talk about it. >> I had a meeting with the CEO yesterday, and this is a very common conversation. He grew his business by acquisition, and now he's got a federation of a whole bunch of companies, and he feels like a holding company. What he wants to do is consolidate these businesses onto a common platform. He won't do it overnight because you can't shut down businesses, but the vision over the next few years is consolidate everything onto one common SAP platform, and take all the databases out and standardize everything on HANA. >> Now here's what's ironic. The core success of SAP historically has been what? It's been that they have a single, unified system, the general ledger and all the financial data and all the supply chain data, all of that is in the same place, accessible, single version of the truth if you will. What's ironic is SAP's made 31 acquisitions in the last nearly 10 years under the tenure of Bill McDermott. So in a way, SAP is becoming a tech holding company, kind of picking up on some of the things that Bill McDermott said in his little clip there. In our view, SAP's big technical challenge is to get all this stuff working together. As you all know, it's nontrivial when you make a lot of acquisitions, billions and billions of dollars of acquisitions, which by the way, they promised to stop that torrid pace of multibillion dollar acquisitions, very difficult to pull those together. Let's look at some of those acquisitions that they've made, Ariba, Concur, SuccessFactors, SuccessFactors is interesting because SuccessFactors was kind of talent management, you had kind of core HR from SAP and it's kind of been a challenge to put those things together. Think about the legacy R3 and R4 and all the on-prem manufacturing stuff that SAP still runs, that customers still run. Acquisition of Sybase, Callidus, so... SAP's answer to all this integration is to put everything in memory in HANA. So the motivation for HANA, however, in many ways was to compete more effectively with Oracle and not have to rely so much on the Oracle database and get people off Oracle. But here's the thing that SAP didn't do that Oracle did do, and I think, my opinion, Oracle got right. Oracle did Fusion, they bit the bullet and did Oracle Fusion, it took the better part of a decade, it actually took more than a decade, but every time Oracle buys a company, and every SAS application that it jams into the Red Stack, runs Fusion middleware, and runs the Oracle database. So, it's not the case with HANA. So it's kind of an integration nightmare, it's very very complex what SAP has got handed to the new regime. I think this is a daunting task, and I think this might be in part why the timing of Bill McDermott stepping down, I mean he sees that this is going to be a heavy lift, it's going to need more of a product-focused leadership team, that's why I think it's smart that SAP has maybe gone back to that two-headed monster of two CEOs, one that's customer-facing and one that's more product-oriented and R&D-oriented because they have a major integration challenge ahead of them. So as I say, SAP has promised to stop making these multibillion dollar acquisitions, they got to get to work on integration, which is going to be a major portion of the task in the next five years, so spending data from ETR shows some positive momentum relative to consensus, now remember, the Street works in a quarter, so they're on a quarterly shot clock, so if the Street says, "You're going to do this for earnings," and they do this, well, that means higher EPS, so the stock's going to go up. If you do this and you come in below, that means the stock's going to go down, so these are very tactical kinds of things. We're talking here about more longer terms, this could be a five to seven year integration challenge if not more, remember, it took Oracle 10 years plus in terms of integrating Fusion, so that's something that you need to keep an eye on, especially if you're a customer and you're getting pitched all these different services and cloud services, just got to think about the architecture for integration. Okay, this is Dave Vellante with CUBE Insights powered by ETR, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Welcome to the CUBE studios for another CUBE Conversation. We go in depth with thought leaders driving business outcomes with technology. One of the biggest challenges that every business faces is how do I navigate these significant transformations that are taking place on a global scale as a consequence of digital opportunities? And then how do I utilize marketing as a basis for engaging my customers differently? It's a significant problem that affects virtually all business of all size and all segments. So to have that conversation, we've got a great guest here with us today, Alicia Tillman is the CMO of SAP. Alicia, welcome to theCUBE. >> Peter, thank you so much for having me here today. >> All right, so, Alicia, I want to start with your perspective on some of the big changes that SAP sees occurring in the marketplace, and then we'll kind of talk about how that informs an evolving role for marketing. >> Well, I mean, look, everybody is transforming something, right, you know? And we are very much in the thick of a digital transformation. I think we've gone past the point where it was education on what does it mean and why I need to get onboard, how is it affecting my business? To now, real application. And it comes in many forms. The definitely of digital transformation is extremely broad and there's application of it across your entire business. One of the things that I will say that really is what companies need to solve for is the business of delivering exceptional customer experiences. Customer service has been taken to a whole new level of competition, a lot of it is because of choice that exists and because of how much digital has impacted, on a positive level, our ability to do many things. Personalization is one option to really delivering enhanced experience, and so that is, I think, the biggest focus in the marketplace today that companies of all sizes are trying to figure out, which is how do we win in the experience economy that we're living in right now? >> Now, the experience economy has a lot of different implications. But certainly one of them is your customers need to have a better experience and that's going to be a feature of your overall sustainable differentiation or not, but also it's the idea that I have expertise that you can use within your business so that you can be more competitive and more successful in dealing with your customers. I know that's been a major feature of SAP strategy over the last 20, 30 years is bringing that deep understanding of how a business should operate and the role that software should play in making businesses operate really well. Talk a little bit about how overall the SAP approach in the experience economy informs how you think about marketing. >> Yeah, I mean, what companies are trying to solve for is how can I be an experience company that thrives in this experience economy that we're living in? And SAP is about helping companies understand that outcome and understand the marketplace and where they need to compete, number one, and then secondly, we help companies learn and embrace how to succeed and be competitive and successful in the marketplace that we're in, and when you think about the how, we live also in an intelligence era. We've gone from big data and access to data and how do we derive the appropriate insights from data to now be able to apply it in a way that allows me as a company to run it my best so that I can succeed in the experience economy that we live in, and this is really the hallmark of SAP, we're a technology company, a 47 year old brand that has always been in the business of helping companies run at their best. And whether you're an HR professional to a head of marketing to a head of sales to a CIO, a CFO, having a very unified integrated technology to run your applications with the most embedded intelligence, so that your operations are running at their best, that enables you to then deliver at your best for your customers, which is very tied to, overall, the experience that you're ultimately delivering. >> So one of the challenges that we have here, especially as we think about a company that's supplying the core operational capabilities to customers, is what is it that marketing must do to help customers transform their business? There's a couple of things that I always like to talk about, let me start with one. Increasingly, we think that marketing needs to take a more active role in demonstrating a company's expertise and thought leadership to help customers establish an agreement about how to move forward in periods of significant transformation. Would you agree with that? >> Absolutely, I mean, look. This is a marketer's dream, the environment that we live in right now, and it is up to marketing to grab hold of it and really chart their destiny in terms of the leadership that they can bring to their companies. This is an era where it's about intelligence, it's about insight, and it's about experiences. And when you think about the role of the marketer, and let's talk about the core role. No matter what company you ask, there's certain things that come to mind when they think about what the role of marketing should be. The one thing that you typically hear time and time again is marketing should be representative of the voice of the customer. And I don't think that there is any bigger function to serve the needs and to respond and to help inform the company on what's necessary, but also to help shape the story, to help our customers understand where they can best compete in this environment, and so I think that understanding those needs, combining it with insights of what's happening in the marketplace, and then help to architect how our value proposition works in support, both of what the customer needs are together with what's happening in the marketplace, it's a beautiful role. And not to mention, the other piece of it, which is every company wanting to invest in some way in someone else that has a purpose. That is focused on doing something good above and beyond what we contribute every day, and I also believe that there's no better functioning than marketing as well to help companies understand their purpose and to articulate the purpose of your own company so that your customer sees values, shared value and common purpose that you share with each other. >> So it sounds as though it's important that marketing become an overall advocate for engaging across the entire customer journey. Helping the customer understand the problem and hopefully biasing them towards your solutions, of course, but even after the sale, helping the customer envision what the outcome is, helping the customer comprehend and establish approaches to change the way the business operates and embed things and working with those many, many, that multitude of actual users out there that are ultimately going to dictate whether or not a solution succeeds or is abandoned within the business. Do you see marketing play a more active role across the entire life cycle? >> Have to, have to. I mean, you know, marketing obviously plays a significant role in driving awareness around a company's brand, and then driving increased understanding to lead to purchase decisions in a company, but now even more when you think of the second half of that life cycle, that focuses on retention and implementation and engagement, which ultimately leads to a desire and an ability for you to keep customers for life, that has got to be an inherent part of the role that marketing plays, because even if you think about it in comparison to something like social media, we've gone from a platform that allowed you to share your opinion and frankly have a voice to now measuring the effectiveness based on how much engagement you get from the voice and the opinions that you're sharing, I mean, that is really the evolution that we also need to think about in terms of marketing's role as it relates to the customer journey. There's been so much effort that's been put in the front half of the journey, which is to get the customer to buy, but now it's equally as important, especially in this economy that we live in right now, that you have to focus on renewal. You have to focus on retention, and the way to do that is in helping through the implementation and the engagement process, and one such opportunity for marketing to play that role is find those use cases. Showcase those customers who are using the products, engaging with the products, make it relevant. Make it relevant so that the customer can really optimize how they're engaging with your brand, how they're engaging with your products, and I don't think there's any better department in the organization than marketing to lead that effort for their organization. >> Alicia, I was at Sapphire recently and one of the things that I really enjoyed about the way you presented SAP there is that you actually celebrated customer success. You didn't just talk about it and reveal it, you actually celebrate it, and I totally agree with you, I think that's a crucially important part of the evolving marketing experience as customers take increasingly center stage in determining success or failure. So let me ask you one more question here, Alicia. We've just described a changed, an evolved role for marketing that's made possible in part because we now can engage customers through data without ever losing the sight that data is not the person, is not the brand, but that suggests a different set of, you know, a different mission, of all a different mission for the CMO. How do you think the CMO's job is going to evolve over the course of the next couple of years in light of what we're talking about? >> So I think it's about balance. I think that we live in a world today that also everybody wants to be heard. They want to embrace brands that are relevant to them, that care about them, that are creating services and products and solutions that really help them solve problems or make them better at what they're trying to accomplish, and there's a fair bit of data that helps you gain that understanding, understand that sentiment, and that is incredibly important. That we use that data so that we know what products and services we need to build to support customer need. On the other half, though, of that equation is always this notion of empathy, and often times the data isn't going to give you that empathy that is such a big part of connecting at a human level. How you create that story, you know, how you respond to the needs of the customer, so there has to be a balance. And I think that, you know, where marketers can once, you know, believe that we've lived in a world where data didn't exist and we had to operate purely on instinct and empathy, we live in a world now where we have more data than ever that can help inform what we're creating, but how we deliver it and how it creates relevancy to the customer, that's where the empathy and the intuition and your understanding of the customer really needs to go hand in hand, and I think that that's a beautiful role for marketing to play. >> And so CMOs increasingly have to be able to lead the organization on the data oriented activities, but also sustain a clear company focus, empathetic focus on customer needs and outcomes. >> That's exactly, right, and you said a very key word, Peter, it's about outcomes. You know, we as marketers have to transition from being representations of products and more leaders of experiences. It's how do the products that we create help to enhance an experience which is the ultimate outcome that we're working to support. We want to deliver memorable experiences through each and every engagement that we have with out brand. We have to create a sense of community. And so if we can start to think about how we market, how we tell our story, how we support the customer journey, end to end, from awareness to retention, think about it in terms of the ultimate outcome that we're working to deliver to our customers, and what I have found is when you focus more there, you focus less on the product itself and more about the outcome and the experience it creates, that is really where you increase the value overall of marketing, because you're increasing the relevancy with your customer. >> Excellent, Alicia Tillman, CMO of SAP. Thank you very much for being on the CUBE. >> Peter, thank you so much for having me today, I really enjoyed it. >> And once again, I'm Peter Burris, you've been watching a CUBE Conversation, until next time. (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering IBM Think 2019. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hey, welcome back everyone, we're here live with theCUBE's coverage in San Francisco, the Moscone Center for IBM Think 2019. I'm John Furrier, my co-host David Vellante. Dave, we've been doing theCUBE 10 years, our second ever CUBE event was SAP SAPPHIRE, so going back into the archives. >> Great memories. >> SAP, we've been watching the SAP evolve, we've got two guests from SAP. Scot Henney, Global VP of SAP Customer Experience CX and Marcus Venth, who's a Global VP of S/4HANA, Business and Market Development, talking about enterprise, intelligence, making data, making it reason. We've been covering you guys and I got to say, Bill McDermott has always been on the front wave of all the big waves. He was talking about data and iPads right at the beginning. And the things he was talking about in 2012, 2013 is what everyone is doing today. >> Yes. >> This has been a big part of SAP, not new to you this transformation, how's the journey going? How's the partnership going with IBM? >> So, the relationship that we have with IBM is, I guess, about 40 years old and we're not even halfway done yet. You know, we're still working together and successfully delivering great business outcomes for our customers, and I think that's because not only do you have great global reach and scale, but you also understand how data and business processes impact business outcomes. Both in the back office and also in the front office too. So you were mentioning Bill McDermott. We have a phrase with inside SAP CX called, "Be Bold." Right, it's really taken in on the mantra for us and we're making some really bold acquisitions with inside the front office space. So, one of the ones he's done recently that's really focused on data is around Qualtrics. >> Yeah Huge, huge acquisition for us about experiential data and how we bring that back to organizations and we're really keen to work with IBM on that too. >> He said that was a game changer on his press conference. I watched that, I was really interesting acquisition. >> Yeah, bold move. >> Because you bring in real time data, you bring in real telemetry, real analytics, all this stuff together in a kind of new powerful way, with an existing system that SAP has been powering business software, in all these apps, what does it mean? Does this make this enterprise more intelligent, is that where is connects? What's some of the key things there? >> So, that's a really good question. So, if you can connect the back office to the front office and then create trusted relationships, then you're going to deliver a better customer experience. And that has a huge impact on shareholder value. Specifically around Qualtrics. That enables to move that next level on into what we call the experience economy. So, not only do we understand implicit data and explicit data like you were just saying before, how many people have just seen that mail, but also how they react to you. But we could also say, "What do they feel about you? "What else would they like you to do?" "What relationship do they currently have with you "and what would they like to see improve?" >> This is interesting, one of the things we talk about all the time at theCUBE is, you know, 'cause we're in the information business, we're a media company. Information's everywhere. >> Yeah >> It's knowledge and experience is the new thread. >> Totally. >> So the outcome is the word you used to use but now you're thinking, okay, if experience and presence and knowledge, this is a new kind of user experience. Is that what the intelligent enterprise is? I mean, what is the intelligent enterprise? Give us the definition. >> Right, so I think I can take that one. So, simplistically it's about taking data that you've referenced earlier on and applying new technologies to ultimately make business processes or optimize business process or come up with entirely new business models. You know, we talk about Uber and Airbnb and all these but the reality is that there are new business models being enacted within certain industries. Whether it's direct to consumer type changes or changes moving from a productized, or selling products to selling services. And so when we look at intelligent enterprise it's about taking your business partners, which are the stakeholders that make you as a company successful, that would be your customers, your suppliers, your employees and connecting them. And then ultimately leveraging the data that you're collecting as part of those business processes, applying machine learning technology, and then looking at how can we make that more efficient, or how can we now leverage that data to create new insights that then tie in to the customer experience side of things. >> You know it's interesting, John, you talk about McDermott during the big data craze. Bill McDermott never really used that term, at least not that much, but he did talk about the importance of fast data being able to respond quickly. Obviously SAP customers have a lot of data. And so you've got this platform now, this sort of data platform. How are customers making investments to, sort of, alter or modernize that data platform for this purpose? >> So, the digital platform is really interesting because what we're looking for if we look at the sort of components of an intelligent enterprise is three components. There's the intelligence suite which includes the digital core, then there's the platform, and then we have the intelligent technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence wrapped around all of that. The platform is really helping our customers get to a more standardized approach. Where it's helping them integrate the applications within the suite. It's also a platform with which they can then implement these machine learning scenarios. It's a platform which with they can innovate and build new applications and allowing them to do that means that they can keep their core standard. And that's the key now as customers are thinking more and more about moving to the cloud, it's all about how do I keep my core clean and standard and allow myself to take advantage of those innovations and then move some of those customer specific innovations to the platform and then layer a UI on top of that, that basically means the end user doesn't know which system they're in, they're just leveraging an integrated suite. >> Substracting all the complexities and all that intelligence out. >> Yeah >> What are the obstacles for, it sounds easy, but it's not, it's hard. What are the obstacles, what's it take? Culture, we always talk about cultural sift. >> I mean, the easy, easy one is the organizational challenges, right? We see that the executive support, the charter, having clearly defined objectives and having the talent in-house that has the courage and the skillset to implement those changes. But I think one of the biggest challenges we see touches on what I was saying before where we have a highly customized environment with lots of disparate applications that really are poorly integrated and then trying to get the customers to then move that to a new platform is very difficult. So, with that, they need the courage, in many cases, to leave that stuff behind, right? >> Completely, and I completely concur. So that's the same challenge that we find in the front office. So, we aim to create a phenomenal experience platform for our clients, but unless they're reorganized internally, to remove those siloed thinking around what do sales do, what does marketing do, then they're not going to be able to fully utilize the tools and platforms that we deliver. So, it's actually about a mind shift change and about focusing on the customer. >> I'd like to get your perspective, since you're here, 'cause we go to a lot of events, we go to 120 events last year. We go to CloudNative, Computing Foundation, AWS re:Invent, we're here at IBM Think, we used to go to SAP Sapphire, but that's a different story. But one of the things we hear about is we see new trends like Kubernetes and containers. People are doing it, but they're doing it kind of like in an experimental way, or doing it, you guys are actually implementing technology with customers. >> Yes >> Integrating it in, like, mission critical kind of integrations. You're not standing up to Kubernetes, saying, "Hey we've got a Kubernetes cluster, look at this." In one or two apps, what's your experience with it 'round the integration? Because putting these piece parts together is hard. What are some of the trends that your customers are doing around really standing up cloud-native, intelligent enterprise, apps, what is some of the real use cases that our people are doing? >> I guess first of all, if we're dealing with the SAP portfolio, we're delivering a lot of those integration points out of the box, so that sort of takes away a lot of the guesswork when we talk about integrating sort of disparate applications. And I think one of the key aspects of that is just having, the plumbing is not good enough. You really need to have a data strategy around that where our data hub is then able to provide a consistent master record strategy. Where these systems can then seamlessly talk to each other. 'Cause one of the biggest problems in integrations is not the plumbing, it's actually having these systems being able to talk to each other and rationalize this information. >> Can we, maybe, do a before and after example? I mean, take a supply chain example. So, what's the before look like? What's the after, ideal after state look like, or the sort of outcome that you're looking for? >> So let's take an example, right? Let's say you're buying goods from a supplier and you now want to be connected to that supplier so that you can see where those goods are in transit. And then you want to be notified when there's a delay in those goods so that they can then adjust your production plan to make sure you're still accommodating a customer's order cycle. Now let's say, for instance, that we start recognizing a pattern, or the system starts recognizing a pattern, that every February we seem to see a five day delay, for whatever reason. Now the system can automatically start applying an additional lead time and accommodating for those changes automatically. So, that's what we think of when we think about an intelligent enterprise. It's about an enterprise that live and able to adjust and therefore able to build the trust with the customers in order to fulfill their expectations. >> I think that's a really, really important point. Can I answer that from a customer perspective? >> Yeah, please. >> Please. >> Because we're all consumers as well, of services, and also within our business lives. I think what you want, as a customer, after you've used our services and our systems, is you want to be treated like a person, right? And you want to feel like your data has been treated with some respect, yeah? And then you want to feel that promise that customer has, sorry, that business offered you is being kept. So, you want to be treated like a person, I wasn't just a transaction to you. You understand what I needed, right? And then, you treated my data appropriately. I can trust you with our relationship and I know that you're going to fill in the promise. That's what our platform delivers >> Yeah, 100%, I mean-- >> Yeah >> I ordered something, I want to know if it's not here when you said it was going to be here? I want you to either tell me, tell me why, or do something about it, not force me to call you and find out. I mean that's, it's proactive, it's anticipatory. Not reactive, or no active. >> You got it and that can only be done if you integrate the front office to the back office. And that's what IBM and SAP are working on right now. >> That's great, I mean, that's the greatest segue into my question, which is, here in San Francisco IBM Think 2019, moved from Vegas, now they're doing so, so great. Great venue 30,000 people. What kind of conversations were you guys having here at the show? Take us through a kind of day in the life. What kind of meetings did you have, what were people talking about, what's on the top of minds of meetings, your customers, and your partners at IBM? >> Well, from my perspective, there's a lot of discussion around how to move toward the cloud and what tools we have available, and so with the collaboration with IBM, they've made a tremendous investment in SAP and SAP technologies. They've built the impact assessment tools to help customers evaluate the value and the cost of making that move. And they've also invested in the impact solution, which is the content and pre-configuration to help accelerate implementations and move towards that standard. So, a lot of the discussions I'm having with customers are taking mission critical applications and moving them to the cloud. with the support of partners like that, yeah. >> And at a speed What kind of speed? It used to be weeks, months, days, now what? Cycle time for moving. >> If you go to some of those presentations there's 12, 16 week implementations out there, right? >> And when you say moving to the cloud one could infer actually moving but it may not be moving, it may be bringing the cloud model or operating model to the data, is that fair? >> Absolutely So, when we're looking at the cloud, it's not necessarily a wholesale shift. It could be a hybrid model where we're bringing subsidiaries up on the cloud and looking at more of a two tier deployment model where we're looking at an on-prem for the core business and cloud models for subsidiaries. >> It's funny the apps are driving dictating workloads or dictating what resources and architecture to it. >> So, I've had some really exciting conversations here. I was really really impressed with the conversations I had with the IX teams in IBM but also with the GBS teams. >> What's the IX teams? >> They're a-- >> Experience. >> Okay, okay. >> VR, ART, cool stuff. >> That's it, really, really cool, forward-thinking group of design-thinking experts focused on customer experience. So, the total adjustable market opportunity for CX, commerce, marketing, sales, service is over 30 billion per year. So, I don't have to come in and tell anyone what the size of the market opportunity is, the question is, where do we begin, because there is so much opportunity ahead of us. All of our market is investing around, how do I deliver better customer experience, and that's because it has a really tangible business impact. I mean, I guess, 80% of consumers have said that they have changed brands because of poor customer experience. That's a huge financial cost. And organizations that deliver better customer experience have over 200% more shareholder value delivered back. So, we've got a great business case\ and a great platform, where do we point the gun? >> You know, they bring up a good point, I want to hear your thoughts. Dave and I, internally our research team, had looked at all the successful companies that we cover. >> Yeah >> And look at the successful ones, and, you know, the not so successful ones, and look at why they are successful. And the winners, at the top of the heap, have design thinking in all of their methodologies. >> Yes >> We just had Accenture's Innovation kickoff last week. Design thinking is at the core of this. Can you give us your view on why that's the case? I mean, I'll see, I'm thinking design, is that just customer experience? Is having more or other impacts in terms of other aspects of tech, why is design thinking such a critical component, design thinking a critical component, of these new innovations? >> 'Cause I think people are, okay. So I think thinking is the operative word there. You've got to think about your customer and what they want from you. And what you've got to think about is how do I deliver a service that is compelling to you, rather than a product you may want through a channel you may choose to buy on? So, if you look at all of those organizations, they've gone through that process of thinking, "How does digital improve my customer relationship?" Because ultimately, if you don't own your customer, then you're out of business really soon. >> Marcus, bring intelligent enterprise now in context to that. Does that close the loop on intelligent enterprise equals customer relationships and impact on outcome? Am I, how does that-- >> Intelligent enterprise definitely plays a part in that, right? So I mean, when we're looking at the intelligent enterprise, especially the intelligent suite, we're really tying all the interim components together. Whether it's dealing with your employees, your suppliers, or your customers, right? So, it's really about the full end-to-end process. My particular area is around the digital core, so that's order to cash, procure to pay, order fulfillment, revenue, these are mission critical applications, right? So, when it comes to making that transformation this is not just some thing that you want to take lightly. That's where the partnership with IBM and SAP really counts. 'Cause those are the sort of partners that you want with that kind of transformation. >> You know what's interesting John? I'll make an observation. If we go back to the early days of ERP >> Yeah >> It wasn't clear that SAP was going to win. It was hard to squint through. But if you could've bet on the companies, invested in the companies who adopted ERP early, despite its complexity and the time it took, you actually could have made a lot of money. Because those companies won in the end. And I feel like you guys are on the cusp of the intelligent enterprise narrative of the next wave of competitive advantage. >> If you combine experiential data with operational data, we're going to blow past the competition and create a whole new market category. Thanks for that observation. I completely agree. >> Yeah, and it's back to your front office back office qualigers and that's why McDermott was all giddy about the acquisition. He was like a kid in a candy store. >> We're all in. >> A spring in his step. >> We're all in. >> We don't want Billy, he's already cool. >> Be bold, be bold >> Yeah. He must do a lot of handshakes. Guys, thanks for coming on theCube. Thanks for sharing that insight. Thanks for clarifying the SAP position. Great innovation. Love following you guys, we think highly of the company. Been following you guys for 10 years and look forward to continuing to track it. SAP here on theCUBE talking about innovation, design thinking, customer experience, and intelligent enterprise. theCUBE is bringing all that intelligent data to you live here in Moscone. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (techno music)

(futuristic electronic music) >> Live from London, England, it's theCUBE covering .Next Conference Europe 2018. Brought to you buy Nutanix. >> Welcome back to Nutanix .Next 2018 in beautiful London, England. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host Joep Piscaer, and happy to welcome back to the program, third time guest, I believe, Chris Hallenbeck, who's the senior vice president of database and data management with SAP. Fresh off the keynote stage this morning. Were you were with CEO Dheeraj Panday? >> I was, a great time. >> So, SAP, things are going well. I see SAP at lots of shows. You've been on our program at a few different ones. You are based here in Europe now, you're from the US. Chris, introduce us a little bit. Give us some of the summary of what brings you specifically to the event. >> Well, I mean, several things. So, my responsibility is looking after data platform. And what we're doing from a strategy perspective, what we're doing, what applications we're building on that in the cloud, what we're doing, everyone asks what are you doing with HANA? What are you doing with Data Hub? And so that's the core of what I spend time on. But equally I think you need to step back and look at SAP's business 'cause we're also, we're our own OEM, right? HANA's what makes S4 possible. HANA's what powers all of our cloud applications. We're going to announce now that everyone one of those, everyone of the acquired companies now runs on HANA and not on any other database. And so you really see these three pillars of SAP. You talk about I've been with SAP seven years ago, and everyone said, why would you go there? Because there's this old applications company that seems to be getting, oh, and even Hasso Plattner, our founder, was saying that was true. Came out with HANA, that we quickly streamed up. Passed Teradata, become the number four database company in the world. Still growing phenomenally. They used HANA as a method of rejuvenation for originally S4 and now that's gone to the cloud. And during that time, we were able to acquire all these cloud applications and build those, SuccessFactors, Ariba, and other stuff, and that's become a wildly successful business. >> Yeah, Chris, I wanted to step back for a second because you talk about data products. >> Yeah. >> You know, I've watched databases for my entire career. I've watched the huge growth of the importance of data. Especially the last few years. You know, we went through that big data wave, which was kind of middle end success, but everything today, data is the center of it all. You know database is where a lot of data live, but how am I getting, and how are customer getting more advantage out of their data when they are using your products? >> It's a great question. So, one is it continues to be the fact that now, people now have realtime access to that information. And it continues to actually be the biggest driver, to be honest. The other one where we see HANA getting picked, especially, is when you have tens or even hundreds of data feeds coming in simultaneously. Frequently, some are streaming, some are traditionally relational, coming from all different systems, and people then want to do analytics on that. But when we talk about analytics, I don't just mean a BI tool, although you could, but now we're doing predictive on that. And, in fact, and then figuring out how does a data scientist then go through, do machine learning, build a model, deploy for scoring, from a full lifecycle perspective. And that's where HANA's getting used tremendously, is in these analytic systems, and data warehousing, and in particularly people going, I want a realtime data warehouse. The other one where we see it being a lot more is in applications where HANA originally was only for SAP applications. We got a huge amount of work on that to make it work for OEM, ISVs, to port their applications over. And you've been seeing that continuously. I think there's some phenomenal work we've done with Esri. HANA's now the fastest geospatial database in the world. And Esri has about 80% of the geospatial market. Now prefers and runs on HANA. So that's been huge. So customers are beginning to use it in more areas. Not just SAP customers, or the CIO who ran the SAP systems, we're getting used a lot by the chief data officer's division. We're getting used out by other groups. We're getting used by specialty firms doing things like geospatial, doing text analytics. And so it's been kind of exciting. I don't know if I answered your question, by the way, but-- >> No, I think that was really good. >> So that sounds like you positioned yourself to enable customers to make the most out of the cloud, make the most out of data, make the most out of IoT. But I'm curious, how are helping customers succeed in that digital transformation? >> Yeah, well, with the digital transformation, and the way I always look at digital transformation, well, it's like big data, what does it mean, right? But what you see the patterns are is people are trying to remove layers between them and the actual consumer or the product. And if I can take those layers out, now you have people like Netflix who went all the way from just saying, let's make it easier to get a DVD, but now they are the movie studio directly to the consumer. They got rid of the 18-year-old kid at the video store, they got rid of everything through streaming. They went out on the, business. They took out all these layers and got closer. Whether it's Airbnb and all these pure plays, that's exactly, they've reduced the number of layers. Our existing customers are trying to do the same thing. They're saying, how do I get closer? How do I understand them? That requires, like if I'm running machinery, IoT data will tell me exactly how they use my machinery. If I can then start to take a look at that, now they want to work with me in different ways. Customers dictate how they're going to work with me. That means if they want to come over the web one time, other time they want to phone, they should always be treated equally based on how important they are to me. Reducing layers. Equally, though, you always have to be worried about someone coming out of nowhere, the pure play that comes in with a brilliant idea in your division, and you can't let 'em just take you out. So what we're seeing is these traditional companies, not necessarily know what the digital transformation is, but saying, I've basically got to get fit. And I can't do that with a really complicated landscape. If my department says, oh, that's great, new business model? We got to have the accounting up and ready in three years to compete with this new entrant. It's not going to work. Yet you upgrade your systems, and let's say SAP is financials, somebody comes up with a new business model, that's a day change in the system. You want to reorganize, that's a few clicks in the system, and I have a new hierarchy. That used to be a two year process. And so we working in all different aspects. We can do the IoT, we can do the agile work, we can have the data science machine learning understand the customer, all the way back to the applications that are agile now as people upgrade to the S4 system. >> Alright, I want to bring us back to the Nutanix show here, Chris. >> We like Nutanix, let's help them here. >> That's great, let's talk about platforms out there. You have applications that they all want to get certified on. Your application certified on their platform, so it's always, okay, am I SAP certified? And, okay, Nutanix even went through some redesign in there file system to make sure that they run really well for HANA and we're real excited for the certification there. Talk a little bit about what goes into that. Is there joint efforts between the companies? Or is it just their going through and following the process that you've got to describe? >> While I was on stage with Dheeraj and this wasn't, although it's nice to say supported database, this was a year and half effort. In memory computing, people get in and go, okay, it's not just a big data cache, this is a fundamentally different way software runs. How data stored in memory uses caches. So Nutanix worked with us, back and forth, on we would have this happen. Now it was worth it to us. Our customers have been demanding simpler infrastructure. And these hyper-converged infrastructures are exactly that. And Nutanix being the leader, we wanted to be supportive. This is good for both of us. If our customers can have agility on both sides of the business, running traditional SAP applications, they've got to ramp up, they need to add 100,000 users at quarter end, they can do that with a Nutanix platform. Equally, they want to quickly bring up an agile data mark for project basis, click a button, have a new data mark in seven minutes like they did on stage. And maybe they don't even want to do that when they're on on-prem/cloud. They want to do that on AWS or somewhere, GCP, they can do that. Yet that's all controlled from a single interface running through Nutanix. So really, really good for both of us. >> SAP is partial with a lot of companies out there, so you have kind of a neutral view when it comes down to everything. I'm sure you have certain partners you work more with and less. But what are you hearing from your customers? How do they think of cloud today? And any more about the Nutanix connection along the way. >> Yeah, it's interesting 'cause talk about data density, the most valuable data a company has is sitting, you typically, if they're an SAP customer, it's in their SAP system. It's exactly who is my customer, what did they buy, what is their service, what is their bill of material? All that, it's very value dense. It's the huge amount of security governance. What we've actually been seeing is a lot of them, yes, we're moving those workloads to the cloud to save money, I've actually seen a fair number come back on-premise. 'Cause they're saying, look, I'm not getting rid of SAP for easily the next seven, but we have no plans. So then they're realizing, I can run this on a private cloud infrastructure and actually save a ton of money. So they've been pulling back on prem, and we've been hearing that from all, the Forrester, and Gartner, and IDC are saying the same things. We have a lot of folks who don't want to go to the cloud with that core system yet, or they're saying, look, I got to save money and I think I'm going to the cloud, but I'm not ready. And so that's exactly where we see private cloud being really, really crucial, and then the ability to then push out and be ready to go to the cloud. Nutanix really is a good solution for that. And in particular, on-prem database right now, depends who you get your estimates on, is roughly growing at 5% to 8%, five year kay-ger. On-prem private cloud is forecasted to go up 26%. I mean, that is massive. Cloud's only 40 overall for databases. So you see it's a close second. So, huge, huge growth. What's declining is bare metal on-prem, it's gone. Everyone wants to run an either virtualized or fully hyper-converged infrastructure now, even on-prem. So we see people, like I said, staying on, getting ready to go to the cloud. A lot of people pushing workloads to the cloud, but even some repatriation. >> Alright, well, Chris Hallenbeck, really appreciate the updates. Thanks for everything and-- >> Well, thanks for having me. I always love speaking with you guys, thank you. >> Awesome, thanks so much. Joep Piscaer, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more programming from Nutanix .Next 2018, thanks for watching theCUBE. (futuristic buzzing) (futuristic electronic music)

>> Live from New York, it's theCUBE covering theCUBE New York City 2018. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. (techy music) >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. It's theCUBE live in New York City for CUBENYC, formerly Big Data NYC. Now it's turned from big data into a much broader conversation. CUBENYC is exploring all these around data, data intelligence, cloud computing, devops, application developers, data centers, the whole range, all things data. I'm John Furrier here with Peter Burris, cohost and analyst here on the session. Our next guest is Byron Banks, who's the vice president of product marketing at SAP Analytics. No stranger to enterprise analytics. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> So, SAP is, you know, a brand that's been doing business analytics for a long, long time, certainly powering-- >> Mm-hm, sure. >> The software for larger enterprises. Supply chain, you name it-- >> Sure. >> ERP, everyone kind of knows the history of SAP, but you guys really have been involved in analytics. HANA's been tailor-made for some speed. We've been covering that, but now as the world turns into a cloud native-- >> Mm-hm. >> SAP has a global cloud platform that is multi-cloud driven you guys kind of see this picture of a horizontally scalable computing environment. Analytics is a big, big piece of that, so what's going on with machine learning and AI, and as analytical software and infrastructure need to be provisioned dynamically. >> Sure, sure. >> This is an opportunity for people who love to get into the data. >> Absolutely. >> This is a great opportunity. What's the uptake? >> Great opportunity for us. We firmly believe that the era of optimization and digitization is over. It's not enough, it's certainly important. It has given a lot of benefits, but just overwhelming every user, every customer with more data, more optimization, faster data, better data, it's not enough. So, we believe that the concept to switch to intelligence, so how do you make customers, how do you serve customers exactly what they need in the moment? How do you give them an offer that is relevant? Not spam them, give them a great offer. How do you motivate your employees to be the best at what they do, whether it's in HR or whether it's in sales, and we think technology's key to that, but at the end of the day, the customer, the organization is the driver. They are the driver, they know their business best, so what we want to do is be the pit crew, if you will, to use a racing analogy, if they're the driver of the race car we want to bring the technology to them with some best practices and advice, because again, we're SAP, we've been in the business for 45 years, so we have a very good perspective of what works based on the companies we see, and serve over 300,000 of them, but it's really enabling them to be their best, and the customers that are doing the best, we call those intelligent enterprises, and that means three components. It needs intelligent applications, what we call the intelligent suite. So, how do we make an HR application that is great at retaining the best employees and also attracting great ones? How do we enable a sales system to give the best offers and do the best forecasts? So, all of that is the intelligent applications. The middle layer for that is called intelligent technologies. So, how do we use these great technologies that we've been developing as an industry over the last three to five years? Things like big data, IoT, sensors, machine learning, and analytics. That intelligent technology layer, how do we make that available, and then finally, it's the digital core, the digital platform for that. So, how do we have this scalable platform, ideally in the cloud, that can pull data from both cloud sources, SAP sources, non-SAP sources, and give the right data to those applications-- >> Yeah. >> And technologies in realtime. >> I love the pit crew example of the race car on the track, because you want to get as much data in the system as possible because more data is, you know, more opportunities to understand and get insights, but at the end of the day, you want to make sure that the car not only runs well on the track, (chuckles) and is cost effective, but it's performing. It actually wins the race or stays in the race. So, customers want revenue, I mean, the big thing we're hearing is, "Okay, let's get some top line benefit, not just "good cost effectiveness." >> Right, right. >> So, the objective of the customer, and whatever, that can be applications, it could be, you know, insight into operational efficiency. The revenue piece of growth is a big part of the growth strategy-- >> Right. >> For companies to have a data-centric system. >> Absolutely. >> This is part of the intelligence. >> But it's not just presenting the data. We introduced a product a couple of years ago, and I promise this isn't going to be a marketing pitch, (chuckles) but I think it's very relevant to what you just said. So, the SAP Analytics Cloud, that's one of those technologies I talked about, intelligent technologies. So, it is modern, built from the ground for SAS applications, cloud-based, built on the SAP cloud platform, and it has three major components. It has planning, so what are my KPIs? If I'm in HR am I recruiting talent or am I retraining talent? What are my KPIs if I'm in sales? Am I trying to drive profitability or am I trying to track new customers? And if I'm in, you know, again, in marketing how effective are we on campaigns? Tied to that is all the data visualization we can do so that we can mix and match data to discover new insights about our business, make it very, very easy, again, to connect with both SAP and non-SAP sources, and then provide the machine learning capabilities. All of that predictive capability, so not just looking at what happened in the past, I'm also looking at what's likely to happen in the next week, and the key point to all of that is when you open the application and start, the first thing it asks you is, "What are you trying to do? "What is the business problem you're trying to solve?" It's a story, so it's designed from the get-go to be very business outcome focused, not just show you 50 different data sources or 100 different data sources and then leave it to you to figure out what you should be doing. >> Yeah. >> So, it is designed to be very much a business outcome driven environment, so that, again, people like me, a marketer, can logon to that product and immediately start to work in campaigns-- >> Yeah. >> And in the language that I want to work in, not in IT speak or geek speak. Nothing wrong with geek speak, but again-- >> Yeah, I want to get into a conversation, because one of the things, we're very data driven as a media company because we have data that's out there, consumption data, but some platforms don't have measurement capability, like LinkedIn doesn't finance any analytics. >> Sure. >> So, this data that's out there that I need, I want, that might be available down the road, but not today, so I want to get to that conversation around, okay, you can measure what you're looking at, so everything that's measurable you've got dashboards for, but-- >> Sure. >> There's some elusive gaps between what's available that could help the data model. These are future data sets, or things that aren't yet instrumented properly. >> Correct. >> As new technology comes in with cloud native the need for instrumentation's critical. How do you guys think about that from a product standpoint, because you know, customers aren't going to say, "Well, create a magic linkage between something "that doesn't exist yet," but soon data will be existing. You know, for instance, network effect or other things that might be important for people that aren't yet measurable but might be in the future. >> Sure. >> They want to be set up for that, they don't want to foreclose that. >> Sure, well and I think one of the balances we have as SAP, because we're a technology company and we built a lot of great tools, but we also work a lot with our customers around business processes, so as I said, when we introduce our products we don't want to give them just a black box, which is a bunch of feeds and speeds technologies-- >> Yeah. >> That they need to figure it out. As we see patterns in our customers, we build an end-to-end process that is analytics driven and we provide that back to our customers to give them a headstart, but we have to have all of the capabilities in our solutions that allow them to build and extend in any way possible, because again, at the end of the day, they have a very unique business, but we want to give them a jumping off point so that they're not just staring at a blank screen. It's kind of like writing a speech. You don't want to start with just a blank screen. If you're in sales and marketing and you want to do a sales forecast, we will provide out-of-the-box, what we call embedded analytics, a fully complete dashboard that will take them through a guided workflow that says, "Hey, you want to do a sales forecast. "Here's the data we think you want to pull, "do you want to pull that? "Here's some additional inference we've seen "from some of our machine learning algorithms "based on what has happened in the last six weeks "of selling and make a projection as to what "we expect will happen between now and next quarter." >> You get people started quickly, that's the whole goal. Get people started quickly. >> Exactly, but we don't lock them into only doing it the one way, the right way. We're not preaching >> Yeah. >> We want to give them the flexibility. >> But this is an important point, because every, almost every decision at some point in time comes back to finance. >> Sure. >> And so, being able to extend your ability to learn something about data and act on data as measurements improve, you still want to be able to bring it back to what it means from a return standpoint, and that requires some agreement, not just some, a lot of agreement-- >> Sure. >> With a core financial system, and I think that this could be one of the big opportunities that you guys have, is because knowing a lot about how the data works, where it is, sustaining that so that the transactional integrity remains the same but you can review it through a lot of different analytics systems-- >> Right. >> Is a crucial element of this, would you agree? >> I fully agree, and I think if you look at the analytics cloud that I talked about, the very first solution capability we built into it was planning. What are my KPIs that I'm trying to measure? Now, yes, of course if you're in a business it all turns into dollars or euros at the end of the end of the day, but customer satisfaction, employee engagement, all of those things are incredibly important, so I do believe there is a way to put measurements, not always at a dollar value, that are important for what you're trying to do, because it will ultimately translate into dollars down the road. >> Right, and I want to get the news. You guys have some hard news here in New York this week on your analytics and the stuff you're working on. What's the hard news? >> Absolutely. Absolutely, so today we announced a bunch of updates to our analytics cloud platform. We've had it around for three or four years, thousands of customers, a lot of great innovation, and what we were doing today, what we announced today, is the update since our SAPPHIRE, our big, annual conference in June this year, so we have built a number of machine learning capabilities that, again, speak in the language of the business user, give them the tools that allow them to quickly benefit from things like correlations, things like regressions, patterns we've seen in the data to guide them through a process where they can do forecasting, retainment, recruiting, maybe even looking for bias, and unintended bias, in things like campaigns or marketing campaigns. Give them a guided approach to that, speaking in their terms, using very natural language processing, so for example, we have things like Smart Insights where you can ask questions about, "Give me the sales forecast for Japan," and you can say it, just type it that way and the analytic platform will start to construct and guide you through it, and it will build all the queries, it will give you, again, you're still in control, but it's a very guided process-- >> Yep. >> That says, "Do you want to run a forecast? "Here's how we recommend a forecast. "Here are some variables we find very, very interesting." That says, "Oh, in Japan this product sold "really well two quarters ago, "but it's not selling well this quarter." Maybe there's been a competitive action, maybe we need to look at pricing, maybe we need to retrain the sales organization. So, it's giving them information, again, in a very guided business focus, and I think that's the key thing. Like data scientists, we love them. We want to use them in a lot of places, but can't have data scientists involved in every single analytic that you're trying to do. >> Yeah. >> There are just not enough in the world. >> I mean, I love the conversation, because this exact conversation goes down the road of devops-like conversation. >> Right. >> Automation, agility, these are themes that we're talking about in cloud platforms, (chuckles) say data analytics. >> Absolutely. >> So, now you're bringing data down. Hey, we're automating things, so it could look like a Siri or voice activated construct for interaction. >> Yeah, absolutely, and in their language, again, in the language that the end user wants to speak, and it doesn't take the human out of it. It's actually making them better, right? We want to automate things and give recommendations so that you can automate things. >> Yeah. >> A great example is like invoice matching. We have customers that use, you know, spent hundreds of people, thousands of hours doing invoice matching because the address wouldn't line up or the purchase order had a transposed number in it, but using machine learning-- >> Yeah, yeah. >> Or using algorithms, we can automate all of that or go, "Hey, here's a pattern we see." >> Yeah. >> "Do you want us to automate "this matching process for you?" And customers that have-- >> Yeah. >> Implemented, they've found 70% of the transactions could be automated. >> I think you're right on, I personally believe that humans are more valuable, certainly in the media business that people think is, you know, sliding down, but humans, huge role. Now, data and automation can surface and create value that humans can curate on top of, so same with data. The human role is pretty critical in this because the synthesis is being helped by the computers, but the job's not going away, it's just shortcutting to the truth. >> And I think if you do it right machine learning can actually train the users on the job. >> Yeah. >> I think about myself and I think about unintended bias, right, and you look at a resume that you put out or a job posting, if you use the term I want somebody to lead a team, you will get a demographic profile of the people that apply to that job. If you use the term build a team, you'll get a different demographic profile, so I'm not saying one's better or the other, but me as a hiring manager, I'm not aware of that. I'm not totally on top of that, but if the tool is providing me information saying, "Hey, we've seen these keywords "in your marketing campaign," or in your recruiting, or even in your customer support and the way you speak with your customers, and it's starting to see patterns, just saying, "Hey, by the way, "we know that if you use these kinds of terms "it's more likely to get this kind of a response." That helps me become a better marketer. >> Yeah. >> Or be more appropriate in the way I engage with my customers. >> So, it assists you, it's your pit crew example, it's efficiency, all kind of betterment. >> Absolutely. >> Byron, thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate the time, coming to share and the insights on SAP's news and your vision on analytics. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. It's theCUBE live in New York City for CUBENYC. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. Stay with us, day one continues. We're here for two days, all things data here in New York City. Stay with us, we'll be right back. (techy music)

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

Phil McDermott always say data's now the currency well today he was saying now Trust is the currency which is completely truth - but from the data being the country currency perspective it's now the endgame for both of us we've kind of pulled in all companies have gone into the middle that that's kind of not only the Mint messaging but kind of central thing we're trying to develop to deliver a value on speaking with a customer early it's like you have an accountability to help me be innovative right and that's a very important responsibility a lot of that revolves around enterprise class security right a lot of that revolves around uptime right with Layton sees between those environments cuts my performance attribute and are you gonna be there with me forever right amazing thing that's going on it thinking about using drones for first responders they actually can know what's going on in the scene and when the other people are showing up they know what kind of area they're going into or for search and rescue drones can cover a lot of territory and detect a human faster than a human can right and if you can actually find someone within the first 24 hours chance of survival so much higher invest more heavily in the cloud in the second thing they want to do is enable digital transformation real digital transformation how did they monetize the wealth of the data that they've acquired through their relationships with their customers and then how do they leverage that for their customer benefit [Music]

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We are in Orlando in the NetApp booth at SAP Sapphire 2018. We are joined by a new person to theCube, Amit Sinha, the Founder and Chief Customer Officer at WorkSpan. Amit, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, excited to be here. >> So I'm really excited to understand more about WorkSpan, what you guys do. Tell us a little about that, what opportunity you saw in the market with respect to alliances that you went, "Ah why is it no one's doing that." You have this great idea. >> Yeah, absolutely, we had this ah-ha moment, in this day and age of connectedness around the world, there is not a single company that goes to market alone. Right, when the reality's that we all serve the same demanding end-customers. We got to align our marketing. We got to align our messages, We need to align our innovation. I mean just altogether in order to be more. Easier said then done, right. So that's we saw the opportunity, that what if there was a network of alliances that are connected with one another, and if they can truly define a joint innovation, a joint solution, take it to market, co-market it. When they co-market they can get twice the audience at half the cost, and then co-sell. That way they can improve their vendors, and we are truly seeing that, so that's the opportunity that we saw, to really make the life of the alliance manager, the alliance leader, simpler, and easier to do in this connected day and age. >> Well, essential because also on your website, 60 to 75 percent of announced alliances fail. That's enormous, so talk to us about some of the successes that you have had, talking with companies, as you say, that, you know, nobody goes to market alone these days, did they have those ah-ha moments as well when you came knocking on there and say, hey look what we're developing. >> Absolutely, so look at this large event here. Sapphire is one of the biggest enterprise events out here. Over 100 strategic alliances are here from SAP, and they will all make key announcements here about joint products, big golden markets, but can you imagine, three months down the line, 70 percent of them will be actually catching dust on the road. They won't even watch the people, the business cases will be the winner. And that's such a wasted opportunity. The amount of due diligence that goes into kind of creating an alliance, thinking about the business case, people putting together solutions. But then once they announce the keynote, that's where the decline really happens. There's no operational support behind, how do you take this to market. That's where WorkSpan comes in. People wanting to join sales plan, the joint marketing plan, the joint solution plan, to really operationalize that people coming together across the platform. In India we say that a marriage is between families, and that's very true. So really, an alliance is between companies, deep in the companies, not just the alliance manager working with another alliance manager. It's really marketeers, sales folks, alliance people. So, it's a family of two companies coming together. And that's where WorkSpan, why it's the foundation, the consistent process logic, and a data driven argument around it. So you can dig decisions on the base of data, to say, okay where is my alliance working, and where does it need help? You don't do post mortems after that, you can fix as you're going along. >> So let's talk about that process and data driven nature of alliances. Alliances are complex setups, just starting at the very beginning of saying, you know what, I'm, we're two companies, we overlap in areas of competition, but there's these outliers where we really can partner together to make that happy. You look on a show floor, you see brands that are obvious, you know, we're in the NetApp booth and we've talked SAP Hanna a lot, and right across the way is the Oracle booth, and they're talking heavily SAP on Oracle, so there's this opportunity to cooperate, and there's this area of competition. A lot of that is data driven, how do you capture that data and help create the process logic to help companies identify alliances and then execute upon, and manage those alliances going forward. >> Well I think that's an excellent question, so when you are living in a network in this interdependent work, you will partner in some areas and you will compete in some places. So for this network world, we need a new security model, so that only people who are allowed to see something are able to see that thing. We call this Attribute Base Access Control. Compare that to traditional applications which do role based access control, just because you're higher up in the organization, you get to see everything. But this new module of security, Attribute Based Access Control model, allows the right people to get into the right plans, so that they, and they alone, can see it. So you might be working for SAP on, let's say the Google relationship, or the Apple relationships, or the Oracle relationship, or the NetApp relationship, only those right people have those accesses. And the owners of those programs can control and secure that data. So what it allows a company to then do is, it's even more secure in this day and age. We can argue that in this day and age with GDPR and all those compliance efforts, that WorkSpan is far more secure, than sending spreadsheets out, which is the current mode of collaboration. So you can enforce a corporate policy around, what is your shared data, what's your private data. So in the same opportunity you can have private data for your own company, employees to see that as them as sort of partners. So that translucency, not transparency, but translucency is really really important when you do alliances, and that we understand is model of WorkSpan. >> So how do you help, like, for alliances marketing for example, and say there's a joint campaign, NetApp with one of their partners for example, and they wanted to do some lead generation activities, events, webinars, lunch and learns, digital campaigns, and they're gonna get leads that come in from that, and they might say, ah, okay, well I don't want to give you all of that. How do you help with some of that, I mean it kind of goes to the "coopertition" theme a little bit, but from a marketing standpoint, I'm just curious, how do you help either reduce or mitigate concerns that companies, alliance partners would have in that space, or do you come in and sort of help them from a strategic area to normalize some of these concerns? >> Yeah, so what we do is we partner with the company's marketing automation systems, so let's say NetApp is working with AP Cloud for customer. So at this event we announce the integration between WorkSpan and this AP Cloud for customer. Similarly other customers may have other marketing optimations, and you should see in a low quarter market, or a salesfirst.com, so we integrate with those systems. So what happens is marketeers can continue their contact database and their lead machine in those systems, and we get aggregate results in WorkSpan to really see which alliances are doing well. So we don't get into what marketing automation systems do, we partner and we integrate with them. So that, what happens in that, we are extending an investment the company already has made in their marketing automations tech, and we come across as a partner or alliance automations tech, so that really the alliances knew one another. And why is this important. This is important because if you're like an Intel or a NetApp, you may be working with a whole ecosystem of providers, and they themselves have their own marketing automation systems. So you imagine if you are at an intel or you're a NetApp or you're an SAP, you can get all this data back, because there's WorkSpan in the middle. So as a network, you may have just one percent of the data, but your overall network is far more intelligent than all the data you've been collecting. >> So again, whenever we get a topic like this, we have to invoke John Forrier's name and get some block chain conversation going on, from an ideal of, you know, basically there's just, you guys have become an authority of authentication, there's reputation, there's all these fundamental infrastructure things that you have to determine. And you think through, you scale this out beyond just, you know, alliances, and honestly technology is one area. There's all the attributes in manufacturing, in other companies, how does this align with, or a more aggressive question, how does this sort plant like, the ideas of smart contracts with the lies of block chain? >> Yeah, absolutely. So BlockShare is a really good implementation of what we really have done in WorkSpan. So, in WorkSpan, if you think about it, it's a network. There are transactions, they're like, flowing across different parties. And these transactions are trusted, right, across different parties. Let's say an Intel or a NetApp stays approved on our platform, the process extends to the partner and they get a contract, that simple. So in some ways, in living in a connected world, we need to have these kinds of smart contracts and trust in data source that is not just your own. We're living in a shared data world, right? So one of the key partners at Bolt, well NetApp works with this Bolt Intel as well as SAP, right. So, because SAP program funds the SAP marketing campaigns here, and they're both Intels, and they both come from trusted parties, NetApp is able to trust that data, trust that transaction that makes it too. So we provide that trans-foundation based on the qualities that.. >> Sorry, Amit, but that's kind of the trust foundation, as sort of aligns to what Bill Madridment said in his keynote this morning, about, you know, trust being this new currency. You guys have been attaining a lot of momentum in the Fortune 500 space. Tell us a little bit about how you're doing that, and then if there's a customer example that you, that's one of your favorites that you think really articulates your brand values, share that too. >> Absolutely, so we've been very fortunate that we've been trusted by a lot of Fortune 500 companies to come on the platform. Really want to orchestrate their platform and their ecosystem. And we are seeing this need that the head of alliances seen, they're going to be very strategic at the board, where they want to be data driven and numbers driven. They're no longer saying, I'm okay by saying that my alliance with such and such partner is going well. They want to be quantified, they wanna say it's going well by this much. So this is where the main value prop is, we have had companies on our platform that have generated 58 percent more leads, that have reduced their marketing cost by 50 percent. Intel and SAP specifically, this is their third year on our platform, and year on year they have collaborated more number of campaigns, deeper in the regions, where their marketeers are working with intel marketeers, for example. So they got a 24X internal marketing investment, [Lisa] Wow. where as they were expecting an eight to 10x marketing investment, so dramatically increased. For SAP, that meant 100 million dollars more than double at lower marketing cost, just because the two companies can unleash their shared potential with the shared customers across the world. Now this happened, this was not an overnight success, this is a three year success in the making, where there's deep partnership and collaboration at the regional level, at the marketeer level, and all rolling it up at the head of alliances. So Intel is one company, we have SAP of course as a marketing account. We not only work with hardware alliances like NetApp and Intel, but also their SI alliances are on WorkSpan, so large, as many as size you see here, those programs are coming at WorkSpan as well. People at Novel were invited on WorkSpan, HPE is on WorkSpan, so that's a great example as well of a Fortune 500 company. >> Wow, lot of momentum. You know, it's for companies like SAP, like WorkSpan, where you've got software and you've got something under the hood that a lot of people won't know what's happening, or further jobs don't have to know or care, it's always challenging for a brand to go, how do we show the value of our product and service is when it's not something we can touch, or see, or feel. And it's really through the validation, the best you can get, is through the voice of your customer. And the stats that you shared, you must be sort of salivating, with we can actually help you increase Legion by 58 percent, or increase revenue opportunities by 40 percent. I mean, you've got some really substantial data driven facts to show how you're transforming a business. That's got to be, that's gotta make doing business a little bit easier, that you know you've got such salitity. >> Actually when you think of the world, it's really diverse, right, but you can see patterns from this all. So when you work with a lot of partners and you're orchestrating them on your ecosystem, you're running different kinds of marketing campaigns or different sales opportunities. They have different traction depending on how you actually executed them, right. But when you step back and you say, hey, webinars don't really work well in Japan, late evening events work better in Japan. But in the US, one of the best course, it seems like webinars work better. Or such and such partner does a really good job of hiring clients in events, but this other partner I spent a lot of money with, it all seems to go in search or non advertising that I don't see a lot of benefit of, right. So you can make these data driven arguments by partner, by channel, by investment, by, you know by any metric that you want now. So now the head of alliance, this is exactly where the value profit for spenders. Now you can be totally data driven and say, this works, that doesn't work, so I should do more of this and spend less there. >> Fantastic, well Amit I wish we had more time to keep chatting, but thanks so much for stopping by and sharing not only who WorkSpan is and what you do, but some of the significant impact that you can deliver to your customers. >> Thank you so much for the opportunity, loved talking to you both. >> Likewise. We want to thank you for watching theCube, I am Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, from SAP Sapphire 2018, thanks for watching. (electronic music)

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

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018 Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we are in Orlando at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018. This is an enormous event, 16 football fields. American football fields is the size of this space. Incredible, we're welcoming back to theCUBE, one of our distinguished alumni. >> Thank you. >> Uddhav Gupta you are the global vice-president and GM of the SAP App Center, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Yes, thank you so much, thank you for having me. And isn't this a lovely event? >> It's amazing. >> It is. >> So much energy and excitement yesterday during Bill McDermott's keynote. He talked about SAP, 46 years old now, has 398,000 customers and is responsible for 77% you said of the world's transactions. >> Yes, yes. >> Unreal. >> And you know the best part about this is we got 77% of the transactions, and if you walk around and ask people about SAP, they don't even know SAP, right? It's funny, I'm from the Bay Area and the first time people started taking SAP and acknowledging the brand of SAP was when they start to see SAP Center. Because that's home. >> The shark tank. >> To the Sharks. >> Yup. >> And they're like, oh, that was the first time. And then the second time we put a building out. We bought SuccessFactors and we got a SuccessFactors building by the airport and then, "Oh yeah we know SAP from the building next to the airport." But now people are starting to becoming really serious of associating themselves with the brand because now they started understanding what a crucial role SAP plays in their lives, right? If SAP doesn't do what it does, the entire supply chain for many large enterprises stops, right? Which means, your beverages don't come, and your food doesn't come in, nothing, right? Your lines are stopped. >> Yeah, we're with you. Your medicine doesn't come. >> Right. >> It is just. >> Yes. >> Well you guys have had Bill McDermott has talked about for a while about, we wanna become one of the world's top 10 most valuable brands but for invisible software you know you talk about, you want to be up there with the Apples and we can engage and touch with so many of these brands, and people probably don't know, a lot of people. >> Yes. >> That they are using SAP that's driving so many businesses, industries, and you guys have done a very good job of articulating your brand value through the voices of your customers who are transforming industries, they're saving lives, and also your partner ecosystem. So talk to us about the partner ecosystem and how they're really enabling partners like NetApp. What you're doing with the App Center to really enable SAP's growth and transformation through your partner ecosystem. >> Absolutely, so one of the good things is, if you look at the different transformations that the software industry has gone and cloud is one big one, right? And right now, with the cloud that one day we've regarded is the Cloud is a completely different dynamics of software. It's a very closed environment, the software itself so not everybody can actually basically just go ahead and deploy anything within the software itself, right? So that's created a huge economy of ecosystem for us where we've got partners that are building Sas Solutions, that extend our core business products. We got partners that are building content services that can actually be consumed within our business products. Similarly, SAP has made this transition from being more of a software applications company to actually being a platform company and now taking it into the cloud. So we've got a whole new generation of partners that we kind of started working with that provide technology services into the platform, right? And that's why we work with partners like NetApp. We work with partners like (mumbles). We works with partners, even SIs. They're starting to build a whole bunch of repeatable solutions, right? So in order to bring all these innovations that are happening around the SAP ecosystem, in the hands of our customers, like NetApp is a customer of SAP, too. How do we bring that easily into their hands so they can discover these products? They can try the products, they can buy these products. And then they can manage these products. And that's the whole idea of the App Center. >> And this has only been around for a year. In fact, you just celebrated your first birthday. >> Exactly. >> But a tremendous volume of apps that are already available. >> Yes, it's amazing. >> For try and buy. >> The ecosystem has really embraced us, they put their hands open, right? So within a year we've got 1100 partners that are on the App Center. We've got 1500 solutions that are on the App Center. And we are growing like crazy, right? We've got amazing endorsements from partners and donor. We've got amazing endorsement from customers. Some customers have come and done repeated purchases on the App Center within a month, right? The number of trials we're executing for partners is huge. On the whole, it's doing really well. >> So let's talk about the range of applications. I know when I think of App Center I think of App Center on my phone. >> Yes. >> And I can go and get something as silly as a flashlight or, in my case, as life-changing as my running app that keeps track of my fitness over the course of several years and I have great data to mine from that. What types of applications and industries, what industries do they serve in the App Center? >> So the App Center is really made for businesses. >> Right. >> So definitely we don't have Candy Crush there, right? (everyone laughs) >> Don't ask them. >> I don't know if that's a good thing. >> Oh, that's good, right, but you have a bunch of fun application for enterprises, right? Which allow them to get a better insight in how the company is operating. And then we have, to give you analogy to your fitness application that gives you a better idea of how your body works. We've got application that basically do the same thing for enterprises, right? So let me give you an example. We've got a major SI that actually has built an audit and compliance application for HR, right? So I can actually tell you, within your organizations what's your diversity ratio, what's your compliance ratio, how are people being paid, gender equality and gender pay, equal pay is a big topic that many CIOs are looking at. It kind of helps on those kinds of areas, right? Then we've got apps or solutions in there that basically deal with helping customers do better sales, right? We have apps in there that basically help provide you tools that can better monitor your platforms, right? Tools that help you migrate. All these things are available on the App Center. >> I'm curious from a differentiation standpoint, SAP has been very vocal about wanting, challenging the old legacy CRM. >> Yes. >> And wanting to be number one. Against their, you know, the (mumbles) competitors. How does the App Center and how you've enabled it so quickly and with such diversity of apps, how does this differentiate SAP? >> Absolutely, so we've owned the back office for a very long time now, right? So now it's time for us to basically get in front of the end users and get into the daily work that they do. It's very important for us to also own different offers. That's a whole big initiative, you heard with C4, right? To enable that, we've got cloud platform, right? And that's the other biggest piece of the puzzle, right? Now when you add these two things up, you don't basically, when you look at customers, the biggest thing for them is time to value, right? The whole concept of the bill versus buy is kind of starting to fade and the customer like, "Here's my problem, is there a solution out of the box "that can actually solve my problem?" If he gets a 100%, great, if he gets 90%, okay. If he gets 80%, I'll take it and then I'll improvise on it. And that's exactly what the App Center does. It gives you an out of the box solution from our ecosystem. So you can get started with it, and then you can collaborate with the ecosystem, to either improvise on it or take a step back and say, "Okay, now we've plugged the hole, now let's find "a more detailed solution to actually build "a more scalable outcome out of it." >> So let's talk about licensing flexibility from apps and App Center. One how do customers pay for. >> Yes. >> Their apps in the App Center? And then two, what are the licensing options for both partners and customers, for those individual apps? >> So the beauty of the apps and then the way we started up is the transaction is directly happening between the partners and the customers. So the partners can actually price their applications the way they wanted, right? So some partners that are basically doing content services are doing it by based on utilization, right? So you actually use this many number of API calls, that's how it's priced. Some of the others are doing SAS applications and they are pricing it by users. So the partners have complete flexibility of pricing and packaging the way they want. Also because we're actually using the App Center to sell to enterprises, it's very unlikely that somebody's gonna go ahead and say, "Oh, he has a gold, bronze, and silver package, "I'm just gonna pick one of them." On the App Center you can actually go ahead and custom package or create custom packages with tailored customs and conditions that are specific to that customer. And the customer can then buy it, right? So we've kind of thought of this from an enterprise standpoint. And that's the beauty, right? When you work with partners like NetApp, that is important for them, right? NetApp is a partner that basically goes ahead and works with some of the largest businesses, right? It's important for them to have the flexibility to go ahead and do the business with them digitally. >> So I'm curious. At every event we talk about digital transformation, right? It's table stakes these days. But at SAPPHIRE 2018 there's been a lot of discussion around the intelligent enterprise. >> Yes. >> I'm curious how this one year old App Center that SAP has built and that you're managing, how are you using the data that you're getting about the types of apps that are being developed and consumed, how are you utilizing that data to transform SAP? >> Absolutely, if you think of the intelligent enterprise, we're doing everything that we can from the platform side. But what's the point of being intelligent if you don't apply your intelligence somewhere, right? And that's exactly. >> You're like my mother. >> (laughs) And that's what we're trying to do with their apps, right? So while the platform is intelligent. It can do a lot of stuff. The apps are the one that will help you derive the value from the platform. And that's where the App Center is super important and the apps that are on the App Center support the product. That's the role within the apps in the place for the intelligent enterprise. >> So Bill McDermott also talked about trust and the trust is the new currency. When you put forth something like the SAP App Center, you're kind of co-signing that, you know what, these apps, these are partners, and this is a partner exchange. Can you talk to the value to the enterprise of wanting to something like a App Center to purchase applications? >> Oh, trust is a big thing, right? These days, I mean, you. Enterprises come to SAP because they know SAP is such a trusted brand. So when we did the App Center we also made sure that every app that goes on the App Center is actually totally validated by an integration and certification center team, right? So you don't find anything on the App Center that has not gone through a vetting process. The second thing you don't know show that on the app center you find apps that are relevant to your SAP landscape and that's not a Shopify, right? You're not going and selling something that has no relevance to the enterprise. The third thing that we've done, and very important for customers is we've actually built workflows that allows them to still have the same comfort of procuring a software but only doing it digitally. So, for example, a customer may say, "Look, not every user "in my company is allowed to buy apps." But if a user is interested in buying an app, he should be able to request purchase, and then somebody who's entitled in the company to go through contracts and negotiate on behalf of the company can actually negotiate it, and then the purchase happens. So we will employ trust at every level of the App Center. >> Security is such a hot topic these days, right? I mean, there's been so many public breaches of corporate data, there's just one again the other day with, I think it was MyDNA or MyHeritage. >> Yes. >> And that kind of opportunity for people to submit a cheek sample and get their DNA is so popular. That's a lot of personal information. So the security woven into the fabric of that is all key. >> Absolutely. >> So you mentioned the number of partners and the number of apps. I think you said thousand partners. >> A thousand partners and 1500 apps. >> 1500 apps in the first year. >> In the first year. >> What are you excited about for the next year? What do you think we're gonna be talking about next SAPPHIRE? >> I think the growth in the number of apps and partners that are gonna come over, it's gonna be a hockey stick event we're completely looking forward to that. But what's gonna be interesting is, as these apps come by, and you've pointed it out, security is one topic, but GDPR compliance is another big one. So one of the things that we've been working with a lot of these partners is to basically become more and more GDPR compliant. Because some of these apps are dealing with HR data. Some of these apps are gonna start dealing with customer data and they have to be GDPR compliant. So that's what we're working on with them and we'll see more and more of those kind of things happen. But the second big thing that we're looking forward is going beyond the apps, right? We call it the App Center, we could call it Solution Center, we could call it anything. But the idea is you gonna have apps, but you're also gonna have vendors like NetApp being able to digitally sell the products to our end customers, right? Somebody bought HANA, they need a HANA appliance, with an adapt storage, that's possible on the App Center. Or some other tools, somebody's existing NetApp customer managing really large SAP landscapes. And they can buy tools that will basically help them manage the NetApp landscape, right? Or SAP landscape running a NetApp gear. So those are kinds of things that I'm looking forward to actually coming into the App Center. The third thing is sensors. People are building IoT Scenarios and we are having tons of partners basically certify sensors against our IoT technology. How about we bring those into the App Center, right? So it's gonna be a huge and beautiful portfolio of solutions. >> Practical question before we let you go is. Simple concept 'cause my mind is working and I come from a traditional SAP shop. So I'm thinking, what interesting things have you seen customers do with SRM and the App Center. I mean, it seems like, App Center, another supplier for SRM should be some integrations? Am I making an assumption? What are some of, as we look at, or even App Center and someone that has SAP core products, what are some of the integration for them? >> Oh, you hit the nail, right? What some of the customers are coming back to us and asking is, can you actually do an App Center specifically for my enterprise, right? Where I as a user can basically go, curate a whole bunch of apps that I've kind of looked at the terms and conditions or have met certain standards, etcetera. And accept the terms of conditions for those products right? Accept those products, negotiate the price, or whatever they do. And then make that open to all of my users of their ecosystem, right? So that way, anybody in that scenario can actually go purchase an app and start using it in production. >> And then I have all of my work full from SRM to approve the purchase of the app. >> Exactly, so it kind of ties in very neatly into that. >> So your 18th SAPPHIRE. >> Yes. >> What are some of the key takeaways that you're gonna go back to the Bay Area with? >> You know, the beauty is every SAPPHIRE keeps growing bigger and bigger and the questions every three, four year we've done a new transformation, right? Last year when I come to this conference, people were still kind of unaware and not really ready to embrace the cloud in an enterprise base. This year, I didn't hear one customer say, "Should we go to the cloud?" Everybody like, "We are on the cloud, how can you help us?" How can SAP and customers and partners like NetApp actually help us get there? And that's a refreshing feel, right? Because now we can talk to them about all the grand plans that we have for them. Prior we were basically still selling them on the concept. Now we're actually walking them and talking to them about how they embrace the cool stuff that we're doing. >> Awesome. >> So it's refreshing. >> It is cool stuff. >> It is. >> Uddhav, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> Talking with Keith and me about what you guys are doing with the App Center and happy first birthday again. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Thank you for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018. Thanks for watching.

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

from Orlando Florida it's the cube covering si P sapphire now 2018 brought to you by net app welcome to the cube I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we are in Orlando Florida that sa piece a fire now 2018 or in the net out booth really cool sa piece a fire is an enormous event this is like the 25th year they've been doing it and it's been really interesting to learn Keith about sa P and how they have really transformed and one of the things that's critical is their partner ecosystem so we're excited to welcome back to the cube a cube alumni Paul Young who is the director of sa P go to market from Google platform Paul it's nice to see you thanks so what is the current news with Google and sa P so you know I think we're making a major push into this three Marquette I think the the yesterday's announcements are we all still have a four tire buy on a server online but we also brought up capacity all the way up to 20 terabytes so we really can handle pretty much all the customer base at this point so on the one end that's good there is however a lot of other stuff we're doing in the AI space in the joint engineering space with SCP and and a lot of work we're doing in the make it a lot easier for SUV customers to adopt the cloud right and and beyond just what's happening a lot in the market right now which is you know 80 percent of the customers who mu and s pieces in the cloud just do straight lift and shift so there's no for momentum with a it's just ticking the box you're in the cloud we're doing a ton of work in engineering on our own and with SCP right now to make that a much more valuable journey for the customers so yeah I don't wake up in the morning at Google and think what am I going to do today it's you know it's a there's a lot of stuff going on so Paul let's not be shy that we've had you on the cube before and your ear s AP alone and as you look out at the hyper scalars the big cloud providers s ap more or less has a reference architecture for how to do cloud how to do s AP and a hyper scale of cloud but it's not just about that base capability when I when I talk to my phone I love asking Google questions when I look at you know capabilities like AI and tensor flow and machine learning that gets me excited just in general what as you looked out at the Haifa scalers what excited you about Google is specific as you we were s ap work to fall 3 so what's so exciting about Google I did I joke internally I was I was a customer of recipes for seven years I did 20 years of SVP and and yeah and and then woke up one morning and decided to go to Google yeah I do I get this question a lot on the yeah my conversation always is it wasn't based on the cafeteria food there are other things to join me across it seriously cuz in my last roll at scpi I was working with all three the hyper scalars and one of the questions I always got from SCP people is well they're all just the same right or and when you actually work with them you discover the are different and that's no disrespect to anyone but they approach the world differently they all have different business models and and the Google thing that really put me is that the the kind of engineering and the future focus was just tremendous right this other girl could do was was immense and so I said I'll jump forward to the future and then will come back but just if you look at the investment school was making in AI and machine learning all the stuff we were order a Google i/o with the the you know custom-built testable computers that can just do an amazing performance greatness or but it's got to be applied right so so things that partially built with Deloitte it's a deletion of the demonstration for it but just to give an example of where we think the future is we build a model in Nai where we have we basically two invoices and we taught the AI system to do data entry and SCP so that's not an interface we didn't say hey here's an invoice and here's all the fields and we map them all across and here's ETL and here's other things we do right here's our interface mapping we literally said imagine you're an AP processor how do you enter an invoice and you give it detail universities and it spends a lot of time doing really stupid things trying to put addresses in the number field of someone else and then suddenly it works so how to enter an invoice and at that point it knows how to enter an invoice and then what you do is you give it more and more invoices or more and more different structures and it learns how to what an invoice is and it learns how to process that and then suddenly it can do complete data entry right so we build as a model this is sort of thing Google does just to test the limits Deloitte came along and said well that's really cool could we actually take it and run it as a product and so the light now has that in there there are engineering further out where literally you can give it any invoice it will it's not OCR it will look at the invoice and it will work out that is an invoice where all the bits you need are from it it will then work out how you would do data entry on that into an SUV system and it will enter the invoice that's a future world where I know SUVs already launched the I our own doing three-way match interesting we're talking about future won't where your your entire accounts payable Department is a Gmail inbox where they mail you invoices that you've never seen before but we're able to understand what a vendor is grantee as a vendor guarantee is not fraud checked and do the deed to entry completely automatically that is the massive new world right and that's just a tiny little bit of what we can do at Google we have it just pretty also we haven't demo running on the booth where we have tensorflow looking at pure experience pharmaceuticals right right we have we have a demo run on the booth which is a graphic of someone we're actually running at customers where we have a camera reading pharmaceutical boxes as they go past or their pinky perfect curlers in this case but it doesn't just look at the box and say I count one box it reads the text on the box but it reads the text in the box was in noise from STP was supposed to be manufactured and it comes back and says well am I putting double-strength pills and single side boxes is this most legal have I mean sent the correct box is it you know is the packaging correct it also knows what a good box looks like and it learns what a damaged box looks like a nice packaging looks like an it knows how to reject them and again that level of technology where we can monitor all of your production lines and give you guarantee quality and pharmaceuticals anywhere else tell me six months ago anyone even imagined that was possible we're doing that right now all right that that ability to work with SCP because it's all integrated with SCP we're doing Depot of efficient that ability to deliver that sort of capability at the speed we deliver that is world-changing right well you know one of the things that I just kept imagining as you gwangsu the description of invoicing thankee was on a run of the day I'm a small business owner and these things are troublesome like you get in an invoice and I'm thinking you know I got a deal my my wife does the Council of payable accounts receivable I'm like there has to be a way to automate get but then I thought about just those challenges like you get one person says an invoice that the invoices at the bottom right hand corner the the invoice numbers on the bottom right hand corner the the amount due etcetera etc just really silly questions that AI should be AI machine learning should be able to deal with build mederma yesterday on stage says that AI should all been human capability and that's a great example of how a I augments you might take a bit and it doesn't in the AP example it doesn't do a hundred percent correct all the time right it knows what it's wrong in the example of Joey runs your seat comes up and says the dates wrong here I need to fix it so it's taken the it's taken the menial work out of the process and it's lighten people really add value in it but it's also a great example of the cloud at work and what it's supposed to do right again if all you do is take official SCP and drop it in the cloud you're just running in a different place if you get to a world where with Google we we don't expose your data to everybody else but we understand what the world's invoices look like and we have that knowledge and we make the entire world more efficient by having the model know how to work that's a radically better place right and that's that's that's there's just never been that value prop before and that's it's a great big exciting thing to wake up in the morning to think that's what we do right so Lisa in the industry we have this term that data has credit I think it's fairly safe at the this week we can say that processing technology compute has gravity it's we had another guest on it says that they use a process and a technology in solution and one customer works out fine and another customer not the same results it's this complexity is this kind of dish 'part of technology that is just not easy to apply across across companies so the other part really quickly that I want to talk about is you know this isn't just about AI right it's not just about the future I mean one of the key in me I said I'm a long-term HCV customer I work a lot of customers everybody wants to get to the cool bit you know and though I always used to joke internally everybody wants to eat candy they're ready vegetables first right and so we better get you across or you can candida vegetables whichever way you've got to eat both there's some point right so um so look just getting customers into the club becomes one of the challenges it's one of the other areas where we're really applying engineering so I'm three weeks ago we bought della Strada as an example Villa Stratos is an amazing company what well so it does basically it's a plug into VMware you drop it into VMware and it watches your SUV systems running it profiles them and it works out what size capacity you're going to need in the cloud at the point where it's then got enough information it'll basically ping you and say hey I know no I'm not a machine do you want exactly the same performance at lowest price in the cloud or do you want better performance here's two configurations pick the one you want give it your Google user ID and password it will build the security build the application servers and begin a migration for you automatically depending on the timing demand the size the box between 30 minutes and two hours later you will have a running version of your SCP system in the closet never been done before that's been performance the way it works basically it's a bit a little bit of magic but it knows how much what's the minimum amount of data we need to ship across through NSEP it knows where all the data is hidden on the box on the disk then sdb needs to run and it just ships that first and then it fills in the gaps afterwards the repair mechanism so from there on the one hand you could do lists and share and frankly our competitors have been using it to do lift and shift in the past it over some a ton of potential right for a bunch of customers we can replicate their production boxes in real time and give them 30-second RPO RTO in high availability but that done but it's like that I can now take that replicated image and I can run operations on it I can run tests on I can run QE rebuilds were you because of the Google pricing model you don't pay me in advance you pay me in arrears for only the computer time that you use so you are a QA system you've got two days worth of work to rebuild it don't shut down your QA system pay me for two days rebuild and you're done or we have integrated it directly into the SDP upgrade tools so you can pipe across your system to us and we will immediately do a test upgrade for you into s4 HANA or you see us rocky or BW an Hana whatever you want I have a customer in Canada who really jumped from ECC e6 and hazard by 5 to s4 Hana using an earlier version of the tools in 72 hours with a lot of gaps to look at in between we reckon we're gonna crush that down into under 24 hours so under 24 hours we can you can literally click on an SUV server and we will not just bring you to the cloud but we will upgrade you all the way to the latest version and we we have all the components we've done it we're pushing that through right and so what we're doing now is taken the hard work and automating that so we can get to the really cool stuff in the eye side right that's way again this is where all of us for all the hyper scalers hosts you know SV systems we want to do something that's better than that right we want to make it easy to get there but we know that in order to justify what you do we're all have seven your room app 2x or hard on right so we want to make it really easy to do that and we want to make it incredibly easy to add in AI and all the other technologies along the way that's a DES and a pricing model that nobody will be right and that's that's a pretty cool place to be I'm mighty glad to be a good place I could tell by your energy so ease of use everybody wants that you talked about just the example of invoices how they can vary so dramatically and you know whether you're a small business owner to a large enterprise there's so much complexity and and fact that was one of the things that was talked about it was this morning well yeah when how so plot I was even talking about naming conventions and how customers were starting to get confused with all of the different acquisitions SAT has done so a I what Google is doing with AI on sa piece sounds like a huge differentiator so tell us as we wrap up here what makes you know in a nutshell Google different than the other hyper scale that s AP partners with and specifically what excites you about going to market with s AP at the base level your Google's just on a different scale from everybody right we are effectively put 25% of the internet if you look at our own assets we we own dark fiber that's equivalent to about 4% of the entire caballo sorry four times the entire capacity of the Internet right MA so my ability to deliver to those customers at scale and up performance levels just unchallenged in this space so you know it's a Google clearly is excelled in a lot of different areas it's been credibly starting to bring that to SVP and carry through but you're right that the the the value add ultimately isn't just the hey I can I can run you and I can run you better write the value add is so March we announced direct innovation rihana and Google bigquery when you're talking about bigquery right massive datasets that you can know Bridge to Hana if you're a retailer this is one last example I can now join all the ad tech data Google has so I can tell you all the agile currently run in Google once we march was being viewed anonymized in clusters so you can't tell the original consumers but I know that data and directly worded to bigquery and I can join at stp so I can now say you are advertising in this area let's being clicked on but I know you don't have the inventory to actually support the advertising so I want you to move advertising somewhere else right and so I can do that manually rename when I had any I to that the potential is is incredible right we've only just started so ya know next time I want the cube we'll see where we're at but it's a it's a fun place to be speaking the next time gasps have a conference coming up Google next is coming up at the end of July yeah it's we have a lot of announcements through probably the rest of the year right there's a lot of stuff going on as we come to massive scale in the SUV space so yeah anyone who's interested in this stuff especially even if you're just interesting the I stuff Google next is the place to be so sounds like it I'm expecting some big things from that based on what you talked about on how enthusiastic you are about being at Google Paul thanks so much for joining Keith and me back on the cube and we look forward to talking to you again Thanks thank you for watching the cube Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend @s AP Safire 2018 thanks for watching

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

>> From Orlando, Florida It's theCube covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018! Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome, you're watching theCube, On The Ground at SAP Sapphire Now. I'm your host, Keith Townsend. We're in steamy Orlando. Great convention center size of 16 American football fields. Got in about three thousand steps this morning, but you know what, I'm not here to talk about me. We're here talking about the relationship between Microsoft and NetApp. We have Brad Berkey, GM SAP Global at Microsoft and Kevin Zhang, Tech Solutions Pro, and this is a mouthful, SAP on Azure Intelligent Global and you're a black belt? >> Yes. >> Oh wow! >> Yes, I can kickbox. >> You can kick some SAP butt. >> Yes (laughs) oh no, yes, yes we do great solutions. >> So first off let's talk about the NetApp, Microsoft relationship as it pertains to SAP. What's the story behind NetApp and Microsoft? >> The great thing aout NetApp and Microsoft is you both have the same vision, right. For us, it's about our responsibility to help our customers innovate. And NetApp is a key partner for us in our ability to help our customers innovate and provide solutions around SAP. >> So, let's talk about those solutions around SAP. One of the things that's getting pushed an awful lot is that SAP is now cloud ready. We can go to the cloud. We can go to these hyperscalers, such as Azure or As-zure and swipe a credit card and get up and running with HANA. Tell us about that experience. How does that go exactly? >> Kevin? >> Oh yeah, so I don't know if you have heard. We just announced we released a 12 terabyte memory size virtual machine. Our Halo logging instances can go up to 24 terabytes. So we ran the largest SAP workload in the world. There are so many customers, about 400 SAP Azure customer. Personally I work with about 30 SAP on Azure customers and over 77 or 80 SAP HANA on Azure customers. So, it's very exciting and we see that the trend is picking up, the demand is picking up worldwide. >> Wow! Bill McDermott on stage yesterday gave the numbers around SAP HANA in general, 1800 customers. So Microsoft having 400 SAP HANA customers. >> Sure, just to be clear on that. So when we talk about customers that are sitting inside of Azure for their SAP Landscape, that's both traditional NetLever base and HANA base and I think the number that you have is closer to 70 of that larger number. The real important thing that customers are seeing today is the... When people think of cloud, they think about cost reduction. I'm gonna save money because I'm gonna be renting equipment. The true value is in your ability to be nimble to innovate, right? So imagine a customer puts their SAP Landscape inside of Azure and it's NetLever based say the older stuff. At any point along that journey, they can call us up and say, "I want the infrastructure for HANA." They can innovate at will. If they buy hardware that sits on-premise, that hardware's set to run that particular landscape, it's not set to run HANA. So there's some opportunities for the customer to innovate using Azure. It's not just cost savings, it's around efficiencies and the ability to innovate at will. >> So let's talk about hybrid clouds scenarios around that very concept. We had another NetApp partner on that talked about the scenario in which customers have this desire to innovate quickly. Traditionally, in a traditional enterprise, to your point, if I wanted to spin up a HANA workload, I'd have to procure hardware, I'd have to get my bases team to lay down the NetWeaver stack along with HANA. It could be a couple of months before I'm up and running. Then I can innovate, do my innovation. How does Microsoft help shorten that cycle? >> I can speak to it. We actually have another partner here with there model, as well, SUSE. HANA is drawn SUSE right ahead and different flavors of Linux. and they're running on Azure. Today, we are able to deploy the entire SAP Landscape using alternative scripts inside Azure. In 30 minutes, you have the entire SAP Landscape deployed including the large virtual machine M series for your HANA cluster. You also have the ESCS, the central instances and also the AFS Cluster as well as your application servers. All of those things running your automation, your cloud speed in 30 minutes instead of three months. >> So one of the obviously manages of cloud, in general, is this ability to get to agility. There's a concept that once I've innovated in the cloud, I know what the workload is, it's stable, it's not changing that I bring that back in house. Is that something that you're seeing, are people continuing to run these workloads steady state in the cloud as well? >> I think they're gonna run more so in steady state. We don't see them kind of moving it back. The idea that in a traditional SAP Landscape is that everything is always on. >> Right. >> Right. Since the lights are always on, why not I have my own equipment as opposed to renting just compute from a hyperscaler like Microsoft. The reality is, is again, back to that notion of innovating. If I'm gonna role out, let's say, S4 on top of HANA, so you think about Suite on HANA and then S4, I'm gonna set up all of these test environments, multiple test environments, versions of it as I roll out. I'm gonna be really big for a short period of time then I'm gonna roll it out and shrink back down. Also, when I do upgrades, you think about it like if you're doing payroll at the end of the month, I'm gonna be big for short periods of time. So we call that bursting, and it's that bursting that allows you to continually to reduce costs you wouldn't bring back on-prem, where you can't burst, right? Makes sense? >> That makes sense. So let's talk about some of these business conversations that you've had with customers. What have been some of the primary drivers other than the obvious agility? What are some of the conversations that you look at the broader Microsoft portfolio solutions that you're able to bring into customer conversations? >> Two things come to mind. One of which is when you think about enterprise-class security across all domains, right? So right now we provide Azure for Office 365. That's an Azure tenant. And we can give you advance security for that. Imagine that I can provide that same security for your SAP system. I want to give you an example of the type of security solutions. We have an intelligent IOT-based security model that sits inside of Azure that will predict hacks. They'll look at your environment and say, "you look just like a customer who has been hacked" or "you have the attributes of a customer "who could get hacked" and they'll proactively come in and say you need to make these adjustments That kind of stuff sits inside of the cloud in Azure. So it's not just... And again, I think the misnomer is it's just about cost savings 'cause if it was just about cost savings, then at some point, your depreciation models for on-premise hardware as long as you can stay and not change, so not changing would save you a lot of money. So that's why I get back to you, it'll allows you to change without burden of impact. >> Talking about change in the industry, we can't have a 7.5 billion dollar acquisition and not talk about it on theCube. We kind of eat this stuff up. You guys acquired GitHub. Let's talk about the relationship of developers, one of the things I haven't heard a lot, at least in conversations I've had on theCube so far this week have been about the developer. Talk about the importance of the developer relationship and potential integrations with GitHub, if you can, and SAP. >> First, that is one of my favorite topics I have. I came from a development background we call enable agility allow you to run continuous development and continuous integration, and the GitHub has been a integrate part of Microsoft Solution already. We are probably the largest contributor in the GitHub before Google and Facebook where if you ranking based on the history. The open source has been cultural after the Satya takeover as CEO has been our winning grace, open source, and we actually... The majority of our code and our deployment is in the GitHub. In the SAP world, the ARM templates for automation templates, JSON templates, and all the automation scripts we deployed in the GitHub, and we share with customer as a community. If they actually use those scripts through their deployment, continuously improve the scripts for automation. >> So, continuous integration, continued development is not a term that we hear a lot in the SAP world. As we're bringing these concepts from I think thought into reality with services such as GitHub to store DevOps scripts, automation scripts, what has been the business impact of being able to bring a continuous integration, continued development practice to SAP which is usually not big? >> I'll give you a good example. For example, when Brad Berkey mentioned earlier doing the SAP Landscape deployment, you have no N+1 deployment and you want to do a test environment, you want to do a Sandbox to troubleshoot the incidence. Today, with the scripts automation, you can spring up an entire system in three hours, four hours, including S4, including the time old system when you put in the business object BI and the other things together. You can test this and then shut down the entire system and delay the resource group inside Azure. As we move that system, they re-spring up as necessary. Also, we're working with SAP called Landscape Manager which allows you to clone the system inside the Azure. The scripts behind it is actually a computer integration into the dual element type of scripts allows you to replicate system files, allow you to deploy another testing system or training system. It gives you a lot of modern deployment methodology to give you fast agility to the business. >> So Microsoft, the ultimate platform company, one of the things that designates the platform company is that your partners basically make more money than you off the platform. Windows is a great example of a platform. So you have platform, Azure is definitely becoming known as a platform, and then we have NetApp, the data driven company. Talk through the value of the NetApp data fabric, data driven technology and platform as it pertains to the ability to have the same data operation strategy on-prem and in the Microsoft Cloud. >> Okay, I'll give you an example. A lot of our customer, Brad sells a lot of SAP on Azure to many customers. I've supported those customers. Many of them because NetApp has a super, very high speed fastest management, snapshot management to data protection and data recovery and backup, and also the DR capability, customers demand asks us can we actually work with Microsoft in the cloud or use a similar technology. So they deployed the NetApp ONTAP inside of Azure today. And we're able to support AFS file services to file sync from on-prem to the cloud, from one Azure region to another region, leverage those ONTAP snap mirroring and all the technology as well. So to enable to provide an enterprise level file sync, file protection, file recovery and warning replication as well. >> So, you guys are pretty good. I'm trying to throw you curve balls but you're pretty much knocking 'em out the park, so I'ma try to throw another curve ball. Bring the hybrid IT story in for me from a Microsoft perspective when it comes to Azure stack. How does Azure stack play a role in the overall vision whether it's Edge, Core, or like stationed into the cloud, how does Azure stack play a role in it? >> In Azure stacks. It's not for SAP. >> Yeah, okay. Azure stack is a very important overall view from Edge to the entire cloud. We have the 50 regions globally. We have many data centers combined. The largest of public quota from region perspective, but still they're areas, for example, like a cruise ship, like a defense department, they may actually require Edge inside a prime type of technology stack. Azure stack allow you to use the same interface, same view to deploy the technology. When you actually connect it, you can synchronize your subscription. So it can allow you to have end-to-end access from your on-premise into the cloud. Microsoft has the perfect hybrid cloud strategy here, and it allow you to do not only the IaaS and PaaS and also the SaaS solution to our customers. >> So, okay, let's bring the conversation back up a couple of levels and talk, Brad, what have been the conversations here? After the keynote this morning, talking about the intelligent business, the conversations yesterday with Bill McDermott with the super-high energy about SAP going into CRM, what has been the conversations with customers? >> We've had a privilege for a lot of customer meetings in here. The great thing about SAP Sapphire is you got about 20,000 customer attendees here. They're the big ones, and at the C-Suite, so we get to have some great conversations. The customer conversations have been around the notion of the responsibility that Microsoft and SAP have to them. To the point where I was speaking with a customer early, he says, "You have an accountability "to help me be innovative." That's a very important responsibility. A lot of that revolves around enterprise-class security. A lot of that revolves around uptime and legacies between those environments. "What's my performance attribute?" and "Are you going to be there with me forever?" Now when a customer chooses Azure or they choose SAP and they choose Azure, certainly, it's really a three-part partnership. The customer, Microsoft, and SAP as a partnership. If I had to add a fourth one to that, it would be the systems integrator because in the case, Microsoft doesn't upgrade, migrate, move or install anything. So we rely on all the many partners that are here to do that set of work, everywhere from Accenture to Gemini to Brave New World. That was ABC, right? I got those out, right? All of those partners are very key to both Microsoft and SAP to ensure customer success. So a lot of the meetings that we've had here have been with those partners and those customers. >> Wow, to be a fly on the wall for those. I would love to go into more detail. We've run out of time. I'm getting the wrap sign, but I would love to have a conversation around support, integration, way more areas than we have time for. We'll have to get you on theCube again. You're now Cube veterans. From Orlando, this is Keith Townsend for theCube. Stay tuned or stay in the YouTube feed to find out more about what's going on about SAP Sapphire Now On The Ground. Talk to you soon. (lively music)

>> From Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018, brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we are in Orlando at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. This is a huge event. Not just 20,000 people here but there's about a million people SAP SAS are going to engage with their life and on-demand video experiences for Sapphire, amazing. We are excited to welcome for the first time to theCUBE Jinesh Jain the VP of Global Delivery at CenturyLink. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you guys for having me here. >> The theme in this event is really around what SAP is doing to enable the intelligent enterprise. This is really beyond digital transformation where customers have to have a customer centric view. It's about infusing and embedding emerging and advanced technologies, AI machine learning into business processes. How is CenturyLink helping customers on that transformation journey? >> I think that's a great question. Let me give you a little bit of background behind what CenturyLink is all about because this is all SAP here in this event right? CenturyLink is all about connecting customers in the in the digital world. And we recently acquired Level 3, and with that Level 3 acquisition we became now, we provide trusted connections to all the connected world, you know all the network world. So you can imagine in a digital transformation you need a very strong foundation when it comes to connectivity, network, infrastructure and security behind that and that's what CenturyLink does. That's our core business and with that journey as we started the journey, we have 60 plus datacenters as part of CenturyLink core strategic assets. We have around 500K miles of fiber optics, which is one of the, we are the second largest in the United States when it comes to network connectivity and redundancy across. And in 60 plus countries, I think all this strategic assets mix provides us very strong foundation for any customers who is embarking this digital journey. It reminds me of one of those recent survey done by McKinsey Global Institute, where they said that they figured out that digitization index for Europe was 12% and for North America was little better around 18%. But look at the gap, how much of gap is there in terms of exploring the full potential of digitization. So I think our journey in terms of giving the digital transformation starts from our strong foundation of our strategic assets of data centers network and security, along with that as you mentioned about the intelligent enterprise, we have a very strong practice in terms of not just descriptive analytics, but we do prescriptive analytics. We do machine learning. We have IOT and we do big data analysis as well. So all these things combined together provides a complete end-to-end solution. And of course SAP plays a big play here and we can talk about that in terms of what we do on the SAP side as well. >> So let's add some more color to that. When I think of CenturyLink, I think about the 60 data centers. Even when I think about SAP what I normally consider CenturyLink's role traditionally in a SAP relationship is that you know what CenturyLink to get me better either closer to my customers so that data injection can happen faster with lower latency. When I think of CenturyLink, I think of lower latency to hyper scale cloud providers so that if I have hold on applications I can get closer to my core SAP data, but what I'm hearing is that CenturyLink has greater SAP capability outside of that. Tell us about the SAP practice at CenturyLink. >> I'm glad you asked that because everybody is wondering about CenturyLink and SAP relationship. In fact let me go back in time here. Six years, few years back I would say six, five years back, CenturyLink acquired Cognilytics. Cognilytics was all about deep HANA expertise, deep analytics and all about BI strategy. And then recently a couple of years back, they acquired SEAL Consulting. So these two organizations which CenturyLink acquired, that gave us deep roots into SAP ecosystem in terms of what CenturyLink and SAP can work together. So now let's look at Cognilytics. They were all about HANA, core HANA expertise. They co-innovated with SAP in terms of that HANA analytics. They came out with number of used cases symptoms of predictive science and then when they acquired SEAL Consulting, it was all about yes for HANA transformation, which is absolutely the theme across this Sapphire and for all the SAP customers globally. From SEAL perspective, which is now of course part of CenturyLink, but now we can provide infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, OSDB as a service, which is already part of CenturyLink. Now with SEAL and Cognilytics coming into play, we are end-to-end sharp in terms of SAP strategy, digital transformation strategy, using SAP tools and products, implementation upgrades, application management services, and continual improvement as part of the digital transformation every customer is looking for. I think that's how we are using the strategic assets of CenturyLink as part of with the SAP expertise coming into play. >> So every customer, digital transformation to any business is just, it's you got to do it right or you will lose relevance and go out of business and we've seen a lot of incumbent retailers for example go away because they haven't been able to transform digitally. I read a stat recently that said 70% of siloed digital transformation projects fail. So how does CenturyLink and your expertise with SAP as for with HANA, how do you help customers be successful? Do you come in and see these siloed projects that you know maybe shadow IT had evolved and helped them to break down those silos, so that they can actually facilitate what it is that they need which is that that 360-degree view of their customers. What they want, when they want it, to be able to predict what they're gonna want next. How do you help break down those silos? >> Right, now I think is a known problem, known challenge across all of the customers who are embarking this journey. I'll tell you what. I'll give you a simple, the way we work, our digital strategy is very much aligned with our customer's business and IT goals. So what we do first and foremost is we want to align ourselves with what the business and IT goals are. Let's double click on that right. So if I look at the business goals, so most of the customers today, A, they want to make sure they want to protect the revenue stream right? B, they want to make sure they have real-time position, no latency in terms of their business decision making. And C, they want to make sure that they go into the new markets. They just can't stay silent to same market there. Plus know the unfamiliar competition, which comes up many times. So that's the business aspect of the goals. We want to look at that and make sure that we align our implementation, our strategy to those business goals. If you look at IT side of that, and I tell you what, these are the things which are being missed out with most of the partners in this ecosystem. If I look at the IT side of it, first and foremost we want to make sure that IT think goals are, it's all about innovation. They want to be innovative. They want to have minimal shelf wear so that they can innovate all the time. They want to evolve the resources so they are aligned with the lines of business all the way and that way everybody has a career path, and they are evolving to the market needs. And then lastly it's all about making sure that all the mundane tasks you know if I look at they need to focus on core competency and offload all the routine tasks. And we very much aligned as part of the journey to those business and IT goals. So if you look at our mission, we won't just look at our mission in terms of overall CenturyLink for SAP customers. We want to provide them a private managed secured cloud, which is scalable, which can be commissioned in a week's time with full automation, completely secure, data protected and an uptime of 99.99% and take care of all the lights on kind of routine tasks, so they can focus on their main core competency about business decision, new business, business process design and things like that which are being lagging behind. So that's our key theme in terms of how we drive all the SAP information. >> There's a lot of complexity behind getting this much value out of any platform, whether it's complexity at the data analytics layer, whether it's the networking that needs to be done, the design and deployment of NetApp stack. We're in a conference where all the hyper scalers are here. >> Yes. >> The company smaller than CenturyLink provides larger than CenturyLink. How is CenturyLink uniquely positioned to basically go to whether it's a Fortune 100 customer or someone down level to basically add value where these other providers potentially will trouble at. >> Alright, no I think it's very true, we need to be nimble. I mean you know we can be a big ship, but should not take time to turn. And I completely agree with that. I think what we do is I'll tell you, one of the unique position we have in this market space is you know we can proudly say that we are, we don't need to go to any third party when it comes to data center locations. We have our own 500k lines of fiberoptics. So network is where we provide, we can provide minimal latency from network perspective. We are all over the, we are 60 plus countries. We are into 350 metros. We can do a metro tier. I think if you look at our network, our hosting capabilities our infrastructure capabilities, we are uniquely positioned compared what the customers need today as a one-stop shop or a one hand to shake to make things happen for them. At the same time, we are very nimble for many customers because that's how CenturyLink has grown up. They acquired us, and we were 800 people company. So was other acquisition as well. We can very easily adapt, innovate, comprehend and adapt to the needs of the customers based on our core competency, our solutions which are available, and strategy which is very much fitting most of our customers in the retail space, in CPG space, in manufacturing space, in healthcare, and in life sciences. We have some designated industry solutions as well, which can help us drive those values quicker. At the same time measurable. >> Being nimble I think of you know being adaptive and being flexible but adaptive struck a big, actually Hasso Plattner this morning in his keynote talked about SAP being adaptive in the context, I think he was talking about intelligence. And everybody wants to paint intelligence all over everything and they talked about SAP being adaptive. That kind of aligns with something I read recently that Bill McDermott said, which is where SAP was the last to accept the status quo. I think he was talking about in relation to CRM specifically but the first to change it. So with that spirit of being nimble, being adaptive how are you helping customers adapt to needing to bring on you know edge core millions of devices or customers that go you know what I want to be able to use advanced technologies like AI to make you know my manufacturing smarter or to be able start connecting my supply chain with demand chain? How are you harnessing that, your adaptability to meet their needs on some of those emerging trends? >> Absolutely, this can be very overwhelming and if you really look at what everybody's talking about, where do you start with and I think we have been doing this for last six years, even before the keynote announcement to be honest to you guys. We have documented 60 to 70 used cases in this case. So what we do is when we approach a customer or a prospect, we come out with some specific used case for their line of business. It can be in a marketing campaign. It can be in a supply chain. It can be in financials. It can be in insurance. So depending on what the needs are, we have those documented used cases, so what we do is for each of these used cases, we break it down in terms of what problem are we gonna to solve, what is the problem definition. And for that problem definition, what's my used case, how do I solve this, what are the alternatives, and how do I reach to my measurable value of that solution. And then we have built-in data models ready to go for each of these used cases behind the scene. So that helps us build something which is nimble, because the data is available. We just need to customize to 20% of what the customer needs are, and then provide that value right away. And once that pilot goes live for a small segment of user community, then we expand that to the larger audience to see the value of whether this is a predictive science machine learning or just pure KPI driven analytics. So we do that and then we expand that. This is what we have done with number of Fortune 500 companies and we're really proud of what we do in terms of being big, but being nimble. >> So speaking of being big, talk about customer engagement, not necessarily the actual customer conversations, but how do customers engage with CenturyLink. One of the simple things that you look at the hyperscalers, I can go to the website, and when I have a question, I can type it in and I'll get a script that answers me in an hour or so. What is the engagement model for interacting with CenturyLink for new customers? >> I think, actually let me go back on this one. I was reading a survey in a CIO magazine. Actually this is a recent survey last year it was, that around thousand-plus CIO's who were interviewed and most of the CIO's, all the CIO's had SAP systems in their companies. And 40% of them said they want to move from on-premise to cloud. Right there that's our engagement strategy there. That we come as a one-stop shop for all these customers who are planning to move from on-premise to cloud. Why? Because number one, they want to reduce their CAPEX, upfront reduction in your cost. They want to make sure that their steady-state cost for keeping the lights on is bare minimal. So whatever budget is left out they can focus more on innovation. We take the sliver line of keeping the lights on and moving them from on-premise to cloud as part of our engagement strategy to start with number one. As we do that, they realize, customer realize that we are not just hosting partners. We just don't provide scalable private managed security cloud for our customers, but we can also do SAP implementation end-to-end, which is whether this is ECC upgrade to S/4HANA or this is a digital strategy for S/4HANA going forward, or just HANA as a pure analytics tool. Or the different SAP suite of products, whether this is Hybris, whether this is Ariba or other suite of products which are very much in a SAS model aspect of SAP, we support that end to end. Our support model is based out of the United States. We have offshore centers in India. So globally follow the same kind of approach. We do this between our number of you know units here in US and in India. That's our engagement strategy across. >> So last question is we're now in our booth here at SAPPHIRE NOW. Tell us about what CenturyLink, NetApp, SAP are doing within the context of automation. >> Wonderful yeah great. That's important actually because I think if you really look at the pace of what customer needs today, the pace is changing so fast. In a typical SAP landscape, you want to commission a system, a development system or a production system within weeks or within days. Gone are other days where you need two months and three months. I mean you miss the business goals for doing all these things. So what we have done is we want to get into the automation mode, and we are heavily investing in that part with help of Cisco, UCSKS. NetApp plays a very big role here in terms of providing their data-driven strategy, their hyper-converged infrastructure as part of the storage system and working with another partner Vnomic to make sure that entire, all these gears behind the scene have a very good orchestration layer to automate the whole process of building the infrastructure, building the application, building all the services and handing it over to our, to the customer team for them to start the journey. So that whole cycle can be reduced by the automation. So I would say NetApp plays a big role there, no doubt about that because most of the IT organizations are data driven today. The SAP workloads are changing and you can't wait for those change manually to be operated. So these are all application driven workloads which changes you know, which can adapt to all these changing workloads and this is where we are going right now in terms of automation. >> Well thanks so much Jinesh for stopping by. I wish we had more time but talking to us about what CenturyLink is doing with SAP, with NetApp for example to help customers on this arduous digital transformation journey. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much I mean this is great, thank you, enjoy rest of the day. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAP Sapphire 2018. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)