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

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018, brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I am Lisa Martin, with Keith Townsend. We have been here all day at SAP Sapphire 2018. Keith, this venue in Orlando is so huge. It's the equivalent of 16 American football fields. >> Yeah, probably should not have worn a pair of new shoes. >> No, but you did close your rings, so it's a trade-off, right? >> It's a trade-off, yeah. >> So, the keynote this morning started out with a bang. Bill McDermott, the CEO of SAP, is probably the most energetic, evangelical, C-level I've ever seen on stage. You really could feel the excitement, the momentum. They also followed that with some great announcements. You know, they've been saying for awhile, being pretty bullish about wanting to not just disrupt the Sierra market, but wanting to become one of the world's most valuable brands. They wanna be up there with the Apples, and the Googles, and Coca-Cola and Mercedes-Benz, who all have products that we all see, and touch, and feel, and buy. And they announced that the brands e-rankings just came out the other day, that they're number 17, up four spots from last year. So, their momentum is, they're really putting their money where their mouth is. >> Yeah, so SAP is the cash register of the world. 70% of the world's transactions go through SAP, but most of us don't see it. So, it's amazing to see that they're ranked number 17 on those brands that are very, you know, if you told somebody you worked for SAP, they'd be like, oh, okay, I think I might have heard of that. >> Right. >> Or, I've heard that that was the reason why manufacturing is down, because the SAP system was down. So, it is a bold statement to say that you're gonna go from that, to a household name. Interestingly enough, part of that is becoming an ecosystem. So, becoming a platform. What we've heard today was a lot of talk about how SAP is transforming from a product company. You know, a point-of-sale system is one thing, but to say that you've built a ecosystem, and a platform around that, is the goal that I think I heard today from the stage floor. >> And you're right, you talk about, you know, them becoming a household name, with a product that's basically invisible to most people who probably use it. They have amassed 390,000 customers in 46 years. They've been around for a long time. This event, though, is massive. The partner area alone is huge. There's probably more than 20,000 people not just that are here, in Orlando, but, he said, Bill McDermott, a million people engaging with SAP Sapphire via the online experience. That's enormous. But to your point, it's all really fundamentally due to the partnerships, the systems integrators, the technology partners and more who have helped them on their transformation. >> Yeah, we had KPIT on, they said the guest has been on 20 Sapphires for 20 years, the event has gone on for 25 years in some form. He remembered, initially, they might have had one or two sessions. They have 12, KPIT has 12 sessions this year at the Sapphire 2018. There's a huge ecosystem of partners, here on the show floor. Over 500, I think, sessions in general. We had the VP of Community for S/4. They have 1,000 how-to videos on how to just do basic things in S/4. Huge community, huge event. SAP is starting to make end rolls and becoming, again, not just a products company, but an ecosystem company, I think. Sapphire in Orlando is a great example of how they're expanding the brand. >> Yes, and in fact, on the brand part, you know, that's one of the things that their CMO, Alicia Tillman, who was on main stage this morning, that's something that I've heard her talk about before. She's been the CMO for about nine months now, and she said, you know, and marketers will know, campaigns and messaging will change every quarter, six months, and that is fine. It's the brand narrative that they really started to work on at SAP. So, you're seeing this "Best-run companies run on SAP", it's sharing the value of what SAP can deliver with their partner ecosystem, in terms of how it's helping customers transform their businesses, transform industries, save lives. They've done a very focused job on showing how this invisible technology is really revolutionizing the world. They're now going, you know, full-force, embedding A.I., and really being quite bold, they're saying. I loved what Bill McDermott had on the slide this morning, of augmented intelligence. And there's always a lot of concern with A.I, right? Jobs being replaced. And he talked about what he, and some of the other world leaders, were talking about. And I liked augmented intelligence, to augment humanity, this connection of humans and machines working together. They're really being quite bold, and focused, in that area. I'm just curious what your take was from an advanced analytics A.I. perspective. >> So, there's a lot of talk around advanced A.I. analytics. At the end of the day, it's about actual business results. We're here in the booth of NetApp, who has done a great job, frankly, of transforming their image from a storage company in the middle of a transformation to being known as a data-driven company. So, NetApp has gone through a similar change that SAP is looking to do, from a brand perspective. Reasonably enough, we had the CIO, Bill, from NetApp, that talked about that transformation, and how data is a key part of their own transformation, internally. And, how SAP could probably hold NetApp up as a great example of a company that's using the predecessor to C/4HANA, which was just announced, on the staged hypers of taking data, analyzing that data, applying A.I, machine learning, more like machine learning in reality. Machine learning to that data, and then getting insights, so that humans can make better decisions. >> Right. You know, on that front, one of the themes I heard today, Keith, from not just Bill Miller, the CIO of NetApp, who was on here with us earlier, but some of their other partners, NetApp and SAP's partners, all talk about their own transformations, internally, as essential for them to become intelligent enterprises, which is a lot of what SAP's talking about. But I also thought that was quite valuable, from an external perspective, to hear NetApp talk so candidly about their transformation, and share that with their customers who are in similar positions. I think, when vendors will, say, drink their own champagne, and there's real proof there in the pudding. I think that's tremendously valuable for these brands. And we've just heard that kind of consistently throughout the day today, of companies that are showing how they're transforming to then help their customers also transform. >> So, one of the things that we like to ask on theCUBE is not just about current customer base, but, what new customers are you attracting? So, one of the interesting conversations is one of the last ones we had with WorkSpan, and how they're a small company, and they started out the gate with SAP, and how the brand has gone beyond this, oh, this is a manufacturing, supply chain, you must be a Fortune 500 company to even consider rolling it out to. You know what? We're a brand new company, providing a data-driven product, and out of the gate, we're selecting a S/4HANA and the platform to create this new product that's consumed by not necessarily technologists, that powers an alliance platform to find and curate business alliances. I thought that was an extremely interesting interview that shows the power of expanding beyond just a focus on traditional enterprise, but the power of data. And once you've become a platform, how you can power your partner ecosystem. >> I thought that was a great example, as well, of a company that's only been in business for three years, less than four years. How they saw this gap in the market, where they said, you know, we're surrounded by alliance partners of SAP's in this 16 football fields location that we're in. And WorkSpan found that 60 to 75% of announced alliances fail. Huge opportunity for them to then get in from a systematic perspective and align, you know, two companies' marketing automation systems, for example, and sales automation systems. And they really saw this big opportunity to, like you were saying, create an entirely new product, and probably create a new market as a result. I thought that was a really modern example of an idea that saw a huge gap, and can be transformative. I asked Ahmed, after we stopped rolling the cameras, all right, so you found 60 to 75% of these announced alliances fail, typically. What does WorkSpan think you can do to bring that number down? And he said, within two years, we wanna get that down to about 30%. >> Wow. That is an amazing stat. So, let's look at the companies that are digitally transforming. So we had two guests that I want to highlight, one with Mike McGivney from SAP SuccessFactors, which is SAP's people-focused cloud, and then Wolfgang Hopfes, the head of SAP Business for EMEA. And they're on a unique challenge. SAP has been around for 46 years, and in IT years, that's like, you know, 1,000. So, there's a lot of technical debt, that companies are now paying for. You know, back in the nineties, early 2000s, customizing SAP was all the rage. Now, customers are faced with, they have to digitally transform their organizations, how do they do so? Well, it's not so easy to move from a customized SAP to S/4. Bill trumpeted the numbers of 1,800 SAP HANA customers, which is great, well over a billion dollars in sales for an in-memory database. However, SAP has over 300,000 customers. So there's a lot of opportunity, but a lot of challenge. So, the ecosystem of partners, Fujitsu, NetApp, other infrastructure companies looking to help simplify the infrastructure so that technologists within these customer organizations can focus on the higher stack of those larger business challenges of basically pulling apart what they've built. Bill from NetApp shared how difficult their transformation was from their CRM to >> Hypers? >> Hypers. He called it painful, a painful six months. And what we saw today, I think, was a reality check. A lot of enterprises have a lot of pain ahead of them. >> Well, it's pain in a number of areas, and one of them is cultural. And I really thought, you know, you say, SAP being 46 years old is like, 1,000 in IT, or dog years. They're like the Gandalf of IT, right? But one of the things that I found quite remarkable is 46 year-old history, 390,000 customers. But clearly, they have been able to evolve their culture to be able to support what their customers need, and go from just being a supply chain procurement-focused type of business. And I thought that was really quite compelling, to see how they must have had to transform their culture, so that they can help businesses transform. They make it look easy, with the messaging and the momentum, but that was something that for a company that's an incumbent like that, is a bit of, you might say, even a model for how to do that right. >> Yeah, we talked to Joe Lazar, he's the SAP VP of Global Technology Partners. He talked about how SAP likes to be pushed to be a little uncomfortable by their partners, and we asked him the tough questions. You know, there's been tweets and there's been announcements from all the ACI vendors. I've talked to customer after customer that says, you know what, S/4HANA on HCI is what we want. A very quotable comment that he made was, we're not doing S/4 on HANA because we want to, we're doing S/4 on HANA because customers demand it. So, SAP is definitely listening to customer demand, S/4 on HANA is one of those things. You know, he tried to stay away from the bad word of certified on 4HANA, and validated, and focused on solutions, but SAP has a little ways to go. And that's kind of a, you talk to any HCI customer, validated and certified 4HANA is a bad word today, but SAP understands it and they're moving to certify the platform for HCI, so I thought that was a great example of them listening to customers and continuing to transform over the years. >> You're absolutely right. In fact, you know, if you look up digital transformation, one of the first pillars that you're gonna see is you gotta become customer-centric. And we really heard that a lot today. Even NetApp, when you were talking with Bill Miller about ONTAP in the cloud, going it's okay guys, maybe we have to listen to our customers. If we don't we won't be in business. That's a hallmark of an enterprise that is digitally transforming. >> Yeah, I'd argue that Dave Hitts was the one who forced that, that kind of cultural change. You had to bring in the founder to talk to the engineers and that had very engineer-driven thinking And I think Dave was very direct, like you know, we have to make the change or we won't be in business. The pendulum has changed to cloud. The SAP, which is not by any stretch of the mind, was never designed to run in the cloud, but they're adopting the technology for what customers are demanding. There's an AWS booth here, Fujitsu was the first one to say that, you know what, if customers need fail-fast environments, that's exactly where they should go, and put S/4 implementations, and then steady states should be moved to RMPRAM or private dating center or hosted solutions. So, the ecosystem seems to be embracing this change. >> Definitely. Anything that you're particularly looking forward to tomorrow for Day 2? >> You know what? I love talking to customers, so I'm looking forward to more customer conversations, talking about how is this being used? We haven't really talked a lot about Leonardo much. So, you know, IoT, A.I., how are these things that get a lot of press being perceived by actual customers? How are they being implemented? What's their true adoption rate? >> Awesome. Well, I look forward to hosting with you tomorrow, Keith. Thanks so much. >> I appreciate it. >> Thanks for watching. Keith and I have been at SAP Sapphire, bringing you some hopefully great informative content. From the NetApp booth, Lisa Martin for Keith Townsend. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Commentator: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge17, brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Hi everybody, welcome back to Knowledge17. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with my co-host Jeff Frick at our fifth Knowledge. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. Seneca Louck is here, he's the Business Process Lead at Dow Chemical. A relatively new ServiceNow customer. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you guys. >> Thanks for having me. >> So you said this is your second Knowledge. >> Seneca: It is. >> And, well how do you like Orlando? >> I like it, I like it. I'm here, in Venetian, >> Sunny? >> for next year, and so I'm a Vegas guy, so I'll be happy to get back there, but Orlando's nice. >> Dave: Where's home for you? >> Originally from New Jersey. Worked in Philadelphia for 15 years and relocated to Midland, Michigan, where Dow Chemical's headquartered. >> Dave: Fantastic, ah it's great, great country, Michigan. >> Absolutely. >> So, take us through your role, start there. What do you do, >> Sure. >> at Dow Chemical? >> So, I'm a Business Process Lead for Enterprise Service Management. We could go down the ITSM route, or we can go down the BSM route and we said, "Why pick one?" Enterprise Systems Management used to be the name. We actually elevated it up, Enterprise Service Management. We're the IT Operability focus on the end. >> Okay, and you said you went live, with ServiceNow, June last year? >> June 11th last year, we started with Incident Problem Change Config. We did Change Management, sorry, a month later. And then we did Service Request catalog, rolled out for the whole rest of the year. >> How long did it take you from sort of, when you said, "All right, we're doing this. "Start the project." To actually get, you know, MVP out? >> The cake. >> Yeah, the cake. (laughs) >> To get to the cake. >> And MVP's a really important thing. Minimum Viable Product. It was a hard lesson for us to learn. Quickly we realized that we're not going to be able to do everything we want to do in a first shot. So, we did focus very heavily on MVP. ServiceNow was good enough to make sure that they bred that into us, the importance of that. And so, we started in October, with workshops. We spent probably the first four or five months before we wrote one single line of code or configured one thing in ServiceNow. You know, a lot of that work was As-Is Process. Document it, understand it, uplift it, figure out what we want that To-Be Process to look like, and then figure out how the tool's going to deliver against that. >> Did you do some of that, I mean much of that came as part of the business case, and then you just refined it, is that right? >> The business case was really more on the value side. We didn't get into the specifics around process. We had a high level idea what we wanted to do strategically. Right? >> Yeah. >> Our guiding principles were really, Industry Best Practice, we like to think we're special. But really, the industry should know. Out of the box, ServiceNow, whenever possible. And to be honest, the out-of-the-box ServiceNow should reflect Industry Best Practice fairly well. And so that was kind of the coming in position for us. We deviated only when absolutely necessary and we really tried to stick to vanilla. >> So you minimized custom mods? >> Seneca: We really tried to do that, yes. There's times where we had to deviate of course. But we really wanted to look to see if ServiceNow had an answer, and if we could tweak what was already there, then great. There's only a handful of opportunities where we had to build something net new. >> And was that related to your ERP, or when did you have to build those custom mods? >> So, in places where we might have a concept that was to bring Legacy capability from a previous system. We knew we weren't going to cut and run from the old to the new. We had to kind of pull on some of the capabilities of that platform. So, the way you guys do category, sub-category, we did through classification. And so we had to customize a couple of tables to bring classifications over to bridge that gap. >> I see, okay, and then, so then you go live. Now was it a CMDB, a single CMDB across the organization? >> So, we have HP technology, where we had large investment. We wanted to keep that for discovery purposes and it enabled us to build one big tunnel between our CMDB and ServiceNow, so it made the integration go very easily. So, we really did two key integrations, a CMDB integration and an LDAP one to get our people data. Once that was done, we were on our feet, we were stood up and we were ready to start delivering processes. >> And the Service Catalog? >> Service Catalog was an interesting one because we had it spread out in a bunch of places. We had web forums, where somebody had customized a small, little web forum that that was actually making calls into our ticketing system to create service requests. We also had Request Center, which was brought in to try and solve that world of Service Request Management, but it only did it for Service Request. And we realize ServiceNow is going to do it end-to-end. >> Seneca, when you're thinking about your investments. I like to look at 'em as you get investments to run the business, some to grow the business and some to transform the business. And you're really sort of an IT-transform expert. How do you allocate that? Are those mutually exclusive? Do they sort of blend into each other and how much of your investment is transformation, and what does that all mean? >> Yeah, so it's tough because you've got guys that are on the run side, and I actually spent the large majority of my career on the run side. So, I know what if feels like to be accountable for everything in production, regardless of how it got there. And so, I kind of oscillate back and forth. Right? If the hair's on fire and these guys are going to be dead by the time the project transforms next year's capability, there's no point in us waiting. We can't wait. So, we're bouncing in and out of transformation and dealing with, making sure operability can happen effectively, efficiently, and that these guys are around next year, and alive and well, so that we can deliver that transformational capability. >> You talked about MVP being kind of a new concept. I wonder if you could dig into that a little bit further. >> Sure, sure. >> Is that not kind of a process or methodology that you guys have done in the past, or was it a learning curve? >> So, it was a little bit of a learning curve. So, typically you know, we delivered the biggest SAP implementation in the history of the world. A billion dollars, 800 SAP systems. And it took us seven years. So, we didn't think a lot about MVP, we wanted perfection. And so we made sure that we got it. And it cost us dearly. But in the end, the results were good. In this case, we had to move fast. Right? We weren't going to be able to do it all. We knew the capabilities that you see, throughout this room, are incredible. We want to get to them. But we've got to get on to the platform first. And so, we really did hone in on trying to find, what is the minimum product that we need to get people moved over to the platform, and we'll increment from there. So, it was a little bit of a learning for us. It was a little bit of a culture change. And we kind of found that sweet spot between Agile and Waterfall, which I think we called it Wagile, or (laughs). Yeah, Wagile I think, >> Well, right. >> is the name. >> I mean your implementation >> coincided with the sort of DevOps craze, and Agile, but there's >> That's right, that's right. >> a place for Waterfall, right? >> There is, there is. >> Sometimes, you need >> that perfection. Other times, you need to break stuff and iterate. >> Absolutely. >> But so, that's interesting. You said you came up with sort of a hybrid. Sometimes, hybrids are scary. So, how did you sort of come to that point and how's it workin' for you? >> Yeah, so what we did is we front-ended a lot of the requirements. We spent, like I said, several months, just sitting and doing requirements. And then, we transitioned into two-week sprints. And we pulled out of the backlog, the requirements that we had captured in those months previous. So, that was kind of how we blended the two together. We're more a Waterfall shop but we were delivering a system of record. And so, in systems of record, we strongly believe that Agile can be dangerous. It's not necessarily the place to start. And so, we started with Waterfall, and we kind of ended with Agile. >> All right, okay, and so, what so far have been the sort of business impacts? Can you share that with us? >> Yeah absolutely, so first thing's first, we're getting consistency throughout our processes. So, many times, geographical differences or even within a geography, at a sub-activity level, people were doing things differently. So, first thing we had to do was Standardize Process. That gives us the ability to measure across the world, how that process is being executed. Whereas before, we couldn't do that one-for-one, we couldn't compare these things one-for-one. And so, now we have that vision, now we have that visibility, and we were a performance analytics customer from day one, so we started capturing data to baseline, to benchmark, from Go Live, until today, and we've got incredible data to go back then and do the continuous service improvement. >> And how much of the consistency and process was forced in your pre-deployment activities, where you kind of find, all right, we got to sit down and actually document this to put it into the system. Versus, now that you've got this tool in place, that you see the opportunity to continue to go after new processes. >> It varied, dependent upon area, so Change Management was actually not a bad process from a global perspective. On the flip side is, we actually implemented some case management capability for our Business Functions. Their processes were extremely deviated across geographies, across activities. And so it depends, but the bottom line is that before we talk about implementing on this platform, we got to talk standardization. Good news is the incident problem changed. It wasn't as much work. On the Business Process side, it was a lot more. >> How are you predominantly measured? Is it getting stuff done? Are there other sort of KPI's that you focus on? Is there one that you try to optimize? >> So, these days, we're actually operating in a little bit of a dangerous place because we're going through so much mergers and acquisition activity, that our success is, can we integrate a company in less than a year while we go on to do the biggest chemical merger in the history of the world? So, typically, we would be kind of looking at metrics, and KPI's, down at the process level. Right now, we're looking at, can I actually bring these companies together? So it's integrated. >> And not kill each other. >> And not kill each other. (laughs) That's right. That's not to say we're not doing the latter as well but I think we have to start with, can we get the big activities done so that we can figure out how to do the process improvement. >> Dave: Right. How about the show for you here? What's it been like? What are you learning? >> Yeah, so. >> Are you sharing? >> Dx Continuum I think is going to be the theme that I'm going to leave here thinking, wow, these guys did the right thing with that purchase. So, you know the artificial intelligence, the machine learning, the data lakes, that we're going to be able to take all this data that we have and pump it out to you guys. And you're going to turn around and tell us an interesting story. You're going to tell me the questions that I would never even think to ask because you're going to be able to see into that data in ways that we never even dreamed possible. So, that's the big one for me. I've heard some rumors of some other things coming, but I shouldn't know about those and so I'm not going to say anything at this point. But right now, it's about the machine learning, the artificial intelligence. >> So, what other, I mean 'cause a company the size of Dow must be doing some interesting things with Big Data and Hadoop and AI. How does what you're doing or does what you're doing with ServiceNow relate to those sort of other activities? Is there sort of a data platform strategy? >> It's an interesting question. It's something that we're actually struggling with a little bit to figure out what that strategy is going to be. I don't think the larger organization expected so many opportunities to use analytics and to use machine learning against data sets that otherwise were, this is operation stuff, for the most part, right? We're starting to get into the business side a little bit but really, we were focused on running the business from an operations perspective. And so, all of a sudden, now, we're getting attention that we wouldn't have had otherwise, from the big players, you know. The SAP Business Warehouse, Business Intelligence guys. They've got 120 people delivering their reporting service. I got a guy half-time, that's helping me with my PA reports and we've got to figure out a way to either join our strategies together or at least meet in the middle because there's data that we probably want to share from each other. >> Do you have a Chief Data Officer on staff? >> We do not, that I'm aware of, actually. But I think it is , it's a very powerful role, but in our SAP world, they kind of act as that defacto person within our organization. But they're not very interested in what we're doing yet but they are starting to get the attention of us. >> It's interesting 'cause we talk a lot about IoT Now will bridge, you know, kind of the IT and the Ops folks. And it sounds like you're having that experience really specifically built around some of the processes that you're delivering in ServiceNow. To bring those two world together. >> Yeah, so while I mentioned machine learning and Artificial Intellience, that's actually right there, second on my list. The thing I came here last year and raised my hands and said I need the most is I need the ability to bring massive amounts of data onto this platform. Raw performance data, network data, server data, utilization data, end-user data. I want to be able to bring it into this platform so that I can use it to correlate events and incidents and problems. And so, the things that you guys are doing for IoT, to bring massive data sets in, are actually going to solve my problem, but I don't think it was necessarily what you were trying to solve. But I'm very happy for that. >> So, by the way, we're independent media, so we're (laughs) like third-party guys. >> Understood, understood >> It's these guys, ServiceNow. So, we just sort of unpack, analyze. What about if you had to do it again. What would you do differently? Obviously you would have, and you did, you embraced the MVP, other things? >> So, we took a very dangerous route in that we didn't have a team built. We didn't have a competency built. We took a system integrator and we went off and we went hog wild and we implemented it quickly, while we built the team, while we built the governance, while we built the competency center. If I could do it again, I'd have that team ready, staffed, you know, well-trained up front, so that we could learn as we went, a little bit more, be a little more autonomous and self-sufficient. >> Were you one of the 100 customers that John Donahoe met with in 45 days? >> I was not actually. >> And if you weren't, then what would you tell him in terms of the piece that he said, "What can we do better?" What would you? >> Yeah. >> So, the question came up yesterday, around releases. You know, should we do more, should we do less. I mean, we're actually struggling a little bit to keep up with the two releases per year. So, the biggest thing that I see is not making it a wholesale upgrade. If I could take parts and pieces from the new capabilities that are coming without having to go through the full upgrade cycle, you know, I think that would be huge for me. So that we don't have to spend a couple of months or we're hoping to get that down to one month. But this is our first one in production. So, we're going to spend three months getting this upgrade right. We're hoping to get it down to, you know, a couple of weeks to a month. But if I can take pieces and parts of the capability that's being delivered, and not have to take it wholesale, that would be the thing. >> Yeah, so that's interesting because Multi-instance is nice. You don't have to go on the SaaS player's schedule. But you want to keep current, you know, for a lot of reasons, with maybe, with certain parts of the upgrade. Yeah, okay, that doesn't sound trivial. (laughs) >> Yeah, it's not. >> Although I know they're thinking about it so it's come up, I've heard a couple of people at least mention that it's something that they have to think about. They may not actually go that direction. But at least that they're thinking about it, that tells me that they're exploring other avenues to deliver capability. >> Dave: What's in the future for you guys? Where do you want to take this thing? >> Yeah, so our next big thing's going to be Event Management. So, we've got 45 different tools that are doing monitoring from purchase tools to somebody's script that's sitting on the mainframe that sends us an event, when some exception happens. And so we've built, you know, with a custom IT process automation tool, our Event Management framework. And it's integrated with ServiceNow. But at the heart of it is, there's some old technology, decade-old technology, that was my first entry into IT process automation. And so, as the person who built it, I'm going to be the one that ultimately unplugs it and hands it over to ServiceNow. So, for us, that's the next step for what we're going to do. >> Awesome, well listen, Seneca, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It's great to have you. Loved the knowledge. >> Thanks for having us. >> Dave: Rapid fire, you know, perfect for theCUBE, so thank you. >> Great, wonderful. >> Thank you, guys. >> Thanks for coming on. >> I appreciate it. >> All right, pleasure. >> All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge17 in Orlando. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: From Orlando, Florida, it's theCube, covering Sapphire now, headline sponsored by SAP, Hana, the Cloud, the leader in Platform as a service, with support from Console Inc, the cloud internet company, now here are your hosts, John Furrier, and Peter Burris. >> Hey welcome back everyone, we are here live at SAP Sapphire in Orlando, Florida, this is theCube, Silicon Angle Media's flagship program, we go out to the events and extract the scene of the noise, I'm John Furrier with my co-host Peter Burris, our next guest is Matt Hayes, VP of SAP Business, Attunity, welcome to theCube. >> Thank you, thank you so much. >> So great to have you on, get the update on Attunity. You've been on theCube many times, you guys have been great supporters of theCube, appreciate that, and want to get a little update, so obviously Attunity, it's all about big data, Hana is a big data machine, it does a lot of things fast, certainly analystics being talked about here, but how do you guys fit in with SAP, what's your role here? How does it fit? >> Sure sure, well I think this is our ninth of tenth time here at Sapphire, we've been in the ecosystem for quite some time, our Gold Client solution is really designed to help SAP customers move data from production to non-production systems, and now, more throughout the landscape, or the enterprise even, so as SAP's evolved, we've evolved with SAP and a lot of our customers get a lot of value by taking real-life production data out of their production system, and moving that to non-production systems, training, sandbox, test environments. Some customer's use it for troubleshooting, you know, you have a problem with some data in production, you can bring that into a non-production system and test that, and some scrambling capabilities as well. Most SAP customers have a lot of risk if their copying the production data into non-production systems that are less secure, less regulated, so some of the data scrambling or obfuscation techniques that we have make it so that that data can safely go into those non-production systems and be protected. >> What's been your evolution? I mean obviously you mentioned you guys been evolving with SAP, so what is the current evolution? What's the highlight, what's the focus? >> So, obviously Hana has been the focus for quite some time and it still is, more and more of our customer's are moving to Hana, and adopting that technology, less so with S4, because that's kind of a newer phase, so a lot of people are making the two step approach of going to Hana, and then looking at S4, but Cloud as well, we can really aid in that Cloud enablement, because the scrambling. When we can scramble that sensitive data, it helps customer's feel comfortable and confident that they can put vendor and customer and other sensitive data in a Cloud based environment. >> And where are you guys winning? So what's the main thrust of why you guys are doing business in the SAP ecosystem. >> So with SAP you're always looking to do things better. And when you do things better, it results in cost savings on your project, and if you could save money on your project and do things smarter, you free up peoples time to focus on the fun projects, to focus on Hana, to focus on Cloud, and with our software, with our technology, by copying that data and providing real production data in the development and sandbox environments, we're impacting and improving the change control processes, we're impacting and improving the testing processes within companies, we're enabling some automation of some of those processes. >> Getting things up and running faster in the POC or Development environment? Real data? >> Yeah because you can be more nimble if you have real production data that you're working with while you're prototyping, you can make changes faster, you can be more confident in what you're promoting to production, you can be avoiding having a bad transport or a bad change going into the production environment and impact your business. So if you're not having to worry about that kind of stuff, you can worry about the fun stuff. You can look at Hana, you can look at Cloud, you can look at some of the newer technologies that SAP is providing. >> So, you guys grew up and matured, as you said, you've grown as SAP has grown, SAP used to be regarded as largely an applications company, now SAP, you know the S4, Hana platform, is a platform, and SAP's talking about partnerships, they're talking about making this whole platform even more available, accessible, to new developers through the Apple partnership etcetera, creates a new dynamic for you guys who have historically been focused on being able to automate the movement of data, certain data, certain processes, how are you preparing to potentially have to accommodate an accelerated rate of digitization as a consequence of all these partners, now working at SAP as a platform? >> That's a great question, and it's actually, it aligns with Attunity's vision and direction as well, so SAP, like you said, used to be an applications company, now it's an applications company with a full platform integrated all the way around, and Attunity is the same way, we came to Attunity through acquisition, and bringing our SAP Gold Client technology, but now we're expanding that, we're expanding it so that we can provide SAP data to other parts of the enterprise, we can combine data, we can combine highly structured SAP data with unstructured data, such as IOT Data, or social media streams in Hadoop, so the big data vision for Attunity is what's key, and right now we're in the process of blending what we do with SAP, with big data, which happens to align with SAP's platform. You know SAP is obviously helping customers move to Hana on the application side, but there's a whole analytics realm to it, that's even a bigger part of SAP's business right now, and that's kind of where we fit in. We're looking at those technologies, we're looking at how we can get data in and out of Hadoop, SAP Data in and out of Hadoop, how we can blend that with non SAP Data, to provide business value to SAP customers through that. >> Are you guys mainly focused on Fren, or are you also helping customer's move stuff into and out of Clouds and inside a hybrid cloud environment? >> Both actually, most SAP customer's are on Premise, so most of our focus is on Premise, we've seen a lot of customers move to the Cloud, either partial or completely. For those customers, they can use our technology the exact same way, and Attunity's replication software works on Prem and in the Cloud as well. So Cloud is definitely a big focus. Also, our relationship with Amazon, and Red Shift, there's a lot of Cloud capabilities and needs for moving data between on Premise and the Cloud, and back and forth. >> As businesses build increasingly complex workloads, which they clearly are, from a business stand point, they're trying to simplify the underlying infrastructure and technology, but they're trying to support increasingly complex types of work. How do you anticipate that the ecosystems ability to be able to map this on to technology is going to impact the role that data movement plays. Let me be a little bit more specific, historically, there were certain rules about how much data could be moved and how much work could be done in a single or a group of transactions. We anticipate that the lost art of data architecture across distances, more complex applications, it's going to become more important, are you being asked by your customers to help them think through, in a global basis, the challenges of data movement, as a set of flows within the enterprise, and not just point to point types of integration? >> I think we're starting to see that. I think it's definitely an evolving aspect of what's going on as, some low level examples that I can share with you on that are, we have some large global customers that have regional SAP environments, they might run one for North America, one for South America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Well they're consolidating them, some of those restrictions have been removed and now they're working on consolidating those regional instances into one global SAP instance. And if they're using that as a catalyst to move to Hana, that's really where you're getting into that realm where you're taking pieces that used to have to be distributed and broken up, and bringing them together, and if you can bring the structured enterprise application data on the SAP side together, now you can start moving towards some of the other aspects of the data like the analytics pieces. >> But you still have to worry about IOT, which is where are we going to process the data? Are we going to bring it back? Are we going to do it locally? You're worrying about sources external to your business, how you're going to move them in so that their intellectual property is controlled, my intellectual property is controlled, there's a lot of work that has to go in to thinking about the role that data movement is going to play within business design. >> Absolutely, and I actually think that that's part of the pieces that need to evolve over the next couple of years, it's kind of like the first time that you were here and heard about Hana, and here we are eight years later, and we understand the vision and the roadmap that that's played. That's happening now too, when you talk to SAP customers, some of them have clearly adopted the Hadoop technology and figured out how to make that work. You've got SAP Vora technology to bring data in and out of Hana from Hadoop, but that stuff is all brand new, we're not talking to a lot of customers that are using those. They're on the roadmap, they're looking at ways to do it, how to do it, but right now it's part of the roadmap. I think what's going to be key for us at Attunity is really helping customers blend that data, that IOT data, that social media stream data, with structured data from SAP. If I can take my customer master out of SAP and have that participate with IOT data, or if I can take my equipment master data out of SAP and combine that with Vlog data, IOT Data, I can start really doing predictive analytics, and if I can do those predictive analytics, with that unstructured data, I can use that to automate features within my enterprise application, so for example, if I know a part's going to fail, between 500 and 1000 hours of use, then I can proactively create maintenance tickets, or service notifications or something, so we can repair the device before it actually breaks. >> So talk about the, for the folks out there who want to kind of know the Attunity story a bit more, take a minute to explain kind of where you fit in, and where you, where SAP hands off to you, and where you fit specifically because big data management, there's are important technologies, but some say, well doesn't SAP have that? So where's the hand off? Where do you guys sister up against these guys the best? How should customers, or potential customers, know when to call you and what not. >> So, I often refer to SAP as a 747 Jumbo Jet right? So it's the big plane, and it's got everything in it. Anything at all, and all that you need to do, you could probably do it somewhere inside of SAP. There's an application for it, there's a platform for it, there's now a database for it, there's everything. So, a lot of customers work only in that realm, but there's a lot of customers that work outside of that too, SAP's an important part of the enterprise landscape, but there's other pieces too. >> People are nibbling at the solution, not fully baked out SAP. >> Right, right. >> You do one App. >> Yeah, and SAP's great at providing tools for example, to load data into Hana, there's a lot of capability to take non-SAP source data and bring it into Hana. But, what if you want to move that data around? What if you wanted to do some things different with it? What if you wanted to move some data out and back in? What if you want to, you know there's just a lot of things you want to be able to do with the data, and if you're all in on the SAP side, and you're all into the Hana platform, and that's what you're doing, you've probably got all the pieces to do that. But if you've got some pieces that are outside of that, and you need it all to play together, that's where Attunity comes in great, because Attunity has that, we're impartial to that, we can take data and move it around wherever, of course SAP is a really important part of our play in what we do, but we need to understand what the customers are doing, and everyday we talk to customers that are always looking, >> Give an example, give it a good example of that, customer that you've worked with, use a case. >> Yeah, let's see, most of my examples are going to be SAP centric, >> That's okay. >> We've got a couple of customers, I don't know if I can mention their names, where they come to us and say, "Hey we've got all this SAP data, and we might have 30 different SAP systems and we need all of that SAP data to pull together for us to be able to analyze it, and then we have non-SAP data that we want to partner with that as well. There might be terra-data, there might be Hadoop, might be some Oracle applications that are external that touch in, and these companies have these complex visions of figuring out how to do it, so when you look at Attunity and what we provide, we've got all these great solutions, we've got the replication technology, we've got the data model on the SAP side to copy the SAP data, we now have the data warehouse automation solution with Compose that keeps finding niche ways to work in, to be highly viable. >> But the main purpose is moving data around within SAP, give or take the Jumbo Jet, or 737. >> Well sometimes you just got to go down to the store and buy a half gallon of milk, right? And you're not going to jump on a Jumbo Jet to go down and get the milk. >> Right. >> You need tooling that makes it easy to get it. >> Got milk, it's the new slogan. Got data. >> Well there you go, the marketing side now. >> Okay so, vibe of the show, what's your take at SAP here, you've been here nine years, you've been looking around the landscape, you guys have been evolving with it, certainly it's exciting now. You're hearing really concrete examples of SAP showing some of the dashboards that McDermott's been showing every year, I remember when the iPad came out, "Oh the iPad's the most amazing thing", of course analytics is pretty obvious. That stuffs now coming to fruition, so there's a lot of growth going on, what's your vibe of the show? You seeing that, can you share any color commentary? Hallway conversations? >> Yeah, Sapphire's, you know, you get everything. You know it's like you said, the half gallon of milk, well we're at the supermarket right now, you need milk, you need eggs, you need flowers, whatever you need is here. >> The cake can be baked, if you have all the ingredients, Steve Job's says "put good frosting on it". (laughs) That's a UX. >> Lots of butter and lots of sugar. But yeah there's so many different focuses here at Sapphire, that it's a very broad show and you have an opportunity, for us it's a great opportunity to work with our partners closer, and it's also a good opportunity to talk to out customers, and certain levels within our customers, CIO's, VIP's. >> They're all together, they're all here. >> Right exactly, and you get to hear what their broader vision is, because every day we're talking to customers, and yeah we're hearing their broader vision, but here we hear more of it in a very confined space, and we get to map that up against our roadmap and see what we're doing and kind of say, yeah we're on the right track, I mean we need to be on the right track in two fronts. First and foremost with our customers, and second of all with SAP. And part of our long term success has been watching SAP and saying "okay, we can see where they're going with this, we can see where they're going with this, and this one they're driving really fast on, we've got to get on this track, you know, Hana. >> So the folks watching that aren't here, any highlights that you'd like to share? >> Wow, well you guys said yourself, Reggie Jackson was here the other night, that was pretty fantastic. I'm a huge baseball fan, go Cubby's, but it was fun to see Reggie Jackson. >> Park Ball, you know you had a share of calamities, I'm a Red Sox's man. >> Yeah you're wounds have been healed though (laughs). >> We've had the Holy Water been thrown from Babe Ruth. It was great that Reggie though was interesting, because we talk about a baseball concept that was about the unwritten rules, we saw Batista get cold-cocked a couple of days ago, and it brought up this whole unwritten rules, and we kind of had a tie in to business, which is the rules are changing, certainly in the business that we're in, and he talked about the unwritten rules of Baseball and at the end he said, "No, they aren't unwritten rules, they're written" And he was hardcore like MLB should not be messing with the game. >> Yeah. >> I mean Batista got fined, I think, what, five games? Was that the key mount? >> Yeah, yup. >> Didn't he get one game, and the guy that punched him got eight. >> That's right, he got it, eight games, that's right. So okay, MLB's putting pressure on them for structuring the game, should we let this stuff go? We came in late, second base, okay, what's your take on that? >> Well I mean as a Baseball fan I love the unwritten rules, I love the fact that the players police the game. >> Well that's what he was talking about, in his mind that's exactly what he was saying. That the rules amongst the players for policing the game are very, very well understood, and if Baseball tries to legislate and take it out of the players hands, it's going to lead to a whole bunch of chaotic behavior, and it's probably right. >> Yeah, and you've already got replay, and what was it, the Met's guy said he misses arguing with the umpires, and the next day he got thrown out (laughs). >> Probably means he wanted to get thrown out, needed a day off. What's going on with Attunity, what's next for you guys? What's next show, what's put on the business,. >> So, show-wise this is one of our most important shows of the year, events of the year, well I'll always be a tech-head, tech-heads are very targeted audience for us, we have a new version of Gold Client that's out a bit later this month, more under the hood stuff, just making things faster, and aligning it better with Hana and things like that, but we're really focused on integrating the solutions at Attunity right now. I mean you look at Attunity and Attunity had grown by acquisition, the RepliWeb acquisition in '11, and the acquisition of my company in 2013, we've added Compose, we've added Visibility, so now we've got this breath of solutions here and we're now knitting them together, and they're really coming together nicely. The Compose product, the data warehouse automation, I mean it's a new concept, but every time we show it to somebody they love it. You can't really point it at a SAP database, cause the data mile's too complex, but for data warehouse's of applications that have simple data models where you just need to do some data warehousing, basic data warehouses, it's phenomenal. And we've even figured out with SAP how we can break down certain aspects of that data, like just the financial data. If we just break down the financial data, can we create some replication and some change data capture there using the replicate technology and then feed it into Compose, provide a simple data warehouse solution that basic users can use. You know, you've got your BW, you've got your business objects and all that, but there's always that lower level, we're always talking to customers where they're still doing stuff like downloading contents of tables into spreadsheets and working with it, so Compose kind of a niche there. The visibility being able to identify what data's being used and what's not used, we're looking at combining that and pointing that at an SAP system and combining that with archiving technology and data retention technologies to figure out how we can tell a customer, alright here's your data retention policies, but here's where you're touching and not touching your data, and how can we move that around and get that out. >> Great stuff Matt, thanks for coming on theCube, appreciate that, if anything else I got to congratulate you on your success and, again, it's early stages and it's just going to get bigger and bigger, you know having that robust platform, and remember, not everyone runs their entire business on SAP, so there's a lot of other data warehouses coming round the corner. >> Yeah that's for sure, and we're well positioned and well aligned to deal with all types of data, me as an SAP guy, I love working with SAP data, but we've got a broader vision, and I think our broader visions really align nicely with what our customers want. >> Inter-operating the data, making it work for you, Got Data's new slogan here on theCube, we're going to coin that, 'Got Milk', 'Got Data'. Thanks to Peter Burris, bringing the magic here on theCube, we are live in Orlando, you're watching theCube. (techno music) >> Voiceover: There'll be millions of people in the near future that will want to be involved in their own personal well-being and wellness.