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

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone we are here in Palo Alto for the special CUBE coverage of Mobile World Congress 2017. In our studio breaking down all the action happening in Barcelona, for the next two days, wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, and our next guest is Michael Foran, who's a product manager at SAP, formerly HANA Cloud, now called SAP Cloud. They renamed it, part of the big news at Mobile World Congress. Michael, thanks for stopping in and sharing your thoughts on SAP Cloud and the impact at Mobile World Congress. >> Thank you for having me. >> So you guys have, we've been following, obviously your Cloud game since the initiative started, the announcement, and then kind of like the slow start, but last Sapphire, SAP Sapphire in Orlando, which we had theCUBE there live, really was the release of the cloud, the announcement of the Apple deal. Now that's going to be the big news here at Mobile World Congress this week is the shipping of that general availability of the iOS developer kit. Once you guys hit the market with the product, it's just been rolling, incrementally getting better. And you changed the name from HANA Cloud to just SAP cloud. I interviewed Dan Lahl earlier about what that means. I don't want to get into that, but it means that SAP's now sassifying all their products. As the project manager, you got to put the roadmap together with the team, so I'm sure you have to balance really two camps, right? You got the SAP installed base which SAP, in my many conferences with Bill McDermott, the CEO, it's you guys run, the biggest businesses are running on SAP. So you have a huge install base. At the same time, the cloud brings Greenfield developers, cloud native, which don't have any SAP in it. So it's the merging of the best of both worlds. That's a product challenge, so I want to get your thoughts. What's the key thing for folks to be aware of at Mobile World Congress this year about the aha moment for SAP cloud? What is that key product feature that bridges the cloud native with the pre-existing SAP? >> Well, that's one of the benefits of having the cloud platform like ours, right John? Because we wanted to support this concept of the bimodal IT because we recognize that a lot of our existing customers really wanted to leverage their existing investments, but at the same time be able to address a lot of the upcoming innovations and being able to address even their change in work force, for example. They want to be able to utilize and adapt, I guess, to a key word that people kind of throw around there as being agile. And being agile means helping the customer be able to adapt efficiently and economically to the changes, whether it's user expectations. I read somewhere like some of the workforce by 2020's going to be 75% millennials, and their expectations of their product experience is going to be much different than what traditional users have been. And at the same time you have a business that you've kept running for a long time and you don't want to just change the way that they've been doing things. You want to have those things there but at the same time bring new innovations. And with the HANA cloud platform, you're going to be given a set of tools and services, as you've probably heard from Dan already, that's going to enable you to do that, bringing new innovations like IoT and machine learning, and so forth. >> And you got the use cases, you got people who actually are building apps, and just last Friday on my Silicon Valley Friday show I interviewed Paul Martino, who had probably one of the best quotes He's also an investor in Bullpen Capital, he does a lot of startup action. But there's been a democratization of entrepreneurship because it's so easy to build apps. Could be a 16 year old in the basement to the dorm room to the old age home where guys my age are building apps. So this is kind of like an app tsunami happening. So that's cool, that's cloud native, great market for that. But then this integration that's really big, because now apps are great by themselves, but if you look at Mobile World Congress, the key theme is 5G and 10, so apps got to start playing well with others. You hear microservices, talk about machine learning, these are now the new tools of the trade to bring that building block approach. Do you guys agree with that, and what are you guys doing specifically to facilitate that seamless integration, the building blocks, is it microservices, is it servantless architecture? Can you share some thoughts on that? >> Yeah, you're absolutely right, and this is where businesses have come. And helping enterprises grow, you mentioned starting with small companies and so forth, but as they grow, what we recognize from customers is that their landscape becomes really heterogeneous. They're trying to integrate best of breed software and so forth, and having a platform like ours that's able to integrate into those things is the perfect utility and the perfect platform for doing that in the essence that we are able to. Let's look at it from the end consumer experience or the end business user. If we do technology right, the technology that's underlying it should be almost invisible. It doesn't matter that they're accessing five, six different systems in order to do their job. With the cloud platform we have a way of being able to integrate all those systems and be able to present it as one experience, one UI, friendly, user-friendly UI and using like, for example, our Fiori user experience and paradigm. >> What's the integration point? Because I think this is something that the developer, developers are fickle, right? I mean, developers are great, but also they wield a lot of power and they're moving to the front lines with their apps, but at the end of the day, the business outcomes are really where the holy grail is. And that's where the developers are getting close to, they're getting close to the outcomes and they're part of that process. So they're out developing, they're slinging their code around, slinging their APIs around, doing all this great stuff with microservices, but sometimes they don't really think about the integration. That's why DevOps was so good. They let the infrastructures be programmable. Some of the times it's not that easy to program integration. Sometimes you have to really understand that. Are we going to have programmable integration playbooks and templates, how is that evolving? Because this seems to be the hot area where, okay, infrastructure is code, I can see that, that's working great, how do you connect down and make it work so that the integration works better? >> Kind of the approach we've kind of taken is that when you're doing integration between systems and so forth, it's best to do it through well-defined APIs, that where there's a decoupling of the system. That way the systems that you're interacting with are not so dependent upon each other. So if one piece changes, the others can still run, as long as that API, or that handshake, if you will, doesn't change. And you brought up a another good point as far as having the developers and business people work in a more collaborative fashion. Because at the end of the day this is what we want to target, we want to enable the business users to be able to have applications that they're comfortable with, that they're able to be efficient with. And the way we're doing that is, we're putting services on top of the platform that's going to allow them to be really, the guys who are actually designing the applications at the end of the day, that they're ones that they're going to be using. Because we in the past have made some bad compromises when you're designing software because you got the business person saying, hey this I want to see and then you got the developer saying, this is actually what I can achieve. But through the platform we offer this service called our build service, which basically allows the business analyst to essentially be the ones who become-- >> They're composing, not necessarily coding. >> Yeah, they're composing, but at the end of that composing, they're able to get that user feedback and go through the rounds of saying, is this the software that I really want to use? And when they're done with that, they're able to pass that along to developers and say, okay, great, I know exactly what you're using it for, now let me be the ones that help you tie into the various systems that perhaps I actually need to integrate with. >> Okay, Michael, tell us the big things that people should pay attention to this week during Mobile World Congress from the cloud. Is it the updates, what are the key news that gets your attention that you want people to look at and take notice of? >> I'm sorry. >> Okay, well, you guy had the, there's been some good proof points You guys had the new capabilities, got the iOS native kit. Is there any machine learning going on in the cloud? Can you share some insights? Because AI is certainly the hype factor right now. But machine learning and IoT, that kind of connects the dots on some of the cool features of what's going on now. >> That's absolutely right, John. In terms of machine learning, here's the thing, once we start integrating all these systems, we have a lot of information that's rolling into the system, essentially. How do you actually make use of that information? Part of it is, we're only human. What we would like to do with the technology is, give you some superpowers with the technology. The technology that we work with is not meant to replace you, but meant to augment what you're able to do. And machine learning's a great vehicle to do that in. This is one of the areas that I think you should be paying attention to. There's going to be a lot of stuff coming out on the platform in terms of services that's meant to aid you, meant to aid the developer and seeing how they can actually do their task a lot better. For example, some of the stuff that's coming to be coming down in the future on top of our platform is, we have this service called the CoPilot, which if you could imagine, it's a digital assistant. So if you're performing a task that you have somebody, have somebody sitting there next to you reminding you perhaps things to be cognizant of. For example, if you're trying to create a purchase requisition or what not and the system already knows that perhaps you're low on budget, these are things you need to be wary of, that's something that you can then act on right away without having to wait for that process of submitting the purchase requisition, getting it back and saying we can't approve this because of budgetary reasons. >> That's the speed of big data. You actually get the software working on new work flows. I want to get your take on, anecdotally speaking, you're the product guy, so you get to see what's going on with the requirements, the roadmaps, this is kind of the keys to the kingdom. I love talking to product guys because I used to be a product guy myself back in the old days. But you got think holistic, you got to look 20 miles down the road and think about those tradeoffs you mentioned earlier. What anecdotal things can you point to from customers that you see that seem to pop out as a trend that you guys are doubling down on? What's the key customer requirements that's the focus? >> Well, a lot of the things that we tend to see from customers these days is a trend actually back towards being able to use standard products. They don't want to do these hypercustomizations on the products themselves because we've seen where it's taken them, and that is -- >> Mean one offs, basically. >> Yeah. One offs and just changes to their system where they're so dependent on the customizations they're afraid to do these upgrades. So it makes them really slow to react and be agile in their business. So this is where having the SAP cloud platform, they're able to keep those things running and then being able to do the new innovations. It's really, from the customer's perspective, they're really asking us to-- >> Scale. >> Be able to scale. >> Is it scalability? >> It is scale. >> Okay, so scale seems to be. So talk about the Google Next coming up. I know you guy got announcements. I'm trying to get the news, although it's under a lot of confidentiality. You got Google, you got Amazon, you got Microsoft out there. Oracle has a cloud. I mean, we're living in a multi-cloud world. And it's pretty clear from our reporting and our analysis, Amazon is obviously doing very well, but it's not going to be a winner take all. Customers want to have multicloud. How do you guys view that conceptually and philosophically from the customer standpoint? >> The SAP cloud platform is a very open platform. We recognize this from the customer's perspective as well as that they don't want to be tied into any one vendor, they want to be able to do what they need to do without being tied to any specific one, and certainly with SAP cloud platform we're adopting that. You've heard of the announcements of the availability of us using Cloud Foundry on top of our platform as well and being able to bring in those Community Source and Open Source type products into the platform. And that also leverages existing investments from the customer's developer workforce. >> So you guys are open cloud, basically. You support open all the way. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, my final question for you, what's the most exciting thing that gets you jazzed up about the SAP cloud? >> I think the most exciting thing about my work and being able to do this stuff is really enabling and empowering people to do their jobs more efficiently. Because at the end of the day, none of us are really the people that want to just be administrators. And some of the applications, some of the things that we do make us administrators versus being a recruiter versus being an interviewer or whatnot. And we want to make software that really fits your needs and really helps you be what you're supposed to be doing and not an administrator. >> The best software is invisible, as I always say. Making it happen, Michael, thanks so much for spending the time here in theCUBE, appreciate it. You're watching two days of wall-to-wall coverage of theCUBE, covering Barcelona, Spain, covering Mobile World Congress 2017 from Palo Alto, analyzing and opining on all the news and commentary. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We have two guests for this segment. We have Tauni Crefeld. She is the Managing Director, communications, media and high-tech at Accenture. And Adam Burden, Chief Software Engineer at Accenture. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Happy to be here. >> So we are talking today about the future of platforms and Adam, I'm going to start with you to just sort of give our viewers a lay of the land here. It's been a few years since platform development really hit the scene. >> Sure. So it's been an interesting space for us as well. When I talk about what's happening in this area, I like to break it up into the how, the now and the wow. And the how is really what is created or enabled by these platforms. It really is extracting away the complexity. This plumbing and difficult parts of building software bespoke and systems. And it's making that complexity sort of disappear so that the real effort is expended upon building systems and enabling business value. And when we talk about how that has changed the way that we look at systems integration and development, it's actually enabling this thing that we call the renaissance of custom to a degree. And that is really kind of the how. And in the now side of this, it's interesting. When we first started tracking this space, these platform areas, I want to say it was close to eight years ago, we actually called it the Helen of Troy effect. Right? So we had the face that launched 1,000 ships. There literally were 1,000 platforms out there floating around in the ocean and some of them had a lot of sailors on it. And a few of them were just dinghies but. Now what we're seeing happen is this consolidation of platforms and it's taken a couple of different forms. Sometimes you got something like one of these really popular open source platforms like Cloud Foundry. And it's actually becoming sort of an OEM product inside of a lot of other platforms. So you see Cloud Foundry now inside of things like SAP Cloud Platform, for example. So it's popping up in surprising places. Plus you can also use the community version. But that consolidation is now sort of channeling down the number of platform options, environments that are available to build things on top of. So that's a very interesting development that's happening right now. And the wow is what's happening, you know, tomorrow. And I tell you, I see some remarkable things on the horizon. Working with our ecosystem partners, that really will change the way that clients, business, the enterprises, especially the ones that have ambitions to be the high performers of tomorrow, how they're going to enable business applications and systems for their customers. And when you talk about things like low-code and no-code platforms, imagine a scenario where you can talk to an intelligent agent and describe the system that you want to build and the scaffolding for that is created for you. So really remarkable advances and leaps forward coming ahead in the platform space and when I think about the how and how we've gotten here. The now and the wow. It's just an exciting time to be working in this area. >> So what are some of the primary benefits? As you said, you're talking to clients who want to become the high performers of tomorrow. What kind of successes are you seeing? >> So I would really group that into probably two things, Rebecca. I think the first one is around agility. One of the things I like to say is that the pace of technology change will never be as slow again as it is today. And it's sort of a daunting thing. >> Which is mind boggling in itself. >> It is. It's kind of daunting. And being here at AWS re:Invent, we're about to be bombarded with an unprecedented number of new product and capability announcements over the next couple of days. It's hard to absorb all of these things. And hard to be able to take advantage of them and for our businesses and our clients who we work with, they are looking for agility. And that's one of the key benefits that you get out of being on one of these or a part of one of these platforms. It allows them to be more responsive to the market and they can do it in a way which is really enabling them to deliver solutions faster and better than ever before. And think about the competitive threats that they're facing, right? With cloud technologies, like AWS, we really, we've democratized a lot of compute like never before. So because of that, it's a lot easier for a start up or even a company in an adjacent industry to come in and say, I'm going to start doing things in this space. I'm going to sell roofing products and I'm a car manufacturer, for example. And when you have things like that happening and it's so easy for competitors to get in and be disruptive, it's really important to business that you can move quickly. And these platforms enable just that. So agility is clearly one of them. And then the other one is around innovation. If you think about how hard it would be for my colleague here, Tauni and I if we were going to build a new customer service system that had natural language processing and a virtual agent technology in it and we were going to try and build this in our own data center, right? Stand up the infrastructure. Set up all the services. Be able to do this. Train the models ourselves. We're talking about something that could takes months or years even, just to get to the point where we're ready to start building. Yet, today, with a lot of these platforms you don't have to do any of that. You can start tomorrow and it's all as a service. It's on tap, it's on demand. And if you're going to be one of these high performers of tomorrow, using it as an innovation platform is absolutely a key component of the success of the future for that business, no doubt. >> Tauni, I want to bring you in here a little bit to the conversation. So talk to me about a specific example of a platform that Accenture has been working on. >> So I'd like to highlight OpenAP. It's just a great example of what Adam was talking about where it was a consortium of media giants that came together to build a new platform really to disrupt the broadcast TV industry and find a way of doing targeted advertising more effectively. So broadcast TV is usually done based on gender and age demographics, that's it. They wanted to find a way of really being more specific. Targeting veterans or people who want to buy trucks or whatever. And they did this by wanting to create a cloud platform that would become the marketplace between agencies and the broadcasters. You know, but because it's a consortium, there's no infrastructure, there's no starting point. It was from thin air, from scratch and they, because of the broadcast industry timelines, they wanted to do the entire, from idea to launch, in five months. And we couldn't have done that if, to Adam's point, we had to create, you know, put in servers and all that stuff. We were able to do all of that because we were able to leverage AWS as a baseline and get started with the development almost immediately. >> So talk a little bit more about this OpenAP. So it's a consortium of media companies and sort of looking at their digital competitors, with a little bit of envy here of wow, you can slice and dice your target customers so finely and you know exactly who they are, what they want to buy, what their consumer proclivities are. And they wanted to be able to do the same. >> Right. Yeah, so there's a lot of analytics that they wanted to leverage and do it in a way that there was a standard across the different media companies cause they realized that the biggest threat was coming from digital not from each other. So they kind of got together and said, hey let's find a way of doing this more frictionless. Make it more seamless. We can have a lot of the data and analytics behind it so that you could target, like I said, you know veterans or whatever. And by doing so, they're able to create that marketplace. But to do that, we had to really make it easy to use. We had to build custom UI's. Back to exactly, the Renaissance of custom. There's nothing out there in the marketplace that would do this. They were the first ones in there to really disrupt the marketplace. So it was custom UI's. API's. The whole set of capabilities that needed to be done for the consortium. >> So Adam, in terms of these platform services, talk a little bit about what you have learned so far and sort of the best practices that have emerged. The nuggets of wisdom. >> Well, thanks Rebecca. I love it when people ask me that question because then-- (Rebecca laughs) I have two things that I think are really important to keep in mind with that. One of them is that if you're building green field applications, right? It's actually time to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And it's a bit hard sometimes cause there's a lot of inertia in enterprises about how you do things and how things have been done. And a lot of times they can be quite conservative too, about their approaches. So for example, if you're going to use a platform but what you're going to do on that platform is you're going to stay using waterfall development techniques you're going to have releases every three or six months or something. That's just not going to meet your businesses expectations anymore. It goes back to what I was saying a few minutes ago about the speed of change in technology. It's just not going to keep up with what potentially competitors are going to do. So, you have to throw of a lot of that baggage that you've carried with you for a long time. A great example I like to talk about in this space is actually site reliability engineering. This is a pattern for solving architecture problems that it really has become quite popular in the last couple of years and what it allows you to do is to release software a lot faster, but you have more circuit breakers inside of your applications that allow it to gracefully degrade if there's some sort of defect or problem that happens so that your customer's, your business partners, your employees, they don't see an outage. What they see is a slightly degraded service. They don't get something where it say's "404: site not available" they get a slightly degraded service. And if you follow those patterns well, you can deliver software a lot faster with higher degrees of quality but you have the comfort and assurance that it's going to do that. That actually helps you get over some of the cultural barriers as well. >> Well those cultural barriers, and I'm interested in your experience at OpenAP, too. What you just described is exactly right. Is that there is this inertia. There is this, enterprises, we've been doing things our way for a long time and they're not broke. So, can you talk about the challenges of having to overcome that? >> Yeah You know, with the consortium, we had a little bit of an advantage in that it was pure green field and the consortium was very specific about the first pain points they wanted to focus on and really wanted to build it as an MVP, you know minimum viable product, not trying to do everything at once and that was really key to us. So once we really knew what they wanted to do we put in all of the DevSecOps, agile practices so that we could move fast. We did automated testing and test harnesses and built in the security, the scalability, the performance from the beginning so that we weren't halfway down the road and then had to try to bolt that stuff in later. And we really all had a vision of what we needed to get to and we were able to leverage all of the modern technology practices to get there. I'm not going to say it wasn't hard. Five months was kind of crazy especially because it had to be ready to launch and go live. And in fact we had a beta day which was industry experts coming to test it hands on demo at Paramount Studies in California. Like no pressure, 4 months after we started. And it was awesome. But it was because we had the vision and then we had all the new tooling and the technologies and the ability to build in some of that stuff from the beginning. Which I think in a green field scenario really helped us. >> Adam, final word in terms of next years AWS Executive Summit, what are we going to talk about? We're already talking about the future platforms, what is going to be next years buzz? >> So the thing, next years buzz. I really think that there's going to be this momentum towards something called go native. And this is going to be, so there's a lot of enterprises that are taking advantage of clouds today but they're using it as compute storage and power and the real value for them is going to be unlocked by taking advantage of the native services that are there. And when we think about things that AWS re:Invent has announced in the last couple of years and I'm sure it's going to come up this year. Think about things like Lambda and Aurora and others. These are native cloud services that taking advantage of those and not just sort of bringing the other components of your older architecture with you. That will really unleash a new era of innovation for your company. You'll be able to do things faster and better. And you'll have even better outcomes for your clients, your customers and business partners than you would otherwise. So, go native. >> Go native, okay! You heard it here first folks. Adam, Tauni, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great talking to you. I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

(lively electronic music) >> Announcer: It's The Cube! Covering Sapphire Now 2017. Brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone, to our special Sapphire Now 2017 coverage from our studio, I want to thank SAP Cloud Platform and SAP Enterprise Cloud for sponsoring our three day coverage, to allow us to go and do some original content. Also, we have Google IO going on, some coverage there, we'll get some of those segments on also, other events going on all around tech. Wanted to bring in to this studio session for discussion is Bill Norton, a CUBE alumni, the chief scientist at Console Connect, also known as Dr. Peering, a real expert in networking, and how networks are built and how they run and the impact of how packets move around the network, and of course, networks are being abstracted away to software and of course, no better person to talk about software-defined networking, the changes in the network landscape, and more importantly, the security implications. Bill Norton, here inside our CUBE conversation, it's good to see you again. >> Great to see you, John. >> So, you've got a couple whitepapers, I wanted to call you on twofold. One: a lot of CIF going up the network, okay, as much as people are moving up the stack as fast as they can, the network still has got a lot of action going on. Software-defined, scaling issues, now security issues, still an important part, you've still got to move packet from point A to point B. Now things in the cloud have certainly escalated the conversation. >> Absolutely. >> John: Your thoughts. >> We're at a crossroads right now. We have two forces that are colliding. The first is increased dependence on the cloud, as more companies are using cloud for business-critical activities, as in, you can't take orders if you can't access your Salesforce.com service, or maybe you have cooperating colleagues in different parts of the planet, that are using a shared storage system, right, and they can't cooperate, they can't do their thing unless they can get access to that infrastructure, so there's great dependence on these cloud-based applications, which is clashing with the continued vulnerabilities of the public internet. >> So the internet's at stress, it's like changing the airplane engine out at 35,000 feet. A lot of stuff's going on. What's the bottom line? What are the core issues right now that people are facing? Is it just availability, or is it just bad packet movement, bad network design? What's the core issue right now facing the stress on the internet? >> You know, it's funny, I work with customers all the time, in my daily job, and the number one reason that they come to Console Connect is for security reasons. It's so funny that every single time it's security reasons. They want to be directly connected to those business-critical or mission-critical applications, and the reason is clear: if you're directly connected, the shortest path between two points is a straight line, right, so you get better performance and better reliability. >> Unless the backhoe hits the link and then you're dead, anyway, that's physical connection. So before we get further, I want you to take a minute to explain Console Connect, 'cause I just want to get that out of the way so we can set the context >> Sure >> for the conversation. >> What do you guys do? >> I know what you do, but share with the audience what you do. >> Yeah. Console Connect is a cloud interconnection company. We believe that what the internet needs is to have the ability to directly connect to mission-critical destinations, whether that be a storage service, or an infrastructure-as-a-service company, maybe it's a particular SaaS application. If you depend on it, if it's business-critical (and when I say business-critical, what I mean is, if it's down for a couple of hours and you can't access it, then your business is adversely impacted, so that's what I call business-critical.) If it's business-critical, you ought to be directly connected because you can mitigate against the concern of not being able to access that particular service. >> Alright, so now you have also two things that you've brought as props, whitepapers. >> (laughter) Yeah. >> Let me just see those for a second. >> What's the first one? >> This one is called 'Cloud Connections' and this is a paper I did when I started initially doing some research on how cloud systems work. This is a comparison between the interconnection regimes of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, and what I found in the research is that these interconnection mechanisms are completely different from one another. It's so interesting that they not only chose different names for all of their services, but in the case of interconnection for direct connections, they also chose a different model for interconnecting. So for example, Amazon Web Services has what's called Direct Connect, and I talk about how that's set up, and both a single and a redundant path to access into your AWS resources. But if you look at Google Cloud's interconnection (they call it Google Cloud Interconnect) and that's really a peering with propagation, it's kind of like peering with somebody, while leaking those routes to the other sides. >> John: Yeah. >> So the Google Cloud Interconnect partner is the one who's propagating that, essentially P2P peering across the infrastructure. And Azure's completely different. Azure decided they wanted to have two bundles of three-tuple peering relationships. One for private resources you can't access over the internet, one for public, which you can access over the internet, and one for Microsoft services. So I laid all this out >> And they call that ExpressRoute connectivity provider? >> That's right. >> I think that's the word you used here. Alright, so let's bottom line, we now have four, well okay, three major horses on the track. Is there any other ones in the air? >> Oh yeah. >> Or shall we just look at the three ones you did? >> I chose those three because AWS, according to Gartner is, whatever, 14 times larger than the next 10 competitors combined, so that's an obvious one to put in there. But Google Cloud and Azure are making strong >> And they have good tech and they've just had their event, too. I did watch that network diagram, Amazon does share a lot. James Hamilton shared a lot of information at re:Invent. Look, he's so popular the phones are ringing. Do you want to grab that? >> No, that's okay (laughter) >> You sure? Is your wife calling? >> Probably, yeah (laughter) >> Alright, so bottom line here is with the horses on the track, three horses, Amazon, Google, Azure, who's better? >> You know, they're just different, they're just different. >> Come on, pick one. >> I think it's really >> Pick one, if you had to bet your life on one which would it be? >> It depends what resources do you need to get access to, it really does. >> Maslow's hierarchy of needs, go. Google, Amazon or Azure. >> I would observe this, I'll get in trouble for saying this but I would observe that AWS seems to appeal to the broad IT crowd. If you're an engineer, you're like me, you like to hack code, you might want to play around with the Google Cloud platform 'cause that's pretty neat. It was designed by engineers so you can see what their mindset was when they designed it. >> Yeah, and YouTube is not a small operation. >> Oh no, no, not at all. >> I mean it moves a lot of traffic. >> Yeah. >> So then, Google knows their traffic game. >> Oh yeah, and of course, massive scale for all these guys. But I also like Azure for .NET types of activities, and of course you can do any workload on any one of these. >> So what you're saying is, some run great on the dry days, some 1k and the horses run good on the rainy days, so different horses, different courses, strengths, >> Bill: Yeah. >> John: weaknesses. As Steve Awodney says, horses for courses. >> You know what the really interesting thing is, is when you can connect those together. We just announced over at the ITW conference our CloudNexus product that we couldn't be more excited about. >> Explain that, what does it do? >> Yeah, it's a mechanism for you to take your availability zones or your regions in one cloud and be able to send traffic through the CloudNexus to get access in to another cloud or another region or another availability zone, and do so without having to go all the way back to your corporate datacenter to exchange that traffic. >> Got it. So basically not a lot of latency. >> Not a lot of latency, it's going to be direct, it's not going to be intermixed with other traffic, it's a internet bypass just like our (mumbles) >> Okay, what's that other paper you have here, let's talk about that one. >> Yeah, just real quickly, this one's called 'The Emerging Private Internet'. >> Okay, how to build your own private business ecosystem for business-critical... and by the way you're the author of both of these, so I'm just going to hold it up there. True private cloud marketshare is going to be in the billions of dollars, Wikibon just put out a study on that. >> Yeah. >> So, hybrid and private clouds are still going to be there heavily with duty, so the notion of private is going to be around. >> Yeah. >> What's this paper find? >> This is a little bit different, this is in response to the denial attack of April 21st or 22nd, I forgot which it is. When that attack happened, that took down dozens of very popular websites that depended on that DNS service. >> Yeah. >> And talking with a lot of the folks that were affected, they recognize that in order to not have that problem happen in the future, they're going to have to have direct connections to those mission-critical destinations, so no matter what happens in the public internet, their critical interconnections and their critical data paths are still solid and robust. So this is the private side of the internet, where you tie down, you essentially lock in connectivity to those mission-critical destinations and the public site is still where you deliver your traffic out to all those who can really get access. >> After a while, yeah, access to all the routes that can be manipulated and or policy-based manipulation as well. >> Yeah, so this is a little bit of a trend now that we're seeing, as companies are migrating over to this new platform. >> I mean, it's like a whole new virtual roadway's got to be reconstructed. I'm a lot fascinated with what... you know, you like to geek out on wide area network stuff, in the past we have. But to me, I think that whole WAN, wide area network concepts from origination to final destination on the packets path is really complicated with cloud, and now we have multi-cloud. >> Bill: Yeah. >> How do you see the routes and the maps and all the naming, all the addressing evolving to support the capacity? >> It's an interesting question. I don't think my crystal ball is any better than yours is. >> John: Well you've got two good papers here. >> I do think we're migrating towards two halves of the internet, the public internet which everyone knows and loves, and gives you great connectivity globally, but that traffic that is attacking somebody else is traversing the same routers and links that your traffic depends on, so I think we're going to see >> I want a secure route that's highly patrolled, and without bad guys. >> And it's solid, and it's robust, the traffic is not intermingled with others, so your traffic is not impacted by the traffic of others. >> Console Connect is your company, had a couple name changes but you guys have grown really fast, you do have a great team by the way, but you're just going, doing your business and it's successful, I've got to ask you what's the main reason why people come to you guys besides your awesome technical knowledge and ability to write great whitepapers and be Dr. Peering, well-known in the industry. Seriously, why are people coming to you right now? Is it because of the alternative? What's the main reason? >> The main reason, as I said before, is security, the fact that any traffic that's being used to DDoS against somebody else is traversing the same routers and links that you depend on. So your traffic, fundamentally in the public internet, is intermingled with other people's traffic, and therefore your traffic can be impacted by other people's traffic. For the mission-critical traffic, you want to have that go across no intermingling elements, so you'd like to have that be directly connected. So security is the number one. Number two and number three kind of go back and forth, it's either better performance or better reliability depending on what issues that particular customer is facing. >> Alright, Bill Norton, chief scientist, Console Connect here inside theCUBE for special coverage of SAP Sapphire 2017. Thanks for watching and stay with us for more after the short break. 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>> Narrator: It's the Cube. Covering Sapphire Now 2017. Brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform. And HANA Enterprise Cloud. (electronic music) >> Welcome to the Cube everyone. We're here for the special exclusive Sapphire Now 2017 coverage from Palo Alto studio. I'm John Furrier, three days of Sapphire coverage. Our next guest is Jason Kotsaftis who's with Senior Director Database Solutions at EMC. Who came in here in Palo Alto. You guys have some news down there, full team down there. I know, normally we cover SAP, it's our first year we're doing it from our studio. But EMC's always been on the cube. You guys had a great relationship with SAP. I think our first year we've done the cube in 2010. >> Jason: That's right, yes, I remember. >> You were that SAP Sapphire. >> You guys were. You were on the Cube. You've been with us for awhile, but the relationship with an SAP, and EMC, now Dell EMC, it's pretty significant. What's the big news you guys have going on? >> Yeah, I mean, it's a huge relationship for us. We've been, even before we were merged with Dell, one of our top partnerships. Now it's even bigger. We've been amazed at how much Dell had been doing with SAP, and we're bringing the best of the two companies together right now. So, yeah, we have a huge presence at Sapphire as you mentioned. We saw Michael Dell do a brief speech at the show, and I thought that really helped set the stage for, not just Dell and EMC with SAP, but even some of the words he said were a good microcosm of Dell and EMC talking about the importance of bringing together people and processes. And we're going through that right now, and we're we're going through how we're going to merge the portfolio to go after Cloud, go after HANA, internet of things, data center transformation, all of those major things. >> Well surely SAP, the theme is Cloud, Multi-Cloud is a big message. >> SAP Cloud platform, we had Dan Lahl on the Cube. We also interviewed the HANA Enterprise Cloud group there also, got a huge alliance with Amazon Web Service, Terry Wise, there. We all saw Century Link. So you start to see the industry formation going on. The fog is lifting, you're starting to get some clear visibility on swim lanes, tactics, we'll help people with settling in. Whatever metaphor you want to use, people are finding it. Dell EMC is just absolutely just a monster now. I mean that in a good way, I don't mean that in a bad way. But it's so big. EMC was already very powerful, and winning in the storage business. Great enterprise jobs, the sales force, the culture, really well, great culture as you know, we know them. Dell has been lean and mean, like a speed boat. Great with channels, great with operations, very lean and efficient. EMC, the direct selling, you bring them together and now the supplier relationships are changed. I was talking with your team. Dell brings to the table deep Microsoft Intel relations. Not that you guys didn't have them, but they have deep relationships. >> Correct. >> You guys bring deep relationships. How has that new culture dealings changed your relationship? And specifically, what's the impact to SAP? >> Sure, you know, great question. First of all, it's been very complimentary. And we felt that going into the merger. I've been at EMC for 21 years right. So I had worked with Dell 10-15 years ago. Very, very complimentary, and you nailed it. They're very good at one segment of the market historically, we're very good at another. You know, for the most part I think it's been a really, really good matching, made sense from merger perspective. If we think about SAP for a second, one of the first things that we've been bringing together is, we have two very complimentary HANA portfolios. So, HANA is obviously a huge focus for SAP customers. I was just at Dell EMC world last week, every single customer that I talked to, whether they were running Oracle or Microsoft, they're all asking about HANA. We had a great focus at EMC with our enterprise HANA systems. And at Dell they have a very good packaged appliances and Scale Up bundles. And right now we feel like we can address the whole breath of what people may want to do with HANA. Whether it's, TDI, Scale Up, Scale Out. Very, very strong and >> John: Where does HANA fit in, because I want you to just take a minute to explain this, because it used to be a blanket word, even when they were kind of getting it out early. It was great marketing from the beginning, You know, it has legacy to it, but as the market changed, HANA changed. And as SAP changed, they changed from their positioning. Specifically, they used to call it HANA Cloud Platform. And they have HANA Enterprise Cloud. Now they've renamed it to SAP Cloud Platform, which is the platform as a service, the cloud native stuff. And then HANA Enterprise Cloud, which is really the managed service. So from your perspective, how do you define what HANA is today. And where is is settling in? Is it just the core engine of SAP? But how's it relate to all these new things? >> Yeah, for us it's really a platform. So if we think about where HANA began when we started working with SAP, it was all about analytics. Collecting data, analyzing data, making better business decisions. Now with S4 on the horizon, and the inevitable cut over to that from all the other enterprise applications of SAP, we really view it as a platform. And it's going to have big implications. If we look at our own SAP install base at EMC, there's a lot of customers that run Oracle underneath their SAP apps. So it's part of the HANA transformation, where we're going to be getting them, hopefully, on the road to, not just take advantage of HANA today, but as they go forward how are they going to get ready for S4 and have, hopefully, a smooth migration path to that. >> Obviously their cloud platform, I mean, their cloud strategy, or cloud direction. I don't know if you can have a cloud strategy. As Michael Dell said, Clouds like the internet, it's everything. >> Jason: Right. >> So, there's no real strategy, it's just the way life is. They're going to be on premise and off premise. And they're clearly targeting multiple Clouds, unlike say Oracle, for instance. But neither here nor there. The point is, is that on premise there's still going to be a 10 year plus journey, nothing's going to be disappearing over night. So the on prem Cloud dynamic is interesting, cuz they used the word mission critical. That was a big buzz word with when I talked to Michael Dell, He banged home mission critical. A lot of the teams in Dell EMC World last week was around mission critical work loads and choice. So you guys have that same mojo going on with SAP, how is that translating for you guys? Big new business, new opportunities? >> Great question. So one of the big things that we've acquired and focused on in the SAP space was Virtustream. So they've been a really big off premise cloud provider for us, but at the same time, when you look at what we've been building at EMC even before that we had our own enterprise hybrid cloud offering. One of the things that we're talking about this week at Sapphire is actually bringing those two together. So we can have people have an off premise and an on premise experience, a single view of their data, a uniform way to manage SAP in the cloud, and to the point of mission critical like you said is, as much as we see people moving to the cloud, there are still people that want to have for certain production systems they want to control that. They don't want to give it off to the cloud yet. They may not want to control the hardware but they certainly want to control the data. And with this new relationship that we're blending in the EHC and Virtustream we can actually allow them to have that choice to your point. >> John: What's EHC? >> The EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. So that's our own self service automation of software framework that we put around the cloud. >> Which cloud, your cloud or other people's cloud? >> Right now it's our cloud offering. >> So you have a public cloud. >> We have a cloud offering that's a hybrid cloud offering. That you can deploy on premise or off premise, and Virtustream has been historically used off premise. >> So you use Virtustream as your off premise component of that piece? >> Correct. >> That makes sense. Cuz you bought them in January, I get that. >> That's right, and we had to bring the two together, and that's been a big new step for us. In that regard we think it's very, very complementary for SAP, that's one option we provide, right. We also work through SAP's own offerings to make sure we give them the right and the best infrastructure behind what they're trying to do with their own cloud. I was at a large partner of ours recently, OpenText, and we were talking about content archive, all the things that they do there, they're very deep in the SAP cloud, so we're working with them to start to potentially build the right archiving and capabilities behind that. >> So what's the big news for SAP this year, obviously we saw the coverage, we got some folks calling in, we had some folks down on the floor giving us some input, but from an SAP EMC, Dell, now Dell EMC relationship, what's the big news, what's the big story for you guys? What are you leading with, what's the announcements, be specific. >> The big news is we're all about the cloud. The bringing together of the on premise and off premise EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Virtustream, giving them that uniform way to consume SAP in a cloud based model, whether it be on premise or off premise, that is absolutely our biggest new highlight. >> You guys released that was a hard news that went out for you guys or... >> Yeah it was part of an EHC evolution story that we brought out, the other things that we have that are not necessarily formally announced but are more things that help the day to day administration of SAP applications, we often forget about that. We're pushing people to the cloud and we all talk about cloud. >> So there's no big splash in the pool like, hey we're releasing a new VxRail version of whatever, it's momentum specific. >> Correct. >> What are the big momentum's you plan, you can look back now and we've seen a lot of the evolution, we've seen the relationship with SAP grow, we've seen the converge infrastructure movement, now going to a whole nother level, hybrid cloud and converge infrastructure is happening. What's the new wave that you guys are riding with SAP together besides the cloud, it's generically cloud. What's specifically, can the customer pinpoint that you guys have solved? >> I think you just touched upon it, it's the whole build versus buy model. So historically if you look at where the SAP customers spend the most of their money, it's the op ex. It's the operational expense of administering and maintaining the SAP landscapes. >> You mean like total cost of ownership stuff, just like, easing some of the pain between deployment and costing. >> Workflow automation, copy clone refresh, backup recovery, performance automation, disaster recovery, all the things that you got to do to keep the SAP applications generating value to the business is heavy operational cost to them. That holds them back from doing innovation and investments. >> Those are the details you got to get down and dirty on. >> Yeah. We've done some great studies with you guys on this, one of the things that, there's different ways to go about tackling that. One of the ways that we believe is good is to simplify what you can. And so one way to do that is, well from an infrastructure perspective, you should have the ability to basically buy the infrastructure as an outcome, not have to build all the components and get it together. >> All the provisioning pain that goes with it. >> Yeah, and so when we were just EMC, we had one choice. We had what was called a Vblock, and then we build VxRacks and VxRails. >> Vblock was so successful, it really was, you did a good job of that. >> Yeah, a lot of customers from the SAP. Now that we're Dell though, we have the PowerEdge family, and we've been bringing that in to not only Racks and Rails, but looking at that in terms of building what we call Ready Bundles, where we can actually deliver as a single... >> Think about this ready solution, because the thing that got me at Dell EMC World was two things. The purpose built mission continued, I mean that in a good way. And two, the disruption of data backup protection and backup with the cloud. With the cloud as a new disruptor. For some reason backup and recoveries, clearly different in the cloud than it is on prem. So we've seen a lot of action in there too. Those are the two ready areas, and then also, dynamic changes going on with backup and recovery. >> Yeah, ready solutions was a huge thing, and this is part of the merger we rebranded our solutions organizations into one. Our whole, as the name implies, the whole goal is to deliver a ready infrastructure to the customer that they can just deploy, so they can focus on their applications and their business and not worry about the server, the network, the storage, which ones do I put together for what reason. We want to give them that menu of choice, whether it's a single node, a bundle of components, or an actual system, and deploy that in any way they want. >> What can we expect from Dell EMC, from your team VZB, with respect to SAP? Next couple months, next year, what's the plans, what's the continued momentum playbook? >> Some things that you'll be seeing more of if you go to the Dell blueprints page where we have all our solutions. You'll be seeing some new and refreshed offerings around HANA, you'll be seeing some new things around SAP landscapes, and you'll be seeing much more formal communication around the cloud offering I talked about. >> And cloud seems to be, again, cloud is taking it outside the four walls, which is different, great capabilities, people going in analytics, putting a lot of analytics in the cloud. So seeing that being the first wave beyond dev tests. Dev tests, even though Oracle says dev tests is really going to be around for a long, long time, people are already moving to analytics in the cloud. That's interesting for instrumenting for backup and recovery, what's possible. Quick thoughts on the changes there, in the landscape between the old way of thinking about backup and recovery, and by the way you guys have some of the best solutions out there that will data domain, scratch record goes to history, but now it goes to the cloud. What's the tricky parts that you guys are watching? >> Well I think on the one hand there'll be people that want to worry about their mission critical, like you said we have great integrated offerings to the workload, so you can have a backup team handle it or you can have your workload team handle it, it's really up to you. As people go into the cloud I think they have to decide, what's the tiering strategy they want to approach that, what's the retention data strategies that they need, how's that going to, >> Where the hell is the data going? >> Where's the data going, is it safe and secure, and how does that relate to how they're protecting their on premise data. I mean from our perspective, and back to the SAP example of where we have this uniform cloud approach, we have the backup capabilities built into that. Whether it's long term data retention, short term backup and recovery, yep. >> Question for you, this is a test, a real time cube test. I'm sure you'll pass with flying colors. What is the most, what are the biggest two waves that the customers should be surfing in the enterprise, top two most important waves? >> I think one of them we've already talked about, which is certainly cloud. I think if you look at the whole digital transformation, which I know is related to cloud, but the whole digital transformation wave I think is separate from that. So if you look at big data and analytics and machine data, every customer, whether it's a traditional RDBMS environment or what have you, they're all looking at how to harness that data. I think when you get into that and look at all the data in your data center that you may not be using today, you may not have been trying to take advantage of, with technologies like Splunk and other things that are out there to help you do that, that's a great thing to look at. We're seeing heavy.. >> So data basically, cloud and data are the two big waves. >> Yeah, digital transformation of data and taking advantage of that data. >> Well they go hand in hand, cuz you got the scale of the cloud for compute and other things, data drives the digital chest of digitalized data, digital assets are data, right, everything's data. So you would agree, cloud and data, two big waves. >> Yes. >> Jason, thanks so much for coming on the Cube special coverage and final comment, I'll give you the last word on SAP Sapphire, I know you got a relationship, you're probably going to be like oh yeah, SAP, everything's great. Be straight, what's going on with SAP. What's the outlook for SAP from your perspective. >> I think there's a great opportunity to your point, but there's also a good challenge, cuz we're going through a merger. I think we're making great progress to bring the two portfolios together, and SAP's being a great partner helping working with us. >> And you're cool with them now, you guys feel good about SAP. >> We feel great about them, we use them in our own environment at Dell as Michael talked about, to run our own business. So it's a great relationship >> Jeremy's been a remote telecast performer at EMC World. >> As you know, these partnerships in the industry go up and down, we talked a little bit about Oracle over the years, that's fluctuated. >> I was dating myself the other day on a Cube gig, and I said, oh it's a Barney deal, which my language was, you know, no real deal, cuz Barney was a character that kids watched, my kids watched, you know, I love you, you love me, it's kind of a love fest, but nothing happens. It's called a Barney deal. I need a new meme now because most of the people in the industry don't know who Barney is. >> Oh I remember, we used to joke about him when I was in alliances, we called them Barney meetings. You got a good meeting with a partner, you'd all talk and nothing would happen. >> You guys do not have a Barney deal with SAP, it's pretty deep across the board, SAP has good relationships, I got to say, they tend to do really, really good. They're either in or they're not, it's pretty obvious. Thank you Jason, so much. Jason Kotsaftis, who's the senior director of the database solutions group with Dell EMC joining us for a special three day coverage of Sapphire now from our studio. Great week, we had Informatica World in San Francisco, Google IO going on today as well, we've got live coverage today with Rob Hove, also VeeamOn is in New Orleans, Dave Vellante is there, and I'm in SAP Sapphire. A lot of coverage for events for the Cube, stay with us more for live coverage after this short break. (techno music)

(techno music) >> Announcer: It's the Cube, covering Sapphire Now 2017, brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform, and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Hey, welcome back to our exclusive SAP coverage here in our studio in Palo Alto, our 4,500 square foot studio. I'm John Furrier. Our three days, we're on third day, of Sapphire Now 2017 coverage. I'm on the phone with RJ Bibby, who's the SAP Global Alliance Manager for SAP. Handles the relationship. RJ, great to have you on the phone and thanks for calling in from Orlando, really appreciate it. >> RJ: You bet, John. Love the Cube. Love SiliconANGLE. We're great partners. It's been a great week and looking forward to talking to you about it. >> Tell us what's going on on the ground. First, give us the updates on day three. So, pretty much everyone's coming-- And always a great activities at night as well. So, SAP, a lot of business done during the day. They work hard. They play hard. But, day three, what's it like? What's settling in as the storylines for Sapphire 2017? >> RJ: Yeah, absolutely. So, you're starting to feel-- You've gone through about-- We're in our third tour. For the partner's community, we're in day four, cause we had the partner day. Last night was the big partner night. We actually NetApped with our partners with Cisco and KPIT did a private event at Universal Studios at the Jimmy Fallon Theme Park that was highly successful. What was great about today, was in the morning, we kicked off will Bill McDermott on stage with Kobe Bryant and Derek Jeter. And it was all about leadership and mentorship and experience in being in the business, whatever industry that you're in for so long and how you just stay creative, hungry, and passionate. And it was packed. One of the comments was they couldn't believe, on the day after the big party night of all the partners that you still have a lot of energy on the floor. Ultimately, it's still about data, which is great for our business that we can get into at NetApp. There's a lot of buzzword bingo going on here, John, all week, whether it's machine to machine, blocked chain, Cloud-- And at the end of it, it's still our customers who we've talked to a lot this week, and wow. What are we going to do with out data? How do we analyze it? And how do we improve that user experience based on all this data that we have? And I think that's one of the things that I see on the floor that's almost overwhelming with the amount of people, 30,000, all the partners. Just a lot of information. And lastly, I'll say, the good news with that is everybody is hungry for content. Whether it's a mini-theater, whether it's at one of the booths, interactions one-on-one, it's people are hungry for what is happening in the industry. And I think that's exciting for all of us. >> Well, we do our part and try and get as much coverage as possible, even if we are going to do it from Palo Alto. Question for you on NetApp. I mean, you guys have been-- The scuttlebutt in Silicon Valley is that NetApp is doing very well with the Hyperscale (mumbles). I know for a fact. I've interviewed the former CEO and others within NetApp. They were really on early with AWS. And obviously, AWS a big part of the announcement at Sapphire. So, you guys are kind of like getting these relationships with these key players. It's changed a little bit of the business model, or culture within NetApp. What's different about NetApp right now? With resect to some of the big players that you've had relationships with. It's not this new relationship with SAP. You guys have a deep relationship. What's changing as the CloudWave hits, as the DataWave hits? Those are the biggest waves hitting the world right now. How are you guys playing in that world? And share some insight there. >> RJ: Absolutely. Great question. 'Cause the world is going through digital transformation and so is NetApp. So, we are actually celebrating our 25th year as a company right now and we've been a traditional, global technology and data management company. And, the digital shift to Hybrid Cloud is where we're moving. So, specifically with partners like AWS, Microsoft and Azure, the Hyperscalers like CenturyLink, it's how we can help our customers really collect, transport, analyze, protect data, in whatever environment they want to hold their data. Whether it's On-Premises, if your in a Cloud, you can choose whatever Hyperscaler you want. You still have to deal with the data. And then, how do we manage it? How do we consume it? Where is dead data that needs to be taken out? So, data's the currency and with our data fabric methodology and tools from software, hardware, we're really able to help manage that complete life cycle, whether it's SAP, or any other type of environment we hold. So, the exciting thing for us, and the stock prices is showing that at an all time high, is what Bill McDermott said on Monday, in the keynote, or excuse me, Tuesday, "Data is the currency. "Our new mission statement is we're trying "to empower our customers to change the world with data." So, back to the buzzWord bingo comment I made earlier, we're still dealing with fact that we have all these great technologies: all these censors, machine-to-machine, On-Print to Cloud. At the heart of everything is the data and what you do with it. And I think that one of the things that NetApp does and the best in the world of, is we continually evolve digital transformations with the tools on how we deal with data. So, that's high level. >> How about the data dynamic? >> Data is the fundamental story, in my opinion. Cloud has been around, the Clouderati. We were part of that from the beginning. Now, Cloud is mainstream. Amazon stock prices looking like a hockey stick now, it's going straight up. But, that took years of development, right? I mean, you saw the Cloud formation coming, really, in the mid-2000s and then, really at 2008, -09, -10 was the foundational years and then the rest is history. Data's now going through the same thing. As people get over themselves and say, "Okay, big data's not a dupe. It's everything." IOT is certainly highlighting a lot of that. SAP has recognized that legacy systems have to move to a MultiCloud and certainly multi-vendor world in a whole new way. But, at the end of the day, you still got to store this stuff. So, that's your business. How are you keeping up with the moving train of data as is architecturally shifts in the marketplace? >> RJ: Great question. I think that we have some of the best minds in Silicon Valley. Again, been there 25 years. I think with the deep relationships we have with companies like SAP. On the front end, I think the one thing that we bring as a value to SAP is the consumption model, life exists. Through owning the data and the user experience, we're able to enable and accelerate the license consumption to the edge. Right from application in to the system. From an architectural standpoint, it still comes down to the thing that we are creating and blabs and launching around, like the data fabric, the tool system, really software. The software that can help from an analytical perspective affect the user experience. Everybody wants it live. And the other part is the data protection and the DR aspect of it. And I think that's another core competency that we're continuing to develop as a service for the customer. So, I hop I've answered your question. >> Yup. >> RJ: But if-- >> (mumbles) a bottom line then, why NetApps? Say I'm a customer. Okay, I get the SAP. Why should I go with you guys over new the Delium see powerhouse over there, or the White-Box Storage? >> RJ: At the end of the day, we are best at capitalizing the value of data in the Hybrid Cloud. Nobody can help collect, analyze, test, and do life-cycle management live like NetApp can. And that's the reason that we are going more upstream, selling like we say at EPC, always selling to the CXO. I think we're changing the landscape from a true storage company on the infrastructure side to a full end-to-end Hybrid Cloud data management portfolio company. And it's been proven by the acquisition of Salazar from bringing Slash in to the portfolio, our cloning, and snapshot capabilities. So, anywhere in the stack at any time during the day when you're looking live at your operations or your data that you can take live snapshots. Just so if there's a glitch from a data protection side, or there's some type of spike from a request on the ticketing side or demand side of your system. So, I think that's some of the things that we're differentiating. And that's the reason that the AWSs and the Azures and the SAPs are so excited about co-innovating together to again, improving the customer experience with their data. >> RJ, final question. What's the net-net? What's the bumper sticker for you this year at Sapphire 2017? What's the walk-away revelation? >> RJ: Well, I think from the SAP side, it's the revelation on the push of Leonardo. I think that SAP-- I'd like to see them continue to hone out the 'what' and the 'if' from partners with Leonardo from blotching in machine-to-machine and IOT. For us, it is the beautiful fact that now at the center of everything that SAP and the ecosystem is trying to do is around the data side of it and it's the actual currency. And the fact that we have kind of the leading-edge tools to enhance the customer experience with our platform for customers' and partners' data is really, really exciting for us. And we're excited. We're all psyched to be partnered with the Cube. And everything we do is in the Cloud. So, I'm here to help. >> Alright. >> RJ, thanks so much for takin' the time callin' in from Orlando. RJ Bibby, SAP Global Alliance Executive with NetApp. He runs the the relationship with NetApp. And again, it's been a long-term relationship. I remember takin' photos on my phone, way back in the day, years ago. So, not a new relationship and continued momentum. Congratulations and thanks for sharing the insight from Orlando. 'Preciate it. >> RJ: You bet. Thanks for the partnership. Have a great day. >> 'Kay, more coverage from the Cube in Palo Alto on SAP, Sapphire 2017 after this short break. Stay with us. (techno music)

>> Announcer: It's The Cube covering SAPPHIRE NOW 2017. Brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube with ongoing coverage of SAP SAPPHIRE 2017 in Orlando. And we're excited to have Floyd Strimling on the phone, he is the global vice president SAP Cloud Platform and he is running around the Orange County Convention Center. So, Floyd, how you doing today? >> I'm doing great, thanks for having me, and I hope you can hear me as it's quite loud in the convention center. >> I can hear you perfectly. So, first off, we actually were just doing a kind of a keynote analysis of Hasso today. You know, we see a lot of keynotes, we go to a ton of conferences, and I thought he was just spectacular. Touched on so many topics and really seems to be on his game. >> And you know what if you go to Sapphire, unless you attend the Hasso Plattner keynote, you never know what's going to be on the agenda. You never know which way he's going to take it, but I thought today he hit all the big points. I mean, whoever thought you would see Hasso doing a lecture on DBUs and core conversion as far as what's going on in computing? So I thought he hit all the great topics, talked about what the class was doing, what were doing with S/4HANA Cloud, how we're really taking the company to the next level, and his honesty is always so refreshing when you look at people up there on stage talking. >> Absolutely, 'cause on of his quotes, and I was live-tweeting during the keynote, was you know, "We want to get as fast to the cloud as possible," and you guys are backing that up with action with all the announcements with AWS and Google Cloud Platform. I think you have Azure underway, so you're offering your customers a bunch of public cloud choices. And then you've rebranded and now you've also got a couple flavors of the SAP Cloud. So I wonder you know, clearly you guys are all-in on this Cloud thing. >> You know I think it's interesting, when you look at what's going on in Cloud, I like to say that the first wave was dominated by infrastructure vendors, and I think the software vendors like SAP have a very big stake in this and are ready to take leadership, but what is our vision? How does that impact the customers? And that's really looking at much more of a multi-Cloud approach. So not sitting here saying we're going to go on one vendor, but staying agnostic and, like you said, we're working with AWS. I saw Diane Green on stage with Google Cloud Platform. We continue to work with Azure. So you know these are key partners to us, but we're the software vendor of that agnostic nature of our customers to be able to move workloads on to any of those platforms, on top of our Cloud Platform, as a major piece is critical. And I think it's given us enormous scale and advantage over what some other people are doing in the industry. >> Yeah, 'cause I mean you have such a great installed base and you're in so many mission-critical applications, obviously with the ERP background, but the other thing that really struck me, Floyd, was Hasso's conversation about a new way to develop applications and you know no more instruction manuals, and intelligent design, and sharing our road-map with our customers, and having customers participate in that road-map. I mean that was definitely not SAP's reputation back in the day. It was you know, "The SAP way or the highway. "We know best. It's a big monolithic application." That is completely turned upside down, and maybe I haven't been paying attention as to when that started to happen, but you know that was a very clear message that he's changing the way that you guys build, deliver, and develop software for your customers. >> I think this has been happening a lot longer than people realize. And when we launched out S/4HANA, and the transformation that provides to really take the core convert to the company and project it beyond even the next decade, that puts you into this real-time notion. And now with that type of technology you need a way to then put more agility, faster app development, better UI experience, better interaction, ability for our customers to take their data and to monetize it in new and different ways, and build ecosystems around them, that's why we have the SAP Cloud Platform. It's designed to be very modern, to be very Cloud-first, the Cloud-data way of developing applications, and really taking our customers to get the speed of innovation to where they need. You know, really SAP is going to help our customers make that. You know we call it the digital transformation, but I like to call it the innovation curve. To help them bend that curve so they can start doing more and more. And if you listen to Bill's keynote, when he said that you have two companies dropping out of the S&P 500, I think he said every week. That's an amazing statistic and something that our customers has, facing destruction at such a high rate, that we've got to be here to help make this transformation. And that's what we're doing. >> Yeah the other part too, again there are so many angles in that keynote this morning, was just the whole machine-learning and artificial intelligence, because it's one thing to talk about it kind of in the abstract, but Hasso was very clear you know you've had airplanes having self-pilots for a long time, but more importantly, you guys have so much data in your systems that you can start to apply the machine-learning and the AI in these new intelligent applications and the machine can learn by doing thousands or millions of repeated scenario processes and start to affect really what on some level might seem like mundane or simple processes, like invoice matching, to actually very, very powerful. If you can actually match 94% of the invoices without having a human touch, you know that's a tremendous business impact. >> Well this is true. AI machine-learning is critical us. I know that he's talked about we're going to put this into all the rest of these applications, and we're going to offer this to our customers in new and interesting ways that change the way you interact with the system. I don't know if you saw some of the of the things we were talking about, about co-pilot and the way that you can actually interact with SAP systems, but changing it from the ground-up, adding this ability to have the system itself kind of answer, like you're saying, self-answer these questions, be more interactive with you in new and interesting ways and really free up our customers to innovate and start doing more with their data than they every thought. I think what you're going to see is that, you know machine-learning and AI right now most of it, what you see in the market all around, more of the consumer based versions, kind of like what you're doing for ad placement and all those types of things. How you apply that same technology to business is a little bit different, and who better than us then to actually it to the business itself? To actually get value out of it, because it's not enough just to have it. Customers have got to get and realize huge business value, which we know is there. And you're going to see a slew of applications. I know Hasso said by next year we'll have 50 of them. But the ones that are coming out there, they're very interesting. They're very unique and innovative, and they can be extended by our customers to specific use cases for themselves. >> Yeah, the other great analogy that he used today was you know kind of comparing Tesla to I presume Mercedes, he didn't call it out by name, but that not only is it a different way to have control knobs and this-and-that in terms of software versus even a beautifully designed and ergonomically proper dashboard, but it's also a different buying experience and just a different experience in general. And really using that as kind of a comparison for really this transformative way that things are being done now that's different from before, and really it's a software-enabled, and software-powered, intelligent design, no-manual way of looking at things. So again, just very impressed by the fact that he's poking fun at one of the best German brands that makes really fine products saying, "Yeah that's great, but software defined is "a whole different way to approach the world "and that's what we are going towards." >> We thought, he's big key is all our user experience, changing that user experience, and really who does read a software manual these days? I don't think any of us do. So the big advantage and the change of what he's really talking about, I love his analogy too because you know he's poking fun at one of the major brands, was that ability to deliver innovation free of fear or risk to that user. So that when you download that application you're not worried. That's doing testing, no one's testing that locally to make sure the test was going to start in the morning, and then changing that ability to innovate at a rapid pace. And I think you're seeing us do this with your idea of S/4HANA being that digital core and then around it the Cloud Platform being the agile, the innovation engine that would deliver in all of these really cool applications that pop up that could be delivered at a much faster pace, and customers then could pick and choose which ones they use. And that's all going to be delivered much quicker. I think that the days of waiting for that big update going over months and months of testing are over. We got to get people moving quicker, but we got to be able to react to what's going on in the industry faster. And that's the whole reason why we transformed the company. I mean we are, and we're seeing our customers have huge benefits as they make this journey with us. >> So Floyd, I know you're kind of up against it on the time. It's busy there in Orlando. So I just want to give you the final say. Any special surprises, funny chatter coming off the floor? What's kind of the vibe there in Orlando on the floor? >> You know the vibe has been interesting because you start off with the keynote from Bill, and then you have Intel, Google on stage talking about their solution sets. And you have Michael Dell coming there talking about the importance of IT again. And then you have the Wladimir Klitschko come out there when Bernd was talking, and the stark message he was talking about about recreating yourself and watching your path. And then you follow that up with Hasso's keynote today, which was outstanding, about just where the company is. I think the buzz really is that SAP now is really going to tell everybody what we're doing in the Cloud. We are committed to this. We have a clear strategy, a clear vision. You can see from our performance we're doing extremely well right now. And we want to really take all of our customers with us, and then add a (phone beeps) lot on the way as we make this transformation. I think people were always wondering what we're going to do, and I think it's out there right now. We're going to be a multi-Cloud company. We're going to offer innovative applications. We're going to have accelerated (phone beeps) bundles of the applications with Leonardo and then we're going to finish this off with the best digital core on the planet with S/4HANA. I think it's exciting times here to be at Sapphire. It's exciting times to be at SAP and exciting times for our customers. >> Alright Floyed, well I think that's a great summary, and you know I think you're fortunate you still have that founder DNA, you've still got a really strong founder that obviously drives that culture, and the fact that he has embraced these mega trends going forward is only good and clearly reflected in the performance of the company. So thanks for taking a few minutes of your time and I'll let you get back to the action there on the floor in Orlando. >> Voiceover: Alright thank you, appreciate your time. >> Alright, thanks a lot. That's Floyd Stremling from Orlando. He is the global VP of SAP Cloud Platform. I'm Jeff Frick; you're watching The Cube on our ongoing coverage of SAP SAPPHIRE 2017. Thanks for watching.

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

(bombastic music) >> Narrator: It's theCUBE, covering Sapphire Now 2017. Brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Lisa Martin: Journey to the Cloud requires empathy, requires transparency, and we've both kind of chatted about... Empathy is kind of an interesting thing. >> George Gilbert: Yeah. >> We don't necessarily hear a lot of CEOs talk about that. They also really talked about and drove home the point that software is now a strategy. Being open is a game-changer. So, a couple of things I kind of wanted to recap with you was there was two initiatives that they, SAP, launched, or announced, today, reinforcing the pledge to listen to customers. And one of them is the SAP Cloud Trust Center, this public website that offers real-time information on the current operations of Cloud solutions from SAP. Along the lines of empathy and transparency and really listening to the customers, what, in your take, is the SAP Cloud Trust Center, and what does it really mean? >> Okay, maybe start with an analogy. We used to call people who did not want to outsource their infrastructure, we called them "server-huggers," you know, they wanted to own their infrastructure. And part of allowing your software, mission critical software, to migrate off your... out of your data centers, off-prem, requires a certain amount of trust that takes awhile... takes awhile to earn, because you're going from infrastructure that you've tuned and that only supports your app to infrastructure in the Cloud that's shared. And that's a big change. So, essentially, SAP is saying, "We'll give you a window onto how we operate this, so that we can earn your trust over time." You know, sort of like a marriage: through thick and thin, richer or for poorer, because there are going to be hiccups and downtimes. But ideally, SAP is taking responsibility and risk off the customer. And over time, that should be... Since they know better how to run their software than anyone else, that should work. So they're taking what they believe is a very reasonable risk in saying, "We'll show you how well we do, and we'll show you we do it better than you." >> So there are, right now, there will be three operations, three services, that will be visible, where customers can see planned maintenance schedules, four weeks of historical data, as well as real-time availability, security, and data to privacy. You brought up a great point that I think in many, many contexts, this transcends industries. This transcends peoples. That trust has to be earned. Does this set SAP apart, or differentiate them, in the market? >> Gilbert: I actually think that this was the sincerest form of flattery in terms of copying Salesforce.com. >> Martin: Ah. >> Because they've had this for awhile. And SAP is far more mission-critical, because it's sort of your system of record. It keeps track of everything that happens in your business, whereas Salesforce, it's not really a transactional system. It's more of keeping track of your opportunities, you know, and your customers. If SAP goes down, your business goes down. >> Right. Right. So another thing that they announced regarding, or along the same lines of, this pledge to customers about being empathetic, about being transparent, is the Transformation Navigator. Now, this came actually directly out of comments that Bill McDermott made at SAP Sapphire 2016, where SAP really wanted to start looking at the world through the customer's perspective, through their lens. So talk to us about the Transformation Navigator. Who is it for, what does it do, and what can people or companies expect to get from it? >> I think that one way to look at it is SAP made a bunch of very large and very important acquisitions, like Concur for expense reporting, SuccessFactors for... HR measurement and talent management, and Ariba for procurement. And I don't think they had put together a compelling case for why you buy them all together. And I think that was the first objective of the Transformation Navigator, because it says that it outlines the business value, helps you with transformation services, explains how all the Cloud apps, which were the ones they bought, integrate with the existing ERP, whether on-prem or in the Cloud, and shows you a roadmap. So it sounds to me like it's their first comprehensive attempt to say, "Buy our product family." I would say that the empathy part, the Cloud Trust Center, is a much deeper attempt to say, "Hey, we're going to make all this stuff work together." The first is a value proposition. >> Martin: Right. We should mention that there are two sessions at SAP Sapphire Now that attendees can take advantage of under the auspices of the SAP Transformation Navigator. There is a session on digital transformation, a concept session, and there's also digital transformation deep-dive sessions. So if you're around and you've got time, check those out. Another thing that we talked a lot about today, and that we heard a good amount of today, George, was this expanded Leonardo. That was brought up in the keynote on main stage this morning. And we know that Leonardo was really the brand for IoT, but now it's got new ingredients, it's got these new systems of intelligence, machine learning, artificial intelligence, analytics, blockchain. What are the keys of getting value from these technologies with this new, expanded Leonardo capability? >> I guess one way to think about it is... So the SAP core, which they call, I believe they call the... either "digital core" or just "core," which is the old system of record, and then all these new capabilities around it, which is how to extend that system of record into a system of intelligence. Again, used to be just... Last year, it was IoT, but now there's so much more richness that goes around it. These are all building blocks that customers can sort of ultimately mix and match. Like, you could use blockchain as a way of ensuring that there's no tampering or fraud from the bananas in Peru, all the way till the grocery store in New Jersey. But if you use that in conjunction with supply chain, machine learning, replenishment, you get much better asset utilization. I guess... they're trying to say, "We have your system of record. We have your mission-critical data and business processes." Now it's easy to build around on the edges, around the edge of that, to add the innovative processes. >> So it sounds like, from a value perspective, by embedding Leonardo into business applications... >> Gilbert: Yeah. >> There are innovations that customers can achieve, asset management, you talked about that, so there's clear business value. As you mentioned, it's maybe like a pick-and-choose that customers can decide which of these new systems of intelligence that they need, but there's clearly a business value derivation there. >> You could think of... Yeah, where all these new services enable transformative business outcomes, the old system of record was more, as we've talked about before, was about efficiency. So it makes sense to position these capabilities as transformative. And to say that they leverage the system of record, core, makes SAP appear to be the more natural provider of these new services. >> So in this route, they did announce that they are partnering with Deloitte. What do you think they're doing here? What's the advantage that provides to SAP's install base? >> When you're... embarking on these transformational business outcomes, there is... severe, challenging change management that has to be done. It's not just that it's... We always have products, processes, and technologies, or people, products, and technologies. Here, your processes and your people have to go through much more radical change than they would in an efficiency application, which was the old system of record. We all remember back when SAP R/3 was taking off, the big system integrators got spectacularly wealthy over the change management requirements to do the efficiency roll-outs. Now, to do the transformational ones are far more challenging right now. >> So, another thing that we chatted about earlier was that SAP has embedded machine learning into a new wave of applications. What are those applications, and what is this really for SAP as a business? >> Well, my favorite analogy is something I guess I heard from one of the SIs back in the heyday of the original SAP R/3, which was, you know... Traditional business intelligence and reporting was really about steering a ship by looking backwards at its wake. And machine learning is all about predictive... answers and solutions. So you pivot now, and we've heard a lot about this concept of "software's eating the world," but now data is eating software, because it's the data that programs the software about how to look forward. And some of those forward-looking things are figuring out how to route a service ticket, like, if something goes wrong, where does it go into the support organization? A really important top-line one is customer retention, where you predict if a customer is about to churn, what type of offer do you have to make? >> Martin: Right. >> Then there's a cash application, which, to me, is kind of administrative, where it makes it easy to match a receivable, like an invoice, with a bank statement. Still kind of clerical, and yes, you get productivity out of it, but it's not a top-line thing like the customer churn function. There's a brand impact one where it's like, "I've spent x amount to promote my brand at a sporting event, used machine vision to find out how many logos were out there, and did it have impact that I can measure?" There are a whole bunch of applications like this, and there will be more. And when I say more, I think the more impactful ones that relate to, like, supply chain, where it's optimizing the flow of goods, choosing strategic suppliers... >> So this may be, with SAP embedding machine learning into this new wave of apps, is, like, a positive first step, entry level, for them to get up the chain of value? >> Gilbert: Yeah. The first... Yes. Yes. Yes. The first ones look to be sort of like baby steps, but SAP is in a position to implement more impactful ones. But it's worth saying, though, that in the spirit of "data is eating software," the people who have the most data are not the enterprise application vendors. They're the public Cloud vendors. >> Martin: Right. >> And they are the... sort of... unacknowledged future competitors, mortal competitors, for machine learning apps. >> Okay. Interesting. So, another thing that I wanted to switch gears, see if we could get a couple more topics in before we wrap here... The digital twin for IoT devices. So the relaunching of Leonardo as SAP's digital brand, they've expanded this definition. What does that mean? What is the digital twin? >> Okay, so digital twin is probably the most brilliant two-word marketing term that's come out of our industry in awhile. >> (chuckling) >> Because GE came up with it to describe, with their industrial Internet of Things, any industrial asset or device where, you took a physical version, and then you created a very high-fidelity software representation of it, or digital representation. I don't want to say replica, because it'll never be that perfect. >> Martin: Okay. >> But they would take the design information from a piece of CAD software, like maybe PTC or Autodesk. So that's as designed. There would be information from how it was manufactured. That particular instance, in addition to, let's say all aircraft engines of this... (sudden musical interlude) ...track, each instance. >> (coughing) Excuse me. >> Then, how it was shipped or who it was sent to, how it was operated, how it was maintained, so then you could... The aircraft engine manufacturer could provide proactive fleet maintenance for all the engines. It would be different from the... very different from having the airlines looking in their manuals, saying, "Okay, every 50,000 miles I got to change the oil." Here, the sensors and the data go back to the aircraft engine manufacturer. And they can say, "Well, the one that's been flying in the Middle East is exposed to sand." So that needs to be proactively maintained at a much shorter interval. And the one that's been flying across the Atlantic, that gets very little gunk in it, can have a much larger maintenance window. So you can optimize things in a way that the current capabilities wouldn't allow you to. >> And they showed an example of that with the Arctic Wind pilot project, which is very interesting. >> Yeah. Where it showed windmills, and not just the wind farm. You saw the wind farm, but you also see the different wear and tear, or the different optimizations of individual windmills. >> Martin: Right. >> And that's pretty interesting. Because you can also reorient them based on climate conditions, microclimate conditions. >> Exactly. So last topic I wanted to dig in with you today is blockchain. So you and I chatted about this, kind of chatted about... What is blockchain, this distributed ledger technology? In the simplest definition, a reliable record of who owns what, and who transacts what. So from what we heard today, and from our conversation, it seems like maybe SAP is dipping a toe into the water here. Give us a little bit of insight about what it is they're doing with blockchain, and maybe a couple of key use cases that they shared in supply chain, for example. >> Okay. So the definition you gave, I think distills it really well, with one caveat. Which is, if it's a record of who owns what, who's done what, in the past we needed an intermediary to do that. The bank. Like, when you're closing on your house, you know, someone puts the money in, you know, someone signs the contract. And only when both are done does it exchange hands. With a blockchain, you wouldn't need someone in the middle because the transaction's not complete until, on one part of the ledger, someone has put the money in, and, on the other part, someone's put the title in. And, not to sound too grandiose, but I've heard people refer to this as the biggest change in how finance and trust operates since Italian double-entry bookkeeping was invented in, like, the 1300s, or somewhere way, way back. And so, if we take it to a modern usage scenario, we could take... foodstuffs that are grown, let's say in Southeast Asia, they get put in a container that's locked. And then we can know that it's tamper-proof, because any attempt to open that would be reflected as a transaction in the blockchain. There are other, probably better, examples, but the idea is, we can have trust in so many more scenarios without having a middleman. And so the transaction costs change dramatically. And that allows for much more friction-free transactions and business processes than we ever thought possible. Because having someone like a bank or a lawyer in the middle is expensive. >> Right. And I'm glad that you kind of brought that back to trust as we wrap up. That was kind of the key theme that we heard today. >> Gilbert: Yeah. >> And a lot of great announcements. So George, thanks so much for spending the day with me, analyzing day one of SAP Sapphire Now 2017. >> Gilbert: Thank you, Lisa. >> And we thank you for watching. George and I will be back tomorrow analyzing day two and talking about great things that are going on, again, coverage from SAP Sapphire Now 2017. For George Gilbert, I'm Lisa Martin. We'll see you next time. (fanfare)

>> Narrator: It's theCUBE, covering Sapphire Now 2017, brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform, and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to our special coverage of SAP Sapphire Now. I'm John Furrier, here in theCUBE's studios of Palo Alto for our three days of wall to wall coverage, breaking down all the news with analysis. Our next guest here on theCUBE is Emily Mui, Senior Director of HANA Cloud Product Marketing at SAP, and Michael Hill, Senior Director of Product Marketing and SAP Cloud Platform. I had a chance to have a conversation around the big news around SAP Cloud Platform and what it means. I had a chance to ask Emily and Michael about the Sapphire impact around this new strategy, and the impact of multi-cloud. Here's the conversation with Michael and Emily. >> Three things to remember, three Cs, it's about helping accelerate cloud adoption, consumption, as well as-- >> [Michael And John] Choice. >> Choice, because of multi-cloud. >> So this is interesting. So the three Cs, I love that, very gimmicky marketing thing that I like. It gets to the point. Choice is huge. Multi-cloud is what everyone's talking about, in essence is what hybrid cloud's turning into. I mean, hybrid cloud has been the defacto norm now everyone's talking about, that is the preferred way most enterprises are using the cloud on premise and some public cloud, call it hybrid. But now, the mobile cloud's out here. There's Amazon Web Service, you've got Google, Azure, so there's a lot of, so the choice is critical, where to put what were clothes. >> And that's what we're hearing from our customers, and that's why we're moving in that direction. Not everyone wants to stick to one infrastructure as a service provider, they've got multiple clouds to manage, and we're enabling that. >> So choice I get. Cloud adoption is essentially creating those APIs to give them that accelerated approach. More cloud adoption means what? I've got be able to run stuff in the cloud faster, so that means getting their apps API, the API economy. And the consumption, is that on the interface side, or what's the consumption piece of it? >> Well, I'm going to let Michael have a swing at it now. >> It's consumption of innovation. So here we're talking about helping companies with digital transformation with things like Internet of Things, which we had in beta, which is now generally available, so customers can intelligently connect people, things, and business processes, all together now. In addition, we've added other great technologies like SAP CoPilot, which is allowing you to talk to your enterprise systems. So initially, that's what with SAPS for HANA. And you can say, "I'm interested in, "tell me all the open orders from the last quarter." And it will intelligently go get that information. >> It's like a voice recognition, all kinds of news things are coming out. >> Absolutely. >> As a user interface, or interface on cloud. >> They're for the enterprise. >> Or IT interface. >> On your phone or on your computer. >> So it's all being automated. We all know AI, that's just, "All our jobs are being automated." But this is specific. You're saying you're going to interface in with like CoPilot. >> Exactly. So you've got that business context. >> All right, let's step back and look at the Lego blocks. The cloud choice, multi-cloud. Let's get in, and then we'll talk about the adoption piece, how you guys are accelerating that through the marketplaces and APIs, and then the consumption through the new interfaces. So start with multi-cloud. What are the big points there? >> Well, the first is the agility that your platform as a service is now available on not just SAP data centers, but Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, being delivered. Amazon Web Services is now generally available, Azure is now beta, and there's a preview of Google Cloud Platform. And here you have one cockpit in SAP Cloud Platform to manage this multi-cloud infrastructure. >> So your strategy is to put your platform as a service on the clouds that customers want to run their workloads on? >> Exactly. So customers may already have specific workloads, or they may be working with partners that have workloads in those particular clouds. And now, SAP Cloud Platform can run in that same infrastructure. >> So the plan is to support the platform as a service from SAP on the clouds of choice for the customer. So they want to put stuff on Azure, if it's related to Office 365, or something going on with that, they could put it there. If they want to put some cloud-native on Amazon Web Service, they can. If they want to use Spanner and some TensorFlow, they could put that on Google. >> And to make this happen was really cool thing, is that we did this through our work in Cloud Foundry, and this allows you to bring your own development language, so BYOL. So if you have developers that are working in a particular language that's not supported natively by SAP previously, they can now be instantly productive on building applications on SAP Cloud Platform. >> So Cloud Foundry is the key to success on this? >> Yeah. Exactly. And that bring things like Node.js, and Python, as well as SAPs. >> All the cloud-native goodness that people want from a developer standpoint. >> Exactly. >> But yet, you guys allow it to run on Prim within the SAP constructs. >> Yep. >> All right, let's talk about cloud adoption, 'cause this is where the big rubber hits the road. Emily, we've been talking about the API economy for years. In fact, SAP was early on, and Web Services going through bankrupt. But there's some real value in here, because SAP runs software in some of the biggest businesses, so there's a lot of nuances to SAP. But when you go cloud and cloud-native, you've got to balance preexisting install base legacy with new apps that are being developed, how are you guys going to do that? >> So we announced the API Business Hub around a year ago at Sapphire in 2016, and it has grown tremendously in terms of content. So we had a lot of new APIs that keep getting added every month. And we're into the hundreds now. But it's not just the APIs, we've got integration workflows, there's all kinds of different content that's being added in there to make easier for our customers and partners to be able to leverage, and integrate, and connect, these different application with SAP back-end. So lot of exciting things happening on that end. >> So this allows them to go to the cloud business model. >> Emily: Exactly, right. >> Okay, now back to the consumption pieces, CoPilot. So is this where you guys are looking at where the dynamic nature of cloud can take advantage of the customers, because not only interfacing with, say, voice, for instance, there's others things, like, "Okay, I want to change processes. "I have the Workflow, or I'm doing something, "I want to just, "I'm not a developer, a Python developer, "I want to go in and make some rule changes, "or things of that nature." >> Yeah, so we have the Workflow service, that's also available. We've got a whole host of new capabilities that are coming out, and we'll call it digital edge, giving our customers a digital edge with these new innovative services. >> Edge as the user and also machines. >> Yes. >> That's where the IoT piece comes in. >> Exactly. >> So decision maker or customer says, "Hey, I've done all this stuff in the cloud." All of a sudden, someone says, "Well, we've got to bolt on some industrial data "from machines in our plant or factory." >> In fact, our IoT, the newest set of capabilities for IoT services is available at Sapphire. >> Okay, s\o what's the big takeaway from this? Let's just boil it down. Bottom line, this announcement impacts customers in what way? >> In many ways. We see many of customers wanting to become digital. And we've talked about how we think the benefits of cloud platform has to do with helping our customers become much more agile in how they do business, and SAP is in perfect position to do that. We've been working with companies, enterprises for years with their business processes, helping them optimize it. So that's the other bit, to be able to optimize all their business processes, and through the cloud. And then lastly, digital is the way to that they want to go. They know they want to be able to adopt all these new technologies. AI is so exciting. The CoPilot, if you've seen the demo, and you can see it at show floor here at Sapphire, it's amazing. Just the fact that you can talk to it, create an order, do some search, talk to it. I know that's how my kids, how they get through everyday life. They don't go look up anything anymore, they don't even Google, just talk. >> It's very dynamic. Certainly, the kids are an indicator, that you see if they want things, have the ability to move things around like the Lego blocks or composability. >> Yeah, so the speed, so that's why we love talking about accelerating consumption, and choice, and cloud adoption, because the speed of which everyone is adopting new technologies is just astronomical. >> Michael, comment on that point, because I always, this is our eight year covering Sapphire with theCUBE. It's our first year we're doing it from the studio as well. But Bill McDermott has always been on this with the whole dashboarding thing. If you look at SAP, the speed of business, how (mumbles) year that was. But each year, he never really changed, it's been the same arc, might've been a zigzag here and there, a little success factors here and there, all this kind of integration you guys have done. But it's been the same message, data's at the heart of the customers' outcomes. And the dashboards of old were data warehouses. But now he was showing a vision where, with the speed of data, the speed of software, you can get your business dashboard at your fingertips. That's what the customers are looking for. Your thoughts? >> It's not only being able to get that information at your fingertips, but actually being able to do something about it. So you can build those applications that can make an impact. So if you have, you're using our iOS SDK, and you've build that Apple interface, you have a nice interface that you can move an order, or you can do something about it while you're traveling. So you have this great dashboard, but now it's actionable. >> And this is the big difference, this is what makes his original vision, which certainly you can replicate with SAP's suite of data, and data and software, to a whole nother dimension of new apps. So app developers can come in and create these apps, and create new value propositions. >> Absolutely. >> All right, so how do they do that? What's the advice the customers, as they look at this new announcement, the impact of them, what does it mean to customer? Pick your cloud of choice? Use the APIs? >> Plenty of choices, and of course, we offer them a lot of guidance too, right? Because we've got a lot of great customers that are using the cloud platform today, some of which are presenting here at Sapphire. Karma Automotive, we love their story. They used to be Fisker Automotive, an all electronic vehicle. And it's amazing that the things that they want to do, and they're using the cloud platform in order to do that. But it's just another example of an innovative company that's looking to work with a company like SAP, and do everything in the cloud, building an application that will make it easier in terms of IoT, the sensors, and things like that, so they can track it to be able to take action on it. So it's very exciting. So lots of new things that are happening. >> I think there's two things that jump out at me, just to summarize the freedom that developers in the cloud-native world can do to create new apps, that also blend in on all of the existing value that SAP's already doing in the marketplace, that's always been, that was something that I observed last year, this is now a realization of that. But two, is now the customers now have a choice to put whatever they want in whatever cloud. And to me, what we've seen on theCUBE over the many interviews we've done, people who follow theCUBE know we've talked to a lot of people, is the workloads find their homes, some like Amazon, some like Azure, some like Google, and I think that is what customers are telling us, and you guys are now offering that choice. "Hey, put some workloads over there. "It doesn't matter where you want to put 'em, "we're just going to run 'em with--" >> And where we can help is really on the business service side. We have the right types of application services within the platform as a service offering, to enable them to create those types of apps to support their business. >> Applications, data, value for customers. >> And it's the integration of data into the application, because that's what's important. >> There'll be a new generation of application developers. We're standing up application like PowerPoint slides, really composing apps, that is the DevOps mainstream trend. Emily, thanks so much for sharing the great news. Michael, good to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Special Sapphire Now 2017 coverage. Breaking the news of the three Cs, multi-cloud, SAP's new announcement in Orlando. This is theCUBE coverage. More coverage after this short break.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE special coverage of Sapphire Now we're here in Palo Alto. Sapphire now SAPs premier conference in Orlando. We are in Palo Alto, we have folks on the ground in Orlando. Special three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Taking you through all the action from our new studio in Palo Alto, 4,500 square feet. Our chance to cover events when we can't get there in person we certainly can cover it from here. And that's what we're going to be doing for the next three days; we're going to have stories on the ground, no story is too small. We're going to chase 'em all down. We have people calling in, we have folks on the ground that'll be Skyping in, calling in, whatever it takes to get the story out to you, we're going to do it and, certainly, expert coverage from inside the studio here. We got George Gilbert from Wikibon and a variety of folks who did not make it to Orlando will be coming into Palo Alto to sit down and talk with us. I'm John Furrier, my co-host is Jeff Frick. Jeff, we'll do whatever it takes. We'll cover from our studio, we'll go to Orlando virtually we got the Twitter hashtag, Sapphirenow, we're on that. We have folks on the ground, a lot of great news coming out of Sapphire. >> What do ya think? I mean, you were just as Dell EMC World last week and the story was all about, kind of, hybrid cloud and customer choice and it sounds like that's a recurring theme here at SAP, where they've got a lot of cloud options based on what their customer wants to do. >> I mean, if you, I mean this sounds really bad to say for someone who follows the tech industry but I just think this digital transformation thing is just over-played. But it's the, it's the Groundhog's Day moment. The movie just keeps replaying itself. Digital transformation, digital transformation, and, again, just like every other commerce, like Dell EMC World and every other one, digitally transforming your business is the theme. Little bit played, I would say business transformation is, I would say, the next chapter of what's happening and what you see from these shows. Specifically, at Dell EMC World, US ServiceNow, OpenStack, all the different events, Red Hat's been the one we been going to this past couple weeks is the business impact of the technology and SAP highlights that with their results and their keynotes in the news letter drops today, which is, look it, they have been doing SAP for all the top companies powering with SAP. As in Oracle. But now the customers want to go beyond the legacy SAP. And this has been a challenge for SAP over the past five years. They've had all the right messaging, digital dashboards, real time for business, all there. But the problem was they were missing a big piece of it. That is a cloud native and really aligning with the explosive growth of cloud computing, cloud native. Which is the new application developer. This new class of developer is emerging and that's different than the in-house SAP guys, by the way, which is still a massive market. >> Sure. >> That's the big trend. And of course, machine learning, AI, the kinds of design tooling that you'd expect to see, they're calling that Leonardo. >> I think it really shows the power of the consumer and the impact that the big public clouds have had on the marketplace, right? With Google, and with Amazon, especially Microsoft, as well, coming into play. And I think it's, what's interesting on the SAP tact is they have their own cloud. But now they've, you know, are very aggressively following up on an earlier announcement at Google Cloud Platform Show. With more announcements at this show and then they continue to strengthen their relationship with Amazon. So, it's a pretty interesting place, if you're an SAP customer, really having options around where, what cloud and what cloud deployment is really no longer an argument. You've got a lot of options at SAP, very different than Oracle, which is still pretty much exclusively Oracle on the Oracle cloud. Very different kind of a tact. >> Yeah and just reading the hard news from from hitting the ground today down in Orlando is the key points, I'll just summarize it real quick. Expanded SAP Leonardo, Digital Innovation System, SAP Google Expand the Strategic Partnership, SAP Cloud Platform accelerates adoption and proves choice advances consumption for customers. That, essentially, is it. And there's a lot of other subtext going on on Enterprise Cloud, a lot of other massive pockets. But in terms of top-level news, it's Leonardo, okay? Leonardo Da Vinci, dead, creative genius. Okay? But that is all about providing the tools for business to be successful in a digital world. But to me, the big story, Jeff, is the transformation of what used to be called HANA Cloud Platform to SAP Cloud Platform. This is their platform as a service bet around winning the new developers, the cloud native. Last year at Sapphire, we actually had theCUBE on the ground they announced a deal with Apple computer around iOS and developers. That, now, has chip as a general availability so you're seeing SAP bringing two worlds together. The Cloud Native World, which they never played in much to the SAP Eco System, which is flush with cash. There's a ton of money to be made in that world. The install base is massive, now you have Cloud-Computing Hybrid Cloud with the HANA Cloud Platform, I mean the SAP Cloud Platform to bring that in. Again, I still can't even get it right. >> And so, let's just break it down as simply as you can, John. Why do they change the name? And what exactly do they have today? >> Well, here's the first of all problem. I'm so used to saying HANA because they have been branding HANA on >> They been bangin' HANA for the decade, or forever. >> It's just like, in my brain. I just can't get it out. SAP HANA, so anytime, and they actually called it HANA Cloud Platform before. >> Right, right. >> But HANA is such a massive set of capabilities that they really wanted to break out the platform as a service, which is the Cloud Native play, where all the action is for developers. From HANA, a viable product that they have that everyone's using. So, they have two clouds that we can say. SAP Cloud Platform, that's in Cloud Native, and then, HANA Enterprise Cloud. One's a delivery mechanism and one's a developer environment; it's the way I like to think about it. I'm a HANA customer, I'm going to need Enterprise Cloud to take my HANA solution and extend it up with self-service or provisioning, some partnership with AWS Google and the different clouds, getting my legacy HANA Enterprise software to be cloud enabled. That's HANA Enterprise Cloud. SAP Cloud Platforms for folks who don't, who like DevOps, the Cloud Native world that we cover deeply. >> Okay, and then, how do you look at the kind of Google partnership, Google Cloud Platform versus AWS partnership. SAP's goin' dual-track, is it just simply to have choice based on what their customers, are they fundamentally different relationships? How do you read that? >> This is where I think SAP's got genius going on. But if they might screw it up because they can't get out of their own way. >> Jeff: Can't use genius anymore, we've had enough geniuses. >> So, so, this could be a brilliant strike of move for SAP. I think it's a brilliant move in the way they're playing it out. But, again, like I said, SAP, they might not be able to get out of their own way. That's going to be their issue. But from a functionality standpoint, this multi-cloud opportunity; they've been with Amazon for many many years. They announced a partnership with Google which is just kind of toe in the water. That's tryin' to advance pretty quickly. Not a lot of meat on the bone there. And Azure relationships. So, SAP wants to put their cloud platform, that platform as a service, in all the different major clouds so that their legacy can work on pram and in whichever cloud the customer chooses. >> Yeah, I think there is, >> I think, that is a multi-cloud strategy that is viable for SAP. Unlike, say, Oracle, which isn't multi-cloud, it's Oracle Cloud. >> Right, right, right. >> So, you know the SAP Oracle, you know, head-to-head thing has been kind of, like, taking completely different paths. Someone will be right. >> Right. But I think there's more meat on the bone with the Google thing than, maybe, maybe we know of, or are aware of, or whatever. I mean, Burnt did come and get in the keynote with Diane Greene at Google Cloud Platform. And, you know, I think it's relatively significant. What'll be interesting to see how it shapes out and, again, what are the customer choices that are going to drive them to Amazon or to SB Cloud or to the Google cloud. I guess at the end of the day it's about choice and I know that was a big theme at Dell EMC World. Is that everyone has to cater to the choice of the customer or else it's just too easy for them to flip a lot of these other clouds. >> I mean, when I say, "not ready for primetime," I mean, Google's got a lot of work to do. SAP as a company is not as far down the road with Google as they are with Amazon and Azure, just to make my point clear. >> Okay. >> But the do have our announcing additional certifications of the coinnovation between SAP and Google. Between SAP Cloud Platform and Google Cloud Platform. IOT, machine learning, they certified SAP NetWeaver in a variety of S4 HANA, business warehousing; essentially more market place to accelerate the digital transformation. And, again, this is all about SAP co-locating in Google. >> Right, right. >> If a customer wants to take advantage of TensorFlow and all the goodness of, say, Google. That's a good move for SAP and, again, I think this is a brilliant strategy for SAP if they don't screw it up. >> Right, right. And potentially, that's the bridge to, like you said, it's been a little bit of Groundhog Day with cloud, cloud, cloud. But what's really the theme of 2017 is AI machine learning and it's an interesting bridge with Google Cloud, to their TensorFlow as another way to bring AI machine learning into the application learning into the application. >> So, Jeff, we've been covering a lot of events. One comment, I will say, is that SAP always has great messaging. >> I got to say, because we've been covering out eighth year covering Sapphire Now. We've only missed, like, two years over that time span. It's a lot like Oracle on the sense that it's a very business oriented event, but they have good pulse. Bill McDermott, great communicator, great customer-focused person. Always has his hand on the pulse. They have great messaging. And they tend to pick the right waves. And they've had some false starts with cloud, they've bought, had some acquisitions, things been cobbled together, but they've never wavered from their mission. And the mission has always been powering the speed of business, great software solutions. The issue is, they're moving off of SAP to new cloud solutions, so SAP is taking a proactive strike to say, look here, we can play in the cloud, therefore this multi-cloud game is critical for the growth of SAP, in my opinion. >> How much of the SAP in cloud will be new greenfield opportunities, or people want the flexibility, and a lot of the attributes of cloud versus, they're not migrating old R3 instances into the cloud. I mean, this is, I would assume, mainly new greenfield opportunities. >> Well, I think it's both. I mean, I think you have greenfield developers basically that are being hired by their customers to build apps, top line driven apps, and also, you know, some consolidation apps. But mainly, you know, their customers are hiring developers. Hey, we need a mobile app for our business, so you need to have data, you need to have some domain expertise. But at the end of the day, the system of records probably stored in some SAP system somewhere. So what they're trying to do is decouple the dependency between that developer, but still use SAP, but and offer an extension of SAP. It really is an opportunity, in my mind, for that to happen, and also partners. Look at Accenture, Capgemini, all these different partners. They are poised to create some great value and make some cash along the way. Remember the minicomputer boom. People who lined their pockets with cash were the integrators. The large global system integrators. So I think that, and the channel partners are going to have a great opportunity to take advantage of preexisting legacy accounts and to grow them further. >> Well, they certainly have a giant ecosystem. There's no doubt about it. It's one of the startup challenges that, new company starters to build that ecosystem. I mean, they have a giant ecosystem. So, what are you looking for this week besides the obvious announcement? And kind of tells that you want to see to let you know that SAP continues to be on track and move with the shifting tides of the market trends? >> Well do me, I'm looking at the multi-cloud story. It's a good story. Not sure how baked it is, but from a story standpoint, I really like it. I think that whoever can really crack the code on multi-cloud in a viable way is going to be a winner. So to me, I'm going to be looking heavily at the multi-cloud stuff coming out of Orlando. I'm interested to see how the developer traction pans out. I'm really interested in following up on the Apple relationship and see how that pans out. And then ultimately, how the rest of SAP can transform as a business. Because SAP tends to have a lot of buzzwords, a lot of word salad, not a lot of, you know, breaking it down and orchestrating. So to me, SAP, where I'm critical of them is, they kind of can't get out of their own way, Jeff. So, sometimes they kind of get caught in that old world thinking when the world is moving very very fast. Look at Amazon Web Services, you look at what Google's doing, you look at where Vmware is changing. Vmware started Pat Gelsinger. He was in the dumps in 2016, now he's flying high. He went from almost being fired, stock had a 52 week low, to them soaring. They have a market cap that's greater than HPE. So these old incumbent like SAP, they have to transform their culture, get relevant, and get real. And if they can't show the proof points with customer wins and partners, and multi-cloud, then they're going to be on shaky ground. So that's what I'm looking for. >> Jeff: All right, so should be a good week. I'm looking forward to it. >> Okay, we are here in the Palo Alto studio, our new 4,500 square foot operation. We can do coverage here, and then have on the ground coverage of which we will be doing all week Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday for our SAP Sapphire Now. We've got great guests coming in, great editorial coverage. I want to thank our sponsors, SAP, for, you know, allowing us to do this and continuing theCUBE tradition at Sapphire Now. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick. More coming after this short break.

>> Announcer: It's theCube. Covering SAPPHIRE NOW 2017. Brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform in HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Welcome to the special Cube conversation covering SAP SAPPHIRE 2017 in Orlando. I'm John Furrier here for special coverage. Our next guest is Margaret Anderson, Senior Vice President of the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. Thanks for joining me today. Talking about the news and the relationships, what's happening around SAPPHIRE. A lot of great things are happening. One of the super exciting thing that we're seeing is, this notion of multi-cloud, this notion of customer value. Starting to see some visibility into a clear line of sight around how the technology in the cloud can be put into use. You guys have some exciting news around some of your partnerships with Cisco and CenturyLink. Tell us about that. >> Yeah we're very excited about that. In the sense that, customers are always asking us, why the cloud and why now. Why don't I just stay with what I have. And we keep telling them that as technology changes, we want to be on top of it for them. And they don't have to think about it. They just have to use it. So we're making it easier for them to consume our technology. But for us to be able to do that, we need partners. We need partners that can be the backbone inside the cloud. Because the cloud is supported by equipment, machinery, systems, all sorts of things that we don't really want the customer to worry about that. We want the customer to consume the services. We want them to run their business. So when we formed the partnership with the Cisco and CenturyLink team, the best thing about it is the fact that we have a partner who creates the engine, who puts together our HANA reference architecture, who sets everything up so the customer doesn't have to think about it. And then we have the CenturyLink team, who provides all the services. They make sure everything works. They listen to what the customer needs and they make sure it all runs together. >> This is important and I want to highlight this and I want to ask another followup question on that. I think this really speaks to the cloud transformation we're seeing. Digital transmission, whatever you want to call it. Certainly it's the cloud, it's data. And Bill McDermott has been on this for years. It's our eighth year of covering SAPPHIRE. He was showing data dashboards years ago, so he's been Nostradamus in the whole vision there. But cloud has been a moving train. And your customers and CenturyLink customers and Cisco customers are constantly questioning themselves around their relationships that they have and the business that they run. This is important because what you're highlighting is, you guys have been no stranger to partnering. >> Correct. >> Now that the cloud stakes are high, the value to the customer at CenturyLink is that they can provide no disruption. I want to get into that a little bit. What at Sapphire is being announced that's going to help this. >> Well I think that customers are always interested in global reach. They might be starting locally in one country and they want to know that when they partner with us SAP, or when we SAP partner with someone else to help us, that when their business grows, we're ready for them and we can grow with them. And in the cloud, customers just assume that somewhere is all the equipment, somewhere the cloud runs. But today, security is really important for our customers. They want to know, can we comply with the rules for data sovereignty in various countries around the world. And they want to know if our partners, if we choose one to work with us, can also do that for them. >> I was just saying I was just having a conversation with a group of experts and influences this morning, on our crowd chat digital platform; question that came up is, what's the biggest misconception of dev-op or cloud in the enterprise? And the number one question that came up was oh, it's easy. That's the number one misconception. And it's not easy. [Margaret] Chuckles. There's a lot of things going on around compliance, governance, but also SLA performance around latency. Little things like, >> Yes. >> Moving packets around and making applications bulletproof and security. How does this relationship with CenturyLink and Cisco make that a reality for customers so they can be confident. Things are going to be secure, and these implementations are going to be reliable. >> Well first of all, at SAP we've defined a very specific reference architecture. So the Cisco team builds the environment for the customer according to that architectural standard. Our security team provides guidance on what the security standards have to be. And between our CenturyLink team and our Cisco team, they have to make sure that those standards are deployed. And that we are completely hack-proof. Because you know it, everybody out there trying to get into customer systems. Data is very valuable. Business knowledge could destroy you if a competitor could find something out about you. We want to promise our customers that everything is secure. And that we have a team of ace security experts and we all collaborate together to make sure that we can keep the environment safe. >> Cloud enabled IT infrastructure and application development and all these SLAs that are required in the cloud are going to be interesting. In our next segment, we're going to have Cisco and CenturyLink on. >> Umhmm. >> What are they going to be saying? When we ask them about the relationship what are some of the things they're going to say about what this all means for SAP, Cisco and CenturyLink. >> I think, I won't put words in anybody's mouth, but I know that the Cisco team, >> John: But we will. >> Is looking at the fact that they're doing a lot of business today on-premise. And customers are getting out of having their own data centers because it's not cost effective for them. So when the customers is thinking about the cloud, and they happen to like the environment that they have, they want to know that they can have a similar environment in the cloud. Because realistically, customers still ask the question, what's under the hood? What am I getting? How do I know that you can provide these SLAs? What are you doing to guarantee me the 99.9 uptime? So customers do ask us those questions. Cisco has excellent answers for those questions. And they also ask the CenturyLink team, what is your expertise in HANA and what is your expertise in running all the other applications that I might want to consume from SAP? So it's the combination of the engine and the people that make the success in the cloud. Because that's how we deliver the services to the customers. >> And also to complicate things, I would say that customers want things faster now. >> Yes they do. >> Not just faster latency and speed of solutions but performance but like deployments. I want it yesterday. That's a big factor, the deployment expectations for the customers are pretty high. >> Sometimes the customers think that they can call us up and they can say I'd like to do a cloud project. And then 24 hours later, magically, all sorts of stuff can appear. That's not always the case. Because every customer has a unique set of things that they'll like to see in the cloud. When they tell us what they need and we recommend how to set it up for them, we work with them on when to deliver it. And I've worked with customers on some very large implementation complicated projects, it still requires the same amount of thought process from an implementation perspective when you do it on-premise as if you do it in the cloud. Because you still have to think about what you want to use, and how you want to use it, and when you want to go-live. >> Lots going on at SAPPHIRE. Just to wrap up, we're going to bring on our guests from Cisco and CenturyLink in our next segment, talk about this relationship. But just in general, what's your perspective of the things that are happening right now around SAPPHIRE NOW 2017. What's the big exciting announcements if you can generalize the theme. What's the sentiment, what's the aroma of the buzz. >> Well, I would think first of all our new Leonardo announcement is going to generate an awful lot of excitement in the market. And I'm not going to steal anybody's thunder by talking some more about what that is. But I also think customers want to know that we are keeping up and that we are ahead of, more importantly, the technology trends. So when we have a big event like SAPPHIRE, we make sure to have announcements keyed up and ready to go. And each day we will tease them with releases of what some of these information is going to be. So that it generates excitement because post SAPPHIRE, we'll be doing a lot of followup conversations with our customers. >> One of the things I observed, just as anecdotal to that is that, I think, I like SAP. Always had good strategy with the data. As I mentioned about McDermott earlier, but I think the developer stake in the ground that was put in last year, around the IOS with the Apple, set the tone over the course of last year, hey, we're going outside of the SAP traditional developer, we're going to expand the reach of what a developer is. >> Margaret: Right. >> That cloud native view is very relevant. I think you're leading the charge on that. So congratulations. >> Well, we are. And we have converted what used to be the traditional on-premise software code lines into cloud code lines. And that means a lot of work internally that people may not realize that you just don't have what you used to have run one way and throw it into the cloud. You really have to think about and develop for specifically the cloud. >> Well, super impressed to see the partnership evolution where you're really bring the big players in partnership delivering real value. Congratulations. Thanks for coming on. In our next segment we're going to have Cisco and CenturyLink on to discuss the relationship with SAP, Cisco and CenturyLink. Great combination, up and down the stack. Great benefit for customers. Again thanks so much. This is theCUBE. More coverage of SAPPHIRE NOW after this short break.

[Narrator] It's The Cube. Covering SAPPHIRE NOW 2017. Brought to you by: SAP Cloud Platform, and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Welcome back everyone live here in Palo Alto for our studio coverage of SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2017. I'm John Furrier of The Cube. Three days of SAPPHIRE NOW coverage from our 4500 square foot studio in Palo Alto covering all the action news on the ground in Orlando, Florida where SAP SAPPHIRE NOW is taking place. The big news and big story of SAPPHIRE is the cloud, multi-cloud strategy and what it means for customers. This is part of SAP's Cloud Platform. I had a chance to sit down with the leader of that team, Dan Lahl, who is the Vice President of Product Marketing. I asked Dan to break down the big news for SAP Cloud Platform. Here's the conversation with myself and Dan Lahl. >> What we're announcing at SAPPHIRE this week is we are going to be running SAP Cloud Platform not only in SAP data centers, but also in AWS data centers, in Azure data centers and in GCP data centers. So, we really now are above the fray of the infrastructure wars. >> It's actually, we also talked with your team at SAP Cloud Platform around Google Next. >> Dan: Yeah. >> And, you guys had a significant announcement. The folks flew in from Germany, the big entourage on-stage with Diane Greene's team at Google, and I was scratching my heading saying I didn't even see this coming, you kind of kept it from me. (chuckles) I knew you had something up your sleeve. Significant presence with Google. So I ping the Amazon folks and say hey what's going on, you lose Hensburg? They said no, no we're doing a lot of great stuff with SAP. Of course, Google is trotted out there as a big win. But this is the strategy for SAP, and Andy Jassy was in San Francisco a while back and he said look, we are winning with more services, more services. But, he made a point. The lock-in spec of the old, and he also talked about the, you can't fight gravity. The old way to buy infrastructure is just taking it down. >> It's dead, it's dead. And our view is we're going to be a software company, right? We're not going to play at the hardware layer, we're going to play above that and differentiate with business services above that. Let the customers decide what they think the best hyper-scale vendor is. We'll give them great software, business services above those layers. >> So, I think multi-cloud is the hottest trend that nobody's talking about. You guys are talking about it obviously, but in the press corps, in the media, no one's actually really digging into this because it's very nuanced. It's an industry kind of thing. But having multi-cloud is like interoperability back in the networking days. >> Dan: That's right. >> And just to be clear, you guys are still behind a hundred percent with AWS, Amazon Web Services, >> Dan: Absolutely, yep. >> and Microsoft Azure. >> Yep, and GCP as well. And then you want to run it at an SAP data center you can do that too, and we'll give customers one cockpit, one piece of glass to manage all those different environments. >> So your PaaS is on Google Cloud Platform >> Yep. >> At Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services. >> To be perfectly clear, GA on AWS, beta on Azure and we're doing a pilot showcase on GCP. That's cool -- >> So that's platforms of service. >> That's right. >> Now that's a completely different strategy than say Oracle. >> Yeah, let's lock you in one more time. Let's lock you in to cloud. >> But they have hardware, and they're going frontal attack against Amazon and vice versa. There's a war going on between the two. That's not what SAP's trying to do, I don't see you making any noise out there. >> To me that's a race to the bottom. That's a race to the bottom. So we're going to provide business services above that hardware layer with the PaaS and then business services above that to help customers. >> So, managing Cloud Workloads is also another topic and this is being talked a lot in context to hybrid clouds. So hybrid cloud obviously is a big deal. A lot of people are moving to public cloud and Andy Jassy says they're happening much faster. I kind of disagree with Andy on this point. I think he's got momentum for sure, and I love what they're doing, but I don't think they're moving as fast. Still got a lot of on-premise. This is your world as well at SAP, so you have to kind of build the connectors if you will. Connectors or API. So, a lot of customers want to know what to do, and then so multi-cloud I think's going to be super important. >> Dan: Yes. >> But I still got the on-premise investment in systems of record, systems of software, that need to enable opportunities for new app development and what-not. How do you talk to customers about that? >> That's not going away. That is not going away for ten years. So, hybrid cloud's going to be with us. So our strategy is we will provide integration services, whether that be at the data layer, whether it be at the process layer, or whether that be through API or microservices. We're going all-in on all of those. So, if you want to connect a business process that you've built in Cloud Platform with an on-premise system, you can do that whether that's SAP or a not SAP. If you want to use APIs and use that infrastructure, we're exposing more and more APIs. In fact, this week we're announcing over a hundred APIs being exposed for S/4HANA, in the finance area for Ariba, for SuccessFactors, for Fieldglass. And then we're adding actually specific APIs for specific business functions. So, do a billing off an invoice, collect data, collect information off a purchase order. We're exposing those higher level services as well. So, integration is huge and again we've been in the data services as well, so you want to move data to the cloud we're providing services to do that too. >> So, two things that are jumping out at me looking at what you guys are doing this week at SAPPHIRE is this API connector. So you're connecting the SAP world into the cloud. And certainly the platform is a service that you have in the platform, the cloud platform is fundamental. But, there's a big buzz around marketplaces. So talk about some of the new things you're doing there because I think this where it gets kind of interesting and it lets us get your perspective on what you guys are announcing, and your thoughts on this notion of the apps center, marketplace, I mean Amazon Web Services is doing a lot of great things. They think that the consumption pattern in the future will all be driven by some sort of app center. You guys are in the software business. I'm assuming that's a big part of what you got doing, what's new? >> Yeah, very exciting for marketplace as well. So, we're extending the value of the app center for our customers. So today you want to look at a partner application, you can go look at it, you can discover it, but you really can't do more than that off the app center. So, today what we're announcing, or this week at SAPPHIRE, the ability discover, to learn, to try, to buy, and to use all directly off the app center. And in further on to that, we'll manage the application for the partner and for the customer. So, if the partner updates their application, automatically gets downloaded and updated through the marketplace, through the app center. >> I've been reading a lot of stuff on the cloud and AI and use the line 'talk to me like I'm a, pretend I'm a five-year old.' People have been using that quote a lot. So, pretend that I'm a customer, I'm not a five-year old, but a customer that's not under the hood, might not be following all the trends. Here's my challenge. I'm on-prem, I'm moving to the cloud, and I just haven't decided yet who I want to look at and John hasn't posted his competitive matrix yet, so I don't know he feels, and I got that coming out, a little plug for my upcoming research, (Dan laughs) but they have a relationship with Microsoft, I have a relationship with SAP, I love Google's got the Mojo with TensorFlow and Machine Learning and all the smart engineers they have. And Amazon is just awesome. I just don't know yet which ones. Can I just choose from the app center? >> Absolutely. >> John: Cloud, any cloud that I want? Or -- >> Well, it's really for any partner that's built on the cloud platform today. So, as we move forward with the multi-cloud you're going to see that happening. >> John: But that's a trend you guys see. >> We definitely see that. And you're right, we want to make it like a five-year old. You want to discover, you want to try, you want to use. That's what we do with the app center today. >> So the other thing I liked about Mobile World Congress when we did chat last, you guys announced in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress this notion of Workflow. What is the new with that? Cause there's some news around some new things you're doing with Workflow. What do you have? >> Yeah, so we're extending Workflow with actually a rules system as well, so we've added a new service to go along with Workflow called Business Rules. So, now you can mash up workflows as we've talked before, mash up some business processes. But now you can actually use the rules system to open up each business process, add logic into that, and as a business analyst it's really if-then type of capability. So pretty easy. Put that, close it back up, now you have a whole new business process or an extended business processes in using Workflow and Rules together. >> So you make it more flexible for the Workflow to get -- >> Let the business analysts deliver more value in their job, and extend business processes more easily. >> What about the app developer? I'm an app developer, I want to take advantage of all the greatness of SAP. What mechanisms are you guys announcing or talking about at SAPPHIRE this year that make my life easier? Without being an expert on SAP, is there any mechanism for me to say hey I want some Rules and app goodness coming into my app? >> Yeah, we have all-new tooling that we're going to be talking about at SAPPHIRE, so we have some relationships we're building with other partners to do high-productivity application work. And then we're extending our Web IDE development tool to be a full stack development environment. Whether you want to do it via the web, whether you want to do it via mobile, if you want to integrate other combinations, other technologies like Slack or other technologies in there. You can do all that in the Web IDE development tool. >> So I can add business services into the API. >> Into the Web IDE, and you can extend the Web IDE like we've done with Slack. So, you just create another tab and import that tool into the Web IDE. So, very easy for developers now to create applications that will run seamlessly on Cloud Platform. >> Let's just take a step back while you're on this topic. This is interesting, DevOps has been the movement that has gone mainstream now with things that we're talking about here. Your philosophy with the developer is what, to just give them SAP all day long? What's the main value proposition for the platform as a service that you have for the developer? >> So, my joke is with Cloud Platform we're able to talk to developers under 40 because it's a Java-based environment. So, what we get with the Cloud Foundry work that we've done with the multi-PaaS and that's how we're doing -- >> John: Oh yeah, everyone over 40 still likes Java too, so we learned about Java >> Me too. (both laugh) So anyway, what we're delivering through multi-cloud we're doing it through Cloud Foundry, and that gives the ability to have multiple run-times. So for those folks that want to use no doT.js they can use that. They want to use different languages like Ruby, Python, Perl, Go, those languages, they can use those as well. So, our view is whatever language, whatever run-time you want to bring to the party, SAP will have this environment where you can develop and deploy in that. And we bring all the mobile technology that we've had for years and years and years if you want to deploy on mobile you can do that too. So I think where we've been lacking in the past is some of the high-productivity tools. So we're adding high-productivity capabilities for our mobile development as well as for core development too. >> Bottom line me on how you would package this up, because there's so much going on at SAPPHIRE. What's the net, net, net? What's the bottom line, because how, gimme the elevator pitch real quick. What's the big news that -- >> Here's the real sound bite. >> -- to set SAP Cloud Platform. >> Yeah, the real sound bite is we're accelerating choice, accelerating adoption, and accelerating ease of use for our customers to be able to adopt cloud. So you get your choice through multi-cloud. You get your choice of different applications that you can do business directly on, and then you're getting choice and capabilities through all of the services. >> What are you most excited about, to point to one thing say look at this new feature. >> It's multi-cloud. We think multi-cloud, as you said, it's the hottest thing going today. We are all-in on multi-cloud. And you'll see us deliver more and more capabilities and services that run on whatever infrastructure provider you want to run on. So, again we're a software company. We're not going to participate at the hardware layer. We're going up, not going down. >> I recently interviewed the CTO of Analytics at Accenture here on one of my shows. He got a huge amount of views. There's a huge interest in analytics. Obviously not something new to you guys, but Accenture's a partner. And that brings up the question, this is all great, you got the cloud relationship so essentially you guys look at cloud the same way you looked at hardware vendors in the past. They're partners, SAP doesn't really change your game, you're still doing the software, still provide all that business intelligence to your customers through software. But I got to ask you the impact to partners, cause they're changing. >> Dan: They are changing. >> Accenture, Deloitte, all of them that, all the top guys out there are changing. >> They're having to become ISVs. It's pretty amazing. They're having to do more than just coming in with a big pitch saying a million dollars in two years. So what we see Accenture, Deloitte, others doing, is providing actual full applications now as an ISV and Deloitte and Accenture have actually done that both through cloud platform. And they're also becoming prototyping and PoC specialists as well. So, they'll come in, they'll do a design thinking with our customer, they'll prototype it, they'll PoC it on the Cloud Platform, do something in four weeks, prove out a concept so that they can then go to the next level, the next step on the agreement. >> Yeah, they're becoming much more strategic with the customers. Well, they always had been, I'm not saying they hadn't in the past. >> But not just implementation, right? It's actually proving that they can do something new in digital transformation, for example. >> I mean, back in the old days SAP ERP roll out in the 80s and early 90s. It was a gravy train for the integrators. >> Yeah. >> You know, the time tables were multi-year. And to your point, the world has changed with Agile that they have to then break down these milestones and have proof of value. Time to value is much shorter, so it's still lucrative, but just different execution cadence. Can you talk about that? >> And just think about that, with the value they're providing they're actually bringing a prototype or a PoC that's a proof point, a proven part of the application that they're going to show to the customer so that they can get to that next level of application development with the customer. So it's really much more of a partnership, and we get to be the platform on which they're running which is the cool part for us. >> Dan, thanks for coming. This Cube conversation's special on SAPPHIRE what's happening around all the new announcements. What should people be looking at this week? What cool things have you got going on on the ground in Orlando? >> Yeah, come to our campus. Come see all the cool things we're doing. Not just what I've talked about, but also IoT that runs on Cloud Platform, Machine Learning AI that runs on Cloud Platform, big data that runs on Cloud Platform. All of the new applications we're bringing that are part of Cloud Platform as well that run on top of the Platform. So, we are truly becoming a pretty cool cog in the SAP wheel. >> Well, great strategy, I'll say it's really brilliant. It's actually mapped the old SAP onto a modern world with cloud as infrastructure. You got the multi-cloud vision, I think that's very relevant. I still, it's still early, early innings stage, but certainly great with the PaaS applied from as a service. The API in the app center, all the new services, great for partners, great for SAP. And again, you're not Oracle. Oracle's fighting all the cloud guys directly. You guys are, you're Switzerland here. >> Exactly. >> Congratulations, thanks for spending the time and breaking it down, appreciate it. >> Dan: Thank you John, appreciate your time today. >> Hi, I'm John Furrier, this is a Cube conversation about SAPPHIRE 2017 with SAP Cloud Platform's Dan Lahl, who's the Vice President of Product Marketing. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (tech music)

>> Announcer: From San Jose, California, it's The Cube, covering Big Data Silicon Valley 2017. >> Welcome back everyone. We are at Big Data Silicon Valley, running in conjunction with Strata + Hadoop World in San Jose. I'm George Gilbert and I'm joined by Raymie Stata, and Raymie was most recently CEO and Founder of Altiscale. Hadoop is a service vendor. One of the few out there, not part of one of the public clouds. And in keeping with all of the great work they've done, they got snapped up by SAP. So, Rami, since we haven't seen you, I think on The Cube since then, why don't you catch us up with all that, the good work that's gone on between you and SAP since then. >> Sure, so the acquisition closed back in September, so it's been about six months. And it's been a very busy six months. You know, there's just a lot of blocking and tackling that needs to happen. So, you know, getting people on board. Getting new laptops, all that good stuff. But certainly a huge effort for us was to open up a data center in Europe. We've long had demand to have that European presence, both because I think there's a lot of interest over in Europe itself, but also large, multi-national companies based in the US, you know, it's important for them to have that European presence as well. So, it was a natural thing to do as part of SAP, so kind of first order of business was to expand over into Europe. So that was a big exercise. We've actually had some good traction on the sales side, right, so we're getting new customers, larger customers, more demanding customers, which has been a good challenge too. >> So let's pause for a minute on, sort of unpack for folks, what Altiscale offered, the core services. >> Sure. >> That were, you know, here in the US, and now you've extended to Europe. >> Right. So our core platform is kind of Hadoop, Hive, and Spark, you know, as a service in the cloud. And so we would offer HDFS and YARN for Hadoop. Spark and Hive kind of well-integrated. And we would offer that as a cloud service. So you would just, you know, get an account, login, you know, store stuff in HDFS, run your Spark programs, and the way we encourage people to think about it is, I think very often vendors have trained folks in the big data space to think about nodes. You know, how many nodes am I going to get? What kind of nodes am I going to get? And the way we really force people to think twice about Hadoop and what Hadoop as a service means is, you know, they don't, why are you asking that? You don't need to know about nodes. Just store stuff, run your jobs. We worry about nodes. And that, you know, once people kind of understood, you know, just how much complexity that takes out of their lives and how that just enables them to truly focus on using these technologies to get business value, rather that operating them. You know, there's that aha moment in the sales cycle, where people say yeah, that's what I want. I want Hadoop as a service. So that's been our value proposition from the beginning. And it's remained quite constant, and even coming into SAP that's not changing, you know, one bit. >> So, just to be clear then, it's like a lot of the operational responsibilities sort of, you took control over, so that when you say, like don't worry about nodes, it's customer pours x amount of data into storage, which in your case would be HDFS, and then compute is independent of that. They need, you spin up however many, or however much capacity they need, with Spark for instance, to process it, or Hive. Okay, so. >> And all on demand. >> Yeah so it sounds like it's, how close to like the Big Query or Athena services, Athena on AWS or Big Query on Google? Where you're not aware of any servers, either for storage or for compute? >> Yeah I think that's a very good comparable. It's very much like Athena and Big Query where you just store stuff in tables and you issue queries and you don't worry about how much compute, you know, and managing it. I think, by throwing, you know, Spark in the equation, and YARN more generally, right, we can handle a broader range of these cases. So, for example, you don't have to store data in tables, you can store them into HDFS files which is good for processing log data, for example. And with Spark, for example, you have access to a lot of machine learning algorithms that are a little bit harder to run in the context of, say, Athena. So I think it's the same model, in terms of, it's fully operated for you. But a broader platform in terms of its capabilities. >> Okay, so now let's talk about what SAP brought to the table and how that changed the use cases that were appropriate for Altiscale. You know, starting at the data layer. >> Yeah, so, I think the, certainly the, from the business perspective, SAP brings a large, very engaged customer base that, you know, is eager to embrace, kind of a data-driven mindset and culture and is looking for a partner to help them do that, right. And so that's been great to be in that environment. SAP has a number of additional technologies that we've been integrating into the Altiscale offering. So one of them is Vora, which is kind of an interactive sequel engine, it also has time series capabilities and graph capabilities and search capabilities. So it has a lot of additive capabilities, if you will, to what we have at Altiscale. And it also integrates very deeply into HANA itself. And so we now have that for a technology available as a service at Altiscale. >> Let me make sure, so that everyone understands, and so I understand too, is that so you can issue queries from HANA and they can, you know, beyond just simple sequel queries, they can handle the time series, and predictive analytics, and access data sort of seamlessly that's in Hadoop, or can it go the other way as well? >> It's both ways. So you can, you know, from HANA you can essentially federate out into Vora. And through that access data that's in a Hadoop cluster. But it's also the other way around. A lot of times there's an analyst who really lives in the big data world, right, they're in the Hadoop world, but they want to join in data that's sitting in a HANA database, you know. Might be dimensions in a warehouse or, you know, customer details even in a transactional system. And so, you know, that Hadoop-based analyst now has access to data that's out in those HANA databases. >> Do you have some Lighthouse accounts that are working with this already? >> Yes, we do. (laughter) >> Yes we do, okay. I guess that was the diplomatic way of saying yes. But no comment. Alright, so tell us more about SAPs big data stack today and how that might evolve. >> Yeah, of course now, especially that now we've got the Spark, Hadoop, Hive offering that we have. And then four sitting on top of that. There's an offering called Predictive Analytics, which is Spark-based predictive analytics. >> Is that something that came from you, or is that, >> That's an SAP thing, so this is what's been great about the acquisition is that SAP does have a lot of technologies that we can now integrate. And it brings new capabilities to our customer base. So those three are kind of pretty key. And then there's something called Data Services as well, which allows us to move data easily in and out of, you know, HANA and other data stores. >> Is it, is this ability to federate queries between Hadoop and HANA and then migration of the data between the stores, does that, has that changed the economics of how much data people, SAP customers, maintain and sort of what types of apps they can build on it now that they might, it's economically feasible to store a lot more data. >> Well, yes and no. I think the context of Altiscale, both before and after the acquisition is very often there's, what you might call a big data source, right. It could be your web logs, it could be some IOT generated log data, it could be social media streams. You know, this is data that's, you know, doesn't have a lot of structure coming in. It's fairly voluminous. It doesn't, very naturally, go into a sequel database, and that's kind of the sweet spot for the big data technologies like Hadoop and Spark. So, those datas come into your big data environment. You can transform it, you can do some data quality on it. And then you can eventually stage it out into something like HANA data mart, where it, you know, to make it available for reporting. But obviously there's stuff that you can do on the larger dataset in Hadoop as well. So, in a way, yes, you can now tame, if you will, those huge data sources that, you know, weren't practical to put into HANA databasing. >> If you were to prioritize, in the context of, sort of, the applications SAP focuses on, would you be, sort of, with the highest priority use case be IOT related stuff, where, you know, it was just prohibitive to put it in HANA since it's mostly in memory. But, you know, SAP is exposed to tons of that type of data, which would seem to most naturally have an afinity to Altiscale. >> Yeah, so, I mean, IOT is a big initiative. And is a great use case for big data. But, you know, financial-to-financial services industry, as another example, is fairly down the path using Hadoop technologies for many different use cases. And so, that's also an opportunity for us. >> So, let me pop back up, you know, before we have to wrap. With Altiscale as part of the SAP portfolio, have the two companies sort of gone to customers with a more, with more transformational options, that, you know, you'll sell together? >> Yeah, we have. In fact, Altiscale actually is no longer called Altiscale, right? We're part of a portfolio of products, you know, known as the SAP Cloud Platform. So, you know, under the cloud platform we're the big data services. The SAP Cloud Platform is all about business transformation. And business innovation. And so, we bring to that portfolio the ability to now bring the types of data sources that I've just discussed, you know, to bear on these transformative efforts. And so, you know, we fit into some momentum SAP already has, right, to help companies drive change. >> Okay. So, along those lines, which might be, I mean, we know the financial services has done a lot of work with, and I guess telcos as well, what are some of the other verticals that look like they're primed to fall, you know, with this type of transformational network? >> So you mentioned one, which I kind of call manufacturing, right, and there tends to be two kind of different use cases there. One of them I call kind of the shop floor thing. Where you're collecting a lot of sensor data, you know, out of a manufacturing facility with the goal of increasing yield. So you've got the shop floor. And then you've got the, I think, more commonly discussed measuring stuff out in the field. You've got a product, you know, out in the field. Bringing the telemetry back. Doing things like predictive meetings. So, I think manufacturing is a big sector ready to go for big data. And healthcare is another one. You know, people pulling together electronic medical records, you know trying to combine that with clinical outcomes, and I think the big focus there is to drive towards, kind of, outcome-based models, even on the payment side. And big data is really valuable to drive and assess, you know, kind of outcomes in an aggregate way. >> Okay. We're going to have to leave it on that note. But we will tune back in at I guess Sapphire or TechEd, whichever of the SAP shows is coming up next to get an update. >> Sapphire's next. Then TechEd. >> Okay. With that, this is George Gilbert, and Raymie Stata. We will be back in few moments with another segment. We're here at Big Data Silicon Valley. Running in conjunction with Strata + Hadoop World. Stay tuned, we'll be right back.

(click) >> Hey, welcome everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Well, it is an excited day and we're really happy to be covering big announcements coming out of Google Next today. And we wanted to get right down here to SAP Silicon Valley Headquarters and talk to Sam Yen and get his take on what's happening up in San Francisco today. So, first off, Sam great to see ya. >> Yeah, great to see you as well. >> So, Sam you are the Managing Director of SAP Silicon Valley. Obviously, you guys have a big presence in Philly, and a big presence here in Paulo Alto. And also the Chief Design Officer. So, let's just jump into it. So, Bernd Leukert was onstage with Diane Green this morning kicking off the Google Next Conference and talking about this new relationship between SAP and Google. >> I think, first of all, it's the trend in what the industry's happening right now. If you look at companies, companies are more and more willing to go to the public cloud in terms of helping them with their infrastructure needs. The market is actually really going to double between now and 2020. So, with that we have three major announcements that we announced today. The first one was SAP's flagship products running on GCP, Google's Cloud Platform. The first one is HANA. If you know anything about SAP, HANA's been our data processing engine, memory processing engine for the last number of years. It's our flagship product that we've been talking about. And that's now certified for GCP. The second thing is really more for the, it's still part of the first announcement, but for the development community bringing HANA Express which is a downloadable version of HANA that you can put on your laptop and really get to know what HANA's all about and see how easy it is to develop on top of HANA. So, that's now available on Google Cloud Launcher. Also, SAP's cloud platform is also going to be, we're working very closely together to co-innovate together with Google. The second part of the second announcement, is taking infrastructure as a service to the next level. SAP has always had a multi-cloud strategy offering customers choice in where they want to deploy on public cloud. And Google is now available from that perspective. But beyond just infrastructure to service, we want to partner with Google to take things like data privacy and protection to the next level by offering transparency over how customers monitor and understand what's going on from the governance, risk and compliance perspective on their information. The last thing, which is really exciting as well, is bringing together productivity tools together with SAP. Google's G Suite, things like Mail and Sheets and Hangouts and things like that, and making that integrate seamlessly into the SAP backend system. >> So, so many layers to these announcements. And thank you for laying it all down. The first one, just at a high level, is clearly enterprises are comfortable with public cloud. There's now more enterprisy software firm out there than SAP. And for you guys to really get together with Google and Google Cloud, that really shows that the conversation is no longer about, "Should I go to the cloud?" or "Is the cloud safe?" or "Is it appropriate for enterprise?" But enterprises are fully all in. >> That's definitely the trend. Customers are different in their journey but more and more we're seeing that. And the numbers that I talked about in terms of the investment and spend for public cloud is growing through the roof. At the end of the day, SAP from an SAP perspective, and also from a Google perspective, we want to provide as many options for customers as we can. And we think that by doing this we're providing the best potential solutions for where a customer thinks they need to be today and tomorrow. >> Right, and it's really about workloads, right? It's not even specifically about customers. 'Cause you guys still have Google Cloud, or excuse me, SAP Cloud, recently the HANA Cloud platform recently renamed. So, you still have your own cloud if they want their own kind of enterprise cloud that you're going to run for them. Obviously, they can run SAP on their own internal cloud now you're saying they can run SAP on Google's cloud. But it's really more workload and application and use case specific as opposed to a company. >> Yeah, and I think ultimately options for the customer in terms of their particular situation. Yes, SAP will continue to have our own hosting, our own cloud as well. But you also mentioned SAP Cloud Platform. So, there's many, many different ways from a platform as a service perspective, enterprise services that we provide from a SAP perspective running on Google's infrastructure. And also leveraging the Google services that they provide on their Cloud Platform as well. >> Right, another piece that you said kind of towards the end of many, many announcements happening today, is really the developer angle. Every show, we cover a hundred shows a year, and every one is fighting for the attention of the developer, and really trying to cater to the developer. 'Cause that's where the power is. And you want a robust developer ecosystem because that's what moves things forward. So, this is a pretty interesting announcement now that developers can basically download a version of HANA onto their laptop to have an appeal to help them develop more stuff for you. >> Yeah, and I think the broader statement here is we're combining the power of the SAP development ecosystem with the millions and millions of people also in the Google development ecosystem to build solutions for customers. At the end of the day, the power of your offering is really the power of your ecosystem. And it's kind of interesting, being here in a German company actually in Silicon Valley from an SAP perspective, enterprise seems to be the new black right now. There are more consumer brands that are looking at going into the enterprise. And SAP's starting to become more and more an on-ramp into the enterprise for these companies. >> And it's interesting because public clouds, traditionally, years ago weren't really thought of as a true enterprise solution or maybe test but you'd never run your production workloads. But clearly now that's going away. That said, there's a lot of very specific issues that you have to deal with with the enterprise security, compliance, the rules around the world that are different for data sovereignty, etc. So, you guys bring a real depth of experience in those areas to this new announcement. >> Yeah, I think that's the power of the partnership if you think about Google and the public cloud, the scalability, the availability, the reach of the Google public cloud and their expertise in terms of the infrastructure and the operations. And then you combine that with SAP's experience in terms of what works from a governance, risk and compliance perspective. We have an understanding both with customers and their needs. And also working with local governments and the policies that need to be in place. So, I think it's a beautiful combination of the two companies. >> Now, the next kind of big trend that cloud is helping even accelerate more is A.I. and machine learning and you know, we're kind of going to Phase Two of what was formerly known as Big Data and Hadoop and now were moving to a much more sophisticated version of that enabled by cloud. Obviously, Google's got a ton of expertise in machine learning and A.I. You guys have been doing it on the enterprise side. Again, coming together, one plus one makes three? >> Absolutely, this is one of the exciting things that we're also, we've also talked about and announced, that we are partnering with Google to really take machine learning to the enterprise use cases. There's so much information that's going through enterprise systems. More and more information as things like Big Data, and Internet of Things, and social things are bringing information in. This is really, really fruitful area where think there's a lot of collaboration. Also, from a design perspective, once you have this information, how do you expose this stuff to the users that makes sense and really amplify human capabilities when we're talking about all this technology. >> Right, so you're sitting 6,000 miles from Waldorf, 3,000 miles from Philadelphia. How does this change things for you? You said you've been at SAP for a number of years now. You're sitting in the heart of Silicon Valley. What does this mean to you, kind of personally, and to SAP's presence in Silicon Valley to do this partnership with Google who's just right down the road and clearly one of the main powers. >> Yeah, I think it really talks about the importance of SAP's presence here in Silicon Valley. Again, as an on-ramp into the enterprise. There's lots and lots of partners that want to expand their business and figure out how they can bring their services also to the enterprise. It's almost like consumerization of IT if you will. And really, that's SAP's purpose and reason for being here. >> All right, well Sam I'll give you the last word. Great event today. Really exciting but before we know it SAP Sapphire will be upon us. I presume you guys will keep working tomorrow and have something new and special for us in Sapphire. >> Yeah, Google and SAP, we're in it for the long term. This is just the beginning. And look out for exciting announcements coming in Sapphire as well. >> All right, super. He's Sam Yen, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (energetic, techno music)

>> Man: Hold on, let me check. (musical fanfare) >> Narrator: Live from Silicon Valley, it's the Cube, covering Google Cloud Next '17. (busy electronic music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live in Palo Alto Studios, looking at media as the Cube, our new 4500 square foot studio where we can do broadcasts here, and of course we're covering a two day special, coverage wall-to-wall with Google Next 2017 in San Francisco. We just had the exclusive video with Sam Yen from SAP talking about the new relationship between Google Cloud Platform and SAP, SAP HANA, and also SAP Cloud platform. On the phone right now with reaction to the news in San Francisco is Akash Agarwal, GVP with SAP, Cube alumni, good friend. Akash, welcome to the Cube coverage and thanks for taking the time. >> Akash: Thanks John, we are proud to helping out. >> Akash, you've been intimately involved in a variety of very cool things with SAP. One of them has been the Apple announcement where you guys have a strategic relationship with Apple Computer, and at Mobile World Congress you've released the general availability of the developer kit, SDK, now shipping. On the heels of that amazing news, you now have a deal with Google Cloud. You also have a deal with Amazon Web Services, to be clear, but this a pretty comprehensive strategic deal. All the heavy hitters flying in from Germany. We had talked to Sam, we're talking to you. What is the reaction in Moscone in San Francisco around the SAP Google relationship news? >> Akash: I think, so the reaction is very positive and I think what this sort of shows everybody here that our friends at Google are very serious about the enterprise, and as such, they have extended a very warm hand in partnering with SAP and bringing what I call transactional and enterprise workloads onto Google Cloud, and I think that's a very significant change from what Google Cloud was doing in the past, they are supporting all kinds of workloads, but they're now really focusing on helping enterprises kind of transition into the cloud. I think SAP can act as a massive catalyst for that effort. >> It also brings a huge amount of credibility to the Google Cloud Platform, certainly in the enterprise. SAP has been a leader, powering some of the biggest business in the world with your software system of records, certainly the database is evolving. You've had cloud, you've had HANA, data analytics for many years, I can almost, I think seven years I've been to Sapphire, Bill McDermott, and back then Schnabel, was talking about analytics. This really hits home, because Google has a great mind share with the developer community, they actually have great empathy, they understand developers and open source, certainly they understand cutting edge technology. But now with SAP, this seems to be a nice lucky strike and a lightning strike, if you will, for developers to monetize with SAP, because you guys have real big paying enterprise customers that could use some cloud native. Is that how you see it? Help us understand the impact to developers and then the impact to customers. >> Akash: Yeah, I think the opportunity is multifold, as I would explain it. Customers, our customers and Google customers can take SAP workloads onto Google Cloud, and that is in the form of taking HANA and running any applications that run on top of HANA onto Google Cloud. I think that's kind of one piece of the announcement that we've made today. The second piece, and I think that's what you're alluding to is around developers, and those developers could be our developers, SAP's 2.5 million developers, it could be a multitude of developers that are attracted to Google and all the services that Google provides. But what they can do now is to leverage SAP's HANA Express product which is a developer centric product, and then run that on Google Cloud Platform, and build applications that could leverage HANA technology and build next generation of applications, either applications that are net new that can take data from any data source, or applications that want to extract data from SAP. The final thing that we also now as part of our HANA cloud platform or SAP Cloud platform is the ability to take the cloud foundry components of our SAP Cloud Platform and make them available on Google Cloud Platform and that. That, as you can see, is a very rich environment. We've extended Google's palette of services to include our SAP Platform as a service components to help fast track developers who want to build enterprise class applications that want to interchange data that's already in SAP systems or want to store stuff in our HANA database that is now going to be able to run on Google Cloud Platform. I think that's what has been announced here. It's quite a lot and I think over the coming months, developers will be able to get access to that, and if they can get access to it, on the Google Cloud Launcher platform later today they should be able to get a copy of the SAP HANA Express product. >> What is the impact to SAP? Because we spoke recently at the Amazon Web Services reinvent, Akash, obviously, you have a relationship with them as well. But this really kind of gives SAP a new set of capabilities for developers that aren't familiar with SAP. You have, certainly, a huge ecosystem of developers that are SAP centric, now a new community's developing for SAP, how do you see that unfolding for SAP and what are you guys doing specifically to onboard those developers and really give them the seamless tooling that they need so that they don't have to worry about all the engineering and the back office, database. What goodness are you bringing to those developers to make their life? >> Well, and I think first and foremost we've expanded the market, we are giving them access to great public cloud platforms in Amazon AWS, in Microsoft's Azure, and now with Google Cloud Platform. Now, a developer that wants to develop using SAP Cloud platform and SAP HANA has a choice, and they can now, depending on the expertise they have, depending on what they want to do, they can very easily leverage any of those three major cloud platforms. We're giving them choice and I think the world wants choice. We're making it easy, so that's number one. Number two, our SAP Cloud platform enablement teams are there to help cross track people. We're making it easy for developers to start working on products that are easy for developers such as the HANA Express, and they can, 32 GB worth of data that they use is free to use, and then they can go to SAP store and get a license key, and then enable that license key on any of the other public cloud providers as they expand and extend their systems. As you can see, I think we're giving them choice, we're giving them a lot of capability in terms of enablement, and then we're giving them a product which they can get started with with no friction. >> I want to ask you a question, Akash, because I know you have a lot of industry's view of the landscape. I was clarifying this morning in a blog post and also here on the Cube that you really can't compare Google Cloud to Amazon, they're two different worlds. You have apples and oranges, if you will. Why, help people understand real quickly, why, what is the Google Cloud all about? Because we really want to separate that conversation, they're not really apples to apples, it still is cloud, but there are differences. What is the key take away for users and customers about Google Cloud and what's the differentiation for them vis a vis other approaches? >> Well, that's not something that, I'm not the world expert on Google Cloud Platform, and I think that's something our friends at Google can kind of give you a very good rundown on. But, obviously, Google prides itself at, instead of services that are very data centric, they have, obviously, decades of experience in running their own services, and they're opening up some of those capabilities and making them available to their customers. We felt that we need to kind of double down on Google Cloud Platform and support that just like we're supporting the AWS platform and Azure. We believe that these are three major cloud platforms, each of them have their own uniqueness and capabilities, that these companies market and promote. I think it's best that you get someone from Google to comment on some of the differences, because I think there are quite a few, and I would be remiss at highlighting those. >> That's fair, appreciate that, and we'll try to have someone on in 5:00, we'll hopefully get someone slotted in. Final question for you, Akash. What's in it for the developers? To share your perspective on what you're excited about, that developers that don't know SAP should be excited about. What's the real opportunity for them in relevant? >> I think today a Google Cloud Platform developer has suddenly a window into the SAP world. The SAP world is big, it's very rich in usage, and those customers are large, they're interesting customers doing very complex things. I think it opens them up to grabbing the digital transformation ways that's hitting a lot of customers. I think what this can do to those developers is give them a window into a world that they perhaps didn't have before, because today, with SAP technology becoming available on Google Cloud Platform, they could suddenly target enterprise use cases that perhaps they were not doing before. These are transactional use cases. Obviously, both transactional and analytical type use cases, what we call OLAP use cases suddenly become important. I think the IoT opportunities are very interesting for developers. The industrial Internet is in full swing. Just coming back from Mobile World Congress, I think that was the theme, everything is connected. We can get you access to the customer record, we can get you access to the product, the SKU, that's all in SAP systems, and suddenly, the developer can access those systems to build next generation engagement applications as part of a digital transformation that the company may be doing. >> Yeah, I think Google could lean on you guys a little bit too, for partnering with the IoT certainly. Not a lot mentioned, maybe we'll hear more tomorrow, but I do think that, if I'm a developer, I would look at you guys as a innovation ground for using AI and using that data analytics making it very intelligent. You have the store of the data, you have the database. Congratulations to Akash, really appreciate you taking the time, on the ground in San Francisco. Akash Agarwal, GVP at SAP, friend of the Cube, a regular contributor here on our new studio programs. Thanks so much for taking the time and giving us a reaction and breaking down the news for us on the SAP Google relationship. >> Akash: Thanks, John. >> OK, more live coverage of Google Next coming right up. Be right back. (busy electronic music)