>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin, on the ground, at SAPPHIRE NOW 2018 in the NetApp booth with Keith Townsend for the day. Keith and I are joined by Scott Feldman, the Global Head of SAP HANA and Leonardo Communities. Scott, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, great to be here. >> So, communities, plural. Why are... Tell us about the communities at SAP. Why is there specifically an SAP HANA community, before we get into Leonardo? >> Okay, well it's kinda fun because you saw one community and then they say, "Well, go do another community." So you do one, and it's like, okay do one. Do another one. So we have, at SAP, a global community that runs on the SAP.com platform. That's for everybody. That's for all customers, all partners, all analysts, everybody. That's normally called a SAP community. What we realized back in, around 2012 or 2013, is that we wanted to have a special place where our SAP HANA early adopter customers could go and join and network with each other on an online presence, right, and then have an opportunity to share their knowledge with each other and get more information from SAP. So we created a separate community on SAP HANA. It's actually a pretty easy URL, it's called SAPHANACommunity.com. It's pretty simple to remember. And now, we've doing this for about five, six years. >> So talk to us about what's unique about the HANA community outside of the technology. SAP Communities, in general's already pretty big, very active community. >> Correct. >> But what was the call out or what was the results of creating the HANA community? >> Great, and that's a great question. So what's really interesting about the SAP HANA community is that the topic and coverage of the content is specifically related to SAP HANA, data management, database tools and technologies, analytics, and other surrounding areas that are connected to that HANA platform as an anchor. So we have provided, over the past five years, almost 300, 300 webinars of content on SAP HANA technology. A lot of that content has come from SAP product managers, a lot of it's come from solution experts, partners as well, have provided content. And they're in the form of webinar frameworks as well as whitepapers and other content that's on there. Now, the people that join the community, which is all free by the way for the customers that join, are mainly our SAP customers. Now I'm proud to tell you, here and also SAPPHIRE 2018, we're here, we're over 6,100 or so members, globally, of the SAP HANA community. And what's really great about that is, you know, relative to some of the millions of numbers of people throughout for other communities, it seems like, you know, 6,000 plus is a small number. But you have to keep in mind that it's very targeted, right? So the people that are through the door, and our members of the community on the SAP HANA Jam, we have it on our SAP Jam site which is hosting the SAP cloud platform. These are people that really are interested in that topic. And they really wanna learn about SAP HANA and the technology surrounding SAP HANA. So they're very, very high-qualified, high-quality people. >> Very engaged, it sounds like. >> Absolutely. >> So, speaking of that, so this morning during Bill McDermott's keynote, he mentioned 23,000 HANA customers. >> Yes. >> You mentioned 6,000 actively engaging in your community. >> Yes. >> Collaboration was a big theme of this morning, talking about, this is not grandpa's CRM anymore, what SAP is doing to break that status quo. How influential are those customers engaging in the HANA community to its development and its evolution? >> That's a fantastic question. So what's happened is the community... Think of almost like a pyramid. So the community of the large, vast number of people who have joined the community for interest in topics have mostly consumed information, they are kinda the base line of the pyramid. Some of those customers have some great stories to tell. Okay, so what we did was we started a webinar series in 2013 called Spotlight. And I'll take credit for the name, actually, 'cause we call it the SAP HANA Spotlight. And essentially, what we're doing is, imagine the customer in a spotlight where they're sharing their journey. They're sharing their SAP HANA story and their journey. So we launched that a number of years ago and now we've done almost 80 separate HANA Spotlight webinars with customers that are sharing their stories. Well we even took it one step further beyond that. In 2013, some of the executives from our early adopting customers for SAP HANA, they came over to SAP and they said, "Gee, SAP, we're betting our career "and our company survival "on this new technology called SAP HANA," back in 2013. And they basically came to us and said, "I wanna have a council." So we wanna have a council of influence so that we have an opportunity to get together, share stories, share our journeys with each other, get to know who the other customers are that are also early adopters and are embarking on this journey with us together, and then, more importantly, to answer your question, feed that information back to SAP development so that we could, back at SAP, improve the product and come out with some additional features and functions and make it even better. Well that was 2013. Our very first meeting was up in Canada, in a suburb in Toronto, at one of our customer locations. We had 13 people in that meeting. Today, dial up six years, we're at over 750 members of an executive, so these are C-level VPS, senior IT, and chief architects that are in our community globally. We've done 24 meetings, I'm about to schedule the 25th meeting, and I've globalized that. And the customers, I thought they would've been tired of these kinds of meetings, they love it. They absolutely love it. So again, going back to that analogy, this is kind of the high peak point of the pyramid. We get the executives that are making these decisions and we talk about thought leadership. We don't talk about features and functionality. We do talk about road maps, we talk about investments that they need to make, and we anchor it again on the SAP HANA platform but we're bringing in other technologies and components like analytics or SAP Leonardo, right, or S/4 HANA, right. Now that it's announced, we'll bring in C/4 HANA. So we'll cover other topics as well, and of course the cloud platform. >> So you set it up, rinse and repeat, now we're at Leonardo. >> Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. >> What is, first off, what is Leonardo? Great name, I love the name. But what is it? >> So SAP Leonardo is a methodology. It's an opportunity for our customers to co-design, co-invent, and get engaged in the design thinking process to understand how data, and we talked about this today, how we can, how data and how knowledge can enable an intelligent enterprise. And it's a process. So what people need to understand, and customers work with at SAP and they could go to the SAP Leonardo booth areas at the conferences and see as many testers as they wish. But essentially it's a foundation. It's an understanding of, how do I take where I am today from my own understanding of how I operate my business, and where do I need to go, what is my next gem process? Where do I need to be in five years to be that thought leader and how do I get there? So how do I take data that I know and data that I don't know? We have, I just ran into one of our customers... We run a program out of our team as well called the SAP Innovation Awards. It started off as the HANA Innovation Awards and now we cover all technologies and all topics for customer innovation. So SAP Leonardo, cloud platform solutions, SAP HANA solutions, data management solutions, these are all innovative offerings. We just announced all the winners, we have a actually ceremony tomorrow night where all the winners have been announced and they're gonna be receiving their trophies. We've been doing this for many years. What's interesting about that is all the innovative projects that are coming from the customer programs, projects, innovations. What are they doing? How are they co-innovating? Are they co-innovating with SAP? Are they doing smart farming? We have one winner that's actually doing smart farming, micro-crop planting to understand soil composition. And humidity and moisture composition is different even if you go one meter away on this, one meter, which is nothing. >> You're right. >> For the Americans listening, it's three feet. (everyone laughs) And that's pretty close. And they can actually combine different crop plantings based on soil conditions and compositions and this is all being monitored in the SAP HANA cloud. So this is really phenomenal. >> Yeah, that would be. >> And we love these kinds of stories. And what we're doing now, as you can imagine. You're probably gonna ask me, how do you connect the dots? Well it was pretty easy to connect the dots. We have the customers that are presented these great programs. They've created these great values that they're providing to their industry, right? And they're great wins and successes. And we're leveraging those customers in the community as thought leaders. And we're also doing sessions like that. I'd like to get them on theCUBE. Have them talk about some of the things >> That would be great. >> that they're doing. >> We would have fun. We love customer stories. >> I love it. I think it would be phenomenal. >> So, let's talk bout the dynamics of running a community program that featured around a product. And HANA, very straightforward, is about the tech, a lot of it was speeds and fees transitioned into solutions. >> Right. >> When you start out with something as ambitious as Leonardo framework, are the dynamics different, like what are, what is the community like? >> A little bit 'cause SAP HANA is the foundation. And we saw this today at the keynotes today. And Bill's keynote was phenomenal and we saw that how he was positioning this and it's all about the intelligent enterprise and SAP HANA as a foundation, it's fantastic. And we've been doing this for a lot of years. But what do we do to build upon that? When we established the foundational community for SAP HANA, people started coming in and wanting to understand everything about the HANA community. We did a couple fundamental things. Number one, we connected with the SAP HANA Academy. And I'll give a shout out to my friends at the academy, I love them to death, and we've been partnering with them for five plus years. The SAP HANA Academy is a YouTube site of thousands of videos on how to do anything. It could be data management, it could be data hub, it could be Vora which is the connected to Hadoop. It could be SAP HANA. It could be analytics. And there's thousands, literally thousands of videos on how to just about do anything that you want connected to the community. So the people and the SAP HANA Academy team has presented content, webinars on our community broadcasting at least for the last... This year they did one, they do like two or three every year for the last number of years. What we did with SAP Leonardo was, Leonardo can be thought of as a combination of the technologies. So we have, as you know, with machine learning, IoT, blockchain, right, analytics and a whole bunch of other things, design thinking methodologies that are in Leonardo, so what we did is we took a lot of that and created a series of webinars and content. We just finished something called the SAP Digital Transformation Series featuring SAP Leonardo in conjunction with ASUG, the America User Group, that's our co-conference sponsor here and we love them to death. And what we did was do the 14-part webinar series. We had thousands of people come onto these calls and each call covered, for example, Mala, who's our president, she did what is the overview of Leonardo? How do we do this? We covered analytics with Mike Flannagan. Maricel covered design thinking. And then we went from there. Then we covered the solutions themselves. What is IoT, what is blockchain, what is machine learning? How do you understand what these things do and how they impact your organization? Then we took it one step further. We went into the industry solutions. So the partners are developing industry solutions. The industry accelerates, we talked a little bit earlier, there's a press release that just came out on that, on some of the.. >> The Partner Medallion Initiative. >> The Premiere Medallion Initiative, right. My friend Mike is running, from the Leonardo team. And that is certifying partners for the specific solutions that they're building around the industry, the deliverables that they have around the SAP Leonardo, we feature that as well. So all of that content was in this series and we continue to build upon that. What we really want, though, now is we wanna do what we did this time last year which was, we want the customer stories. So we've done, I've told you, we've done a lot of webinars in the community. So a lot of content going to the members of the community from the experts that understand that content. Next step, second half of the year, is we want those customer stories out there. So those 80 or so webinars that I mentioned that we did with our customer Spotlights, we want those Spotlights now. So we'll focus those... Anybody watching, give me those Spotlights. We want those stories. We want the customers to really articulate their story, their challenges, their successes, their wins, what are they doing to the SAP technology that-- >> You're preaching to the choir about customer marketing persons so that there's no better value-- >> Isn't it great? >> Brand validation, than the voice of the customer. Speaking of brand validation, I heard this morning that Bill McDermott announced that you guys are now 17 on the top 100 global most valuable brands. >> Absolutely. >> He wants to be in the top 10. >> And we're proud of that. I'm part of that team. >> Up four. You're doing this with a tremendous amount of partners is what you mentioned, partners. We're in the NetApp booth. >> Correct. >> Talk to us about what SAP and NetApp are doing in the community to enable this amazing amount of education that you're doing. >> So that's a great find. I mean, SAP wouldn't be where it is today, and I've been with SAP for (chuckles) I don't wanna say the number of years but people watch me and they know I've been at SAP a long time. It's like you can't say Scott Feldman without SAP. So it's been kind of anchored in for a long time. It's sort of the blood, the blue blood runs in the DNA you know. It was just kind of fun. But some of the partners that we've worked with in the communities have taken it to another step. NetApp is one of those. And I love working with NetApp. They're a strategic technology provider and a fantastic global partner with SAP. I know you just heard from RJ who did an interview, we work a lot with him and his team as well, Roland and the rest of the team. And what NetApp has done is they've made another strategic investment with us in the communities, for the HANA community and the Leonardo community such that they're a name-sponsored partner. And what's really nice about that is we have a special spot and if you go to the SAPHANACommunity.com site, or if you're already a member, or the other one is, you can guess, SAPLeonardoCommunity.com, very similar, right? If you go to either one of those sites, you'll find that there's a spot for partners that are specific to that community, that have taken the next step to add additional value. NetApp is there, there's a page. And what we've done is we've created a page with all the NetApp content on, what is NetApp's contribution on SAP HANA and Leonardo? Where is the value proposition? Why NetApp? What are they doing with SAP? Where are the links that we can go for all the content that NetApp has provided to us to post in that community? And not only that, NetApp is also an outstanding member, upstanding member of the SAP HANA CL Council Community 'cause they also run SAP. And, in addition to that, NetApp is a strategic partner that provides webinar content for SAP, for the community. So, about once a quarter, there'll be a webinar that is sponsored by NetApp and now I'm bugging them a little bit to get the customers in front of the webinar so we can have these little-- >> There must be some NetApp-SAP Customer Spotlights just waiting to come into the surface, right? >> Oh, absolutely. And we're doing them in small snippets so what's really great about that, it's kinda like this discussion that we're having, these small chunks. 'Cause I think the new wave of doing things, >> Snackable content. >> And I could certainly tell you're from the generation that's just maybe a little bit younger, is that they don't have time to sit down and watch a webinar for one hour. But they'll take it in 20-minute doses. They'll just like, "Man, give me "all the 20-minute webinars you want." It's like, I'll just give me a chunk and I'll take it and boom. I really want that. So that's been a lot of fun. So NetApp's been a fantastic strategic partner and we'll continue to partner with them moving forward. >> So I'm hearing a lot of collaboration, a lot of participation, energy just radiating, I think off from the main stage-- >> Oh I don't like the community, just do the watch, uncles love it. >> From the main stage to what you're talking about, what with what you guys are doing and I love to hear that the customers are being recognized for their innovation. Not just-- >> They are, yeah. >> Transforming their businesses, new revenue streams, new business models, but leveraging their partners like SAP, like NetApp, to become the intelligent enterprise and change industries. >> Absolutely, Lisa. And they're becoming the thought leaders of their own industry. So if you want to become a leader or a thought leader in your own specific industry, join the SAP HANA Community, make the investments in SAP Leonardo, work with SAP, work with NetApp, and like Bill says, let's get it done. >> Let's get it done. Scott, thanks so much for stopping by and chatting with Keith and me this morning. >> Thank you for your time, it's been my pleasure. >> And enjoy the rest of the event. >> I look forward to it. >> All right. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend on theCUBE from the NetApp booth at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Thanks for watching. (funky music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We are joined by Chhandomay Mandal, he is the Director of Solutions Marketing for Dell EMC. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Happy to be here. >> Direct from Boston. This is a Boston panel, I love it. >> Yes, and we were on the same flight yesterday. >> (laughing) There you go! >> Ah, so half of Hopkinton. >> Yeah. So, we're here at Dell Technologies World, but you're here to talk to us about SAP. Explain to our viewers a little bit about the connection between your companies. >> Sure, so SAP connects a lot of our customers. They are running their ERP, CRM, digital procurement, HR systems, and many other workloads on SAP, and we, Dell Technologies, as a company, have a portfolio of solutions to support SAP workloads. So, that's the big connection. SAP and Dell EMC, we are big partners, and we work hand in hand as well. >> Talk a little bit about what SAP customers are doing. You know, everybody knows the stories of SAP multi-year implementation, very complicated, although driving business value, but today people want to be more agile, cloud, Hana, who's been around now for quite a number of years. SAP obviously pushing hard for a number of reasons. What are you seeing in the customer base? >> Yeah, SAP customers are in a journey. As you mentioned, the SAP landscapes implementations. In fact, in 2016, greater than fifty percent of SAP landscapes were running on Oracle. SAP has come up with the in-memory database, SAP Hana, and there is a mandate that by 2025, the customers need to be running on SAP Hana to run any SAP workload. So, customers need to go through that transition, and as the data explodes from IoT, Big Data, BlockChain, our next gen intelligent applications, they are driving a lot of analytics, and SAP has come up with a platform called SAP Leonardo for mission learning. So, customers are trying to consolidate their old SAP landscapes on an agile, modern infrastructure. They are planning to migrate all the older databases to SAP Hana. At the same time, they are looking into deploying SAP Leonardo to take advantage of IoT, AI, BlockChain, all those things. >> So SAP is dangling the carrot. With Hana, it's in memory, performance, efficiency. With Leonardo, it's the promise of machine intelligence, but there are challenges in migrating off of Oracle. How are customers dealing with that? Are you guys in a position to help with the partnership with SAP? Can you talk about that a little bit? >> Yes, SAP implementations, as you know, is fairly complex, takes many months, years, and customers have been running SAP for a long time, so their challenge are, "How do we keep our businesses running while we need to transition from what we have to these SAP Hana based deployments." They are looking into modern infrastructures that will be able to consolidate all of this around their applications with the same SLS, and at the same time when they migrate one application to the next on SAP Hana, that platform should be able to add up and deliver all the SLS. So, refactoring what they have into this SAP Hana is really big for all of our customers, and how to have a better performing platform, how to deliver the agility's simplification, as well as lower the TCO. These are the projects that CIO's are running for our customers. >> So, as we know, simpler is always better. Can you talk about some of the ROI? What are companies actually seeing in terms of these benefits? >> So, let's take specific examples. Dell EMC PowerMax is the backbone of running SAP applications for a long time. Our previous generations in terms of VMAX, VMAX All Flash, now with our PowerMax, it has the highest skill ability of SLP Hana. It can actually run 162 SAP Hana nodes on a single array, but that's not the end game. The thing is, it can consolidate SAP, traditional SAP workloads, SAP Hana, as well as other mixed workloads while delivering the same performance masking the SLS, with it's built-in mission learning capabilities. Now, what does that translate to? We have several customers seeing benefits out of this. For example, a big sports equipment manufacturer, when they move to this platform, there are software quality assurance process. It used to take like ten days in all the infrastructure. Now they could run on this new platform in two days. That's literally eighty percent improvement, because of the higher performance, the more consolidation that they were able to access. So that's one example just from the performance perspective, but if you take a consolidation simpler to run, there are other examples I can actually walk you through. >> So, I want to double click on that, because every storage company wants to partner with SAP, target that stuff, because Oracle's not that friendly these days. They have their own hardware, right? They're trying to elbow you out with Exadata. So, talk a little bit more about the differentiation that Dell EMC brings relative to some of your other storage competitors, specifically within SAP environments. >> Sure, so first Dell comes in with a portfolio of solutions. As you are mentioning, these are fairly complex deployments, and customers are looking for cross state partner, with professional services, experience, and a portfolio of solutions, not just one solution fits all. Just to continue on that aspect, I talked about Dell EMC PowerMax. It's great for consolidation, for running Hana and the existing workloads, but then when you look at the next generation of applications, the IoT, AI, BlockChain, the unstructured world, Dell EMC Isilon is a great platform which has already been in the market and in the forefront of AI workloads. Dell, as a company, offer a portfolio of solutions, and it's not piecemeal. We see the broader picture, and plug in all the right pieces with the right consulting surfaces as well, so that the customers can run their applications day in and day out, and transition as well as bring in new deployments like SAP Leonardo. I'll give you one example here. Another big service provider, their analytics, their SAP APOs, used to take like 32 hours of run time, and they could only do in weekends. Now, with this Dell EMC storage solutions, they are actually down to, give or take, seven hours. So that's like 78% improvement in terms of how fast they can run this analytics, and this is turning into better decision making for the procurement manager, for the business analyst, and they are able to drive value from time to market, time to value, from all the data that's captured in these SAP landscapes. >> And these are realtime or near realtime analyses that are going on, right? But then ultimately you have to persist the data, that's where things like PowerMax come in, and then sometimes you got to bring it back in, and so are you guys architecting high speed interconnects and InfiniBands and all kinds of crazy stuff? >> All kinds of things-- >> NVMe's... >> And actually, you brought up a very good point. SAP Hana is an in-memory database, so everything is running in the memory speed. Why do you need high performing array like Dell EMC PowerMax? Guess what? Everything is in memory, but this is all critical databases. Everything needs to be persisted back to the storage array, and then when something reboots, you cannot stay still til all the data is back from the storage array into the memory. So, persisting the data quickly and fast reboots are also necessary. Driving the needs of throughputs like what PowerMax provides, 150 gigabits per second throughput, so that's where the connection comes in. >> So the throughputs you're describing really were unthinkable five years ago. Can you reflect on that a little bit in terms of what you've seen the technology do that you really couldn't have even imagined it doing, even in very recent times. >> In fact, that's a very good point. One of the customers that participated in this TOI study, they mentioned they wanted to go to the cloud, public cloud. When they wanted to go to the cloud at the time the maximum size of our database you could do was 2.5 terabyte, and they already had a 4 terabyte SAP database, so there was no way they could go to a public cloud. What they were looking into, the cloud operating model, so that you can actually be flexible with your infrastructure, consume as you go, and we were able to help in that transition with all of the solutions. >> Great. So where you think we're going to be going? I mean in terms of next year's Dell Technologies World 2020, which will be big just because it's a cool number. What do you think we'll be talking about next year's conference? >> That's a very good point, and as you mentioned 2020, we are already seven billion people, and by 2020 it's predicted to be like 30 billion devices generating 44 zettabytes of data, so managing all of this data, putting the data at the right tier, the data that needs to be accessed quickly to make realtime analysis process. The data that's seven days old, putting them in the right tier, accessing them, and driving the value from your data, from this past amount of data, so that you can make decisions, you can gather intelligence, and take this value to drive competitive differentiation will be where we are. And the form factor? Yes, everybody will be able to do all of this pretty much like realtime in phones or even smaller devices. >> It's the march to 2025, when everybody's going to be off Oracle. >> Well exactly! You're right. >> Oh, that's your mandate. >> Anyway, @dvellante if you want to talk about that. We've got a lot pf research on it, so... >> Exactly. >> Not trivial. >> Well Chhandomay, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you. >> Same here. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have much more of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat electronic music)

>> From Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018 brought to you by NetApp. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We are in Orlando at SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. We're in Vanetta booth talking to all sorts of guests and we're welcoming to theCUBE for the first time, Anand Chellam at KPIT, the Global Leader for SAP at KPIT. Welcome to theCUBE Anand. >> Thank you, thank you so much for having me here. >> So you have been working with SAP in some capacity for twenty years or so. You've no doubt seen a lot of transformation that SAP has undergone, since then. You're now with KPIT, who was just named yesterday a Hybris America Service Delivery Partner of the Year. Congratulations. Talk to us about one, the evolution that you've seen at SAP and two, how that excites you being on the the KPIT partner site. >> Absolutely, absolutely. It's been interesting. This is my 20th Sapphire, so you know it's been a long journey, and while today in the keynote while watching some of the demos, it goes back to, we saw a demo by Hasso Plattner when they launched mysap.com in Philadelphia. There was a big storm and there was a lot of notion that is SAP going back because internet was new and SAP was not in the bandwagon and SAP was trying to prove themselves that no they are, and they are an internet friendly software and there's a lot of debate whether that's going to be transformed or not, but looking at today, they've done a phenomenal job. I really think the last 10 years, the 50 billion dollar investments, which SAP has done through acquisitions, I feel it's been very rewarding to a lot of our customers, our partners and it's really truly the next generation software, which all of us can look forward to to get the most value. So I'm personally very excited to see how SAP has really looked ahead and done these acquisitions, and more importantly integrating them. I think one of the keys at least in the ecosystem I've seen companies, they acquire a lot of software, but the biggest challenge is integrating them and making them seamless to the customers, and I think a lot of credit goes to SAP for being able to have a plan and integrate that, so it's very seamless. So net-net I'm very excited about what's ahead of us. >> Tell us about KPIT, what do you guys do and then what do you do specifically with SAP? >> We're in Sapphire and KPIT's theme this year is elevate IT, elevate IT or elevate IT. And it's basically elevating to the next level at every level, whether it's from front office to back office, whether it's integrating the connected devices, whether it's building some intelligent automation in the ERP, whether it is adopting and rolling out a personalized cloud model. All of it we are in, and we're very fortunate to being able to you know one is obviously, we planned this. We had a planned strategy on which are the focus areas we're very focused. S/4, we are one of the leaders in the S/4. We have over 120 HANA implementations which is pretty sizeable. If you see there is gonna be some press releases coming out, that has been some piracy where we are the leaders in S/4. And we're excited to see how much of that automation is going to come into the picture. So S/4 is a big area of growth for us. Connected devices is because we're a very strong engineering firm, so it comes very naturally how those two, engineering and IT come together and that comes along very well. In Hybris as you said thank you again we were very excited to get the delivery partner of the year for Americas, which is a pretty amazing accomplishment given you know the last four years our focus has been, but I think what's more exciting for us is the co-innovation we're doing with our customers. As an example you know we are co-innovating building the dealership portals for a lot of their dealers for their customers and see how that's integrating well. The other aspect is CPQ. Big in configuring products and how they can one, bring it to market and two, position that so that their customers are able to configure their products, so we're able to doing a lot of that. We are uberizing service to see on an on demand model how is it that they can provide. So lots of activity around that area as well. >> Anand talk to us, 20 years it's a long time to have observed and participated in the SAP ecosystem. I think it would be fair to say that 20 years ago the conversation in a typical enterprise would be you know what, we're waiting on SAP, whether it's some innovation, practically some batch foul process to end to now we're in a market that SAP is driving business. Can you talk to us about the importance of the relationship of this trifecta of SAP, NetApp, KPIT, how do you guys bring this new business capability? What's the critical components of you bringing this new critical capability to customers, where you can now say that innovations that KPIT, whether it's Hybris or S/4 coupled with NetApp is able to bring innovation to digital transformation. >> Excellent, good point. I think we're not, I'm stating the obvious. There has been so much changes happening in the IT world that it's very important I believe to coexist with partners, and that's where I see the SAP, NetApp, KPIT partnership is a very critical one right, because all of them bring such critical components to bear that we really can use the software, the infrastructure, the disaster recovery the implementation services and the IP, which brings to the table, bundle it together to see some very fast outcomes. I'll give you an example. We just went live with an S/4 implementation. And day one, day one we had a 40% increase in order entry, which is phenomenal so the point being 20 years back that would be unheard of. It would be like oh if we go live and we still can (all talking) were great, so the velocity aspect has increased tremendously. That comes through all these partnership, the underlying infrastructure, which supports the software and the people and the processes, which come into bear. So it's very important that the trifecta effect is seen in outcomes which customers really benefit from. >> Who are you talking to when you guys are going in together as this partnership that you just articulated. Who are you talking to? I mean because the C suite has has shifted so much right? I was reading from the CMO council that 67% of marketing execs rank marketing and commerce technology is critical to their overall performance. We've got the chief digital officer who have to drive cultural change, the CIO who needs to be bimodal. When you guys are talking with customers, what are are those conversations like? What's driving the innovation that KPIT needs to deliver for these customers? >> Very good point. So we've started adopting some of the newer areas to see some of the benefits, which customers are looking for. As an example, one of our customers who make packaging machines, they wanted to see how they can overall reduce their service costs by 20% and how they can implement, an IOT based solution on Leonardo Connected Goods to help reduce and build a new business model, so what in this new age it's just not about implementing a software. It's about how does it drive efficiency by reducing cost, but more importantly how does it spur and build new business models, so it's no longer restricted to an IT solution. I think in this digital era, it's more important how does how does it look differently, how are the models which we never thought about before are being brought in and we were part of the Medallion select group of Leonardo partners and we're very proud to see how that grows. >> What excites you about that because I just saw that announcement come out yesterday. Tell us a little bit about the KPIT's SAP Leonardo innovation portfolio and what you're delivering or will be delivering to customers with respect to that? >> We're focusing in many areas, but the couple which come to mind is Connected Goods. This is an example where we talk about how we reduce the overall service cost by 20% right by just implementing something around that lines. We're also doing a lot of work on the predictive maintenance side of things, where being able to predict failures, before it happens to reduce the downtime and increase the overall productivity, where KPIT is big in automotive and the vehicle insights are something, which we are working with closely to build some of those outcome based models, which I think will be very much beneficial to lot of the customers we have being seeing. >> So if we were live, John Fourier would be DM'ing us and saying this is a perfect opportunity to ask about blockchain in general, so let's not jump on a blockchain bandwagon. Let's talk about other enabling applications including blockchain. As you look out into the next few years, how important is SAP becoming a true platform company that embraces technology such as blockchain? Or they're reaching out to Internet of Things and manufacturing companies, the solutions, other supply chain integration points, how important is SAP's participation in the larger ecosystem and technology? How important is that to the overall success of this partnership? >> You know I think the concept of intelligent enterprise is truly evolving in SAP. What it's helping I think a lot of customers do is it's connecting the dots between their customer experiences, the 360-degree view of their customers. It's looking at connected devices where there's so many devices out there, how do we bring that to the table. it's building a lot of intelligent automation. It's building connected factories so that the production efficiency is where I think there's a lot of emphasis in the next few years going to happen and of course supply chain right, where there has been the case. I think what it's bringing it all together to really have an intelligent enterprise where using whether it's blockchain, using machine learning, to be able to bring that together, because I think in isolation there are benefits, but I think the power of all of this is how do we bring it together in a very seamless manner, and that's what's very exciting. >> When they announced that this morning speaking of integration that C/4 HANA, they talked about that. I thought they did a good job of showing integrations and talking about that, but if I kind of distill that down to one of the things that their CEO has been really vocal about it's got to modernize Legacy CRM and connect, synchronize the supply chain with the demand chain. With what they're doing this momentum that the SAP is carrying through, how do you see that as a differentiator for KPIT's business to be a partner with SAP? >> Absolutely, you know, fortunately for us we've been very strong in the three-generation CRMs. I know we are now talking about the fourth generation CRM, which is C4/HANA. But having lived through the journey of the three generations, I think KPIT has a very unique proposition in the market place. We know very importantly what not to do, what are the things which did not work. I think that's a very important aspect, which I think SAP themselves have learned and that's probably why they're talking about the fourth generation CRM. And I think we are in a very unique position and that's the example. We have implemented this for a long time, and I see that with their integration what they've done with some of the other softwares like Callidus, this is gonna be a complete portfolio of solutions, which they can offer, which I think KPIT is in a very unique position, whether it's cloud for service, cloud for sales, Hybris Commerce, the Callidus, commissions. We're very well positioned to be able to provide all of this to our customers, so the portfolio is a lot more enriched, and I think it's going to be very rewarding. >> What are some of the things in terms of all those announcements that you're looking forward to at Sapphire this year in terms of I can imagine there's a wealth of, I think there's a thousand SAP sessions alone, from an education perspective? Is your team here ready to, you said your theme was Elevate IT? >> Yes. >> What are some of the things that you're excited to learn how to do for those boots on the ground? >> I think one of the areas we are excited about is we're seeing the S/4 adoption going up. I think we're very excited about that. >> I think you said 1800 customers. >> Yes and there's lots... >> And counting. >> Lot's to go but I think yeah. >> Lot of opportunity here. >> Exactly, so I think that's one we want to make sure and then I think the intelligent Enterprise. I think we're very excited about that, along with the data hub. I know it's early days, but we'll closely be watching that because data is going to be a critical aspect for all of this to be successful. So I think we're right on very excited to see those three, four areas and I think we're well positioned to really be able to take this momentum to the next level. >> So you said this was your 20th Sapphire. I think when I was doing some research on this event, it looks like they had done this for about 25 years. Wow, so do you remember back 20 years ago like how many people were at Sapphire back then compared to the... >> Absolutely. >> 20 some thousand that are just here physically this week. >> Yeah I still remember I think it was '99 Sapphire in Las Vegas, that was the only Sapphire happened Vegas. It's easier for me. I don't know why they don't do that. >> Really? >> Yeah, so there I was sitting and one of the big areas we were very excited was, if I was able to enter sales order in HP Jornada. Believe it or not, it was one of the handheld devices. >> I remember that. >> And we were very excited to see oh we are able to enter an order in an HP Jornada. And today we're talking about virtual reality where we are able to look at stuff, change the colors, and be able to order just looking at what you like. >> Transparently. >> Yeah it is unbelievable the change, so to your point, lots have changed, all the way around, whether it's technology, whether it's expectations, whether it's the number of people, number of sessions, and you know we ourselves have got about 12 sessions, customer sessions in this Sapphire. We used to have two or three at the most. >> Wow there's customer centers here and theaters. >> Yes absolutely. >> So another 20-year perspective and looking towards the future. One of the great things about SAP is, also one of the challenges. 46 years of technology and moving customers along, SAP HANA, no question it changes businesses. The stat you gave earlier 40% more orders in one single day, day one. However, what are some of the major barriers that customers face with Legacy infrastructure and moving into taking advantage of S/4 HANA? Is it customization of environments that they did? Is that business processes? Like what's the top one or two challenges customers are facing? >> Very, very good point actually. I'm glad you brought this up. We've been at this for four years. In fact one of the first HANA migrations was done by KPIT at Varian Medical, one of the very early days. So from my perspective, the customers are looking to reduce risk, because they've been working on SAP for such a long time. They built it, it's evolved, it's customized. So how do we reduce risk? In fact KPIT has built a monetization tool, which automatically correct codes, so that it takes away, reduce the risks and reduces the time. So that's one aspect is, customers are very worried about the risks aspect. Second is of course the cost, because they don't want to be spending time in just implementing another system. They want to take leverage about the intelligence, which can built in the different processes, the advantage, so they do want to make sure that that aspect is there, but I think the biggest aspect is, they are looking for the business nuggets. You know what we talked about can this propel them into different business models. Can this be relevant for the next 20 years? Because this is a big investment and that's one of the big roadmap discussions we are having with a lot of our customers. >> Relevance, you know, you really hit the nail on the head. Customers have to be relevant. They have to be able to compete and become intelligent in order to do that. Well and I wish we had more time, but we're out of time. Thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE, and again congratulations on the award, the service delivery partner of the year for Hybris that KPIT has won. >> Thank you, thank you so much. Thanks for getting me here. >> Our pleasure. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, and we are at Sapphire Now 2018. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's the Cube, covering .NEXT Conference 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to the Cube, I'm here with Keith Townsend and I'm Stu Miniman. Happy to have on the program first-time guest Joe Zarb, who's with SAP Labs. He's the Vice President of Global Technology Partners. And welcome back to the Cube, long-time guest, Venugopal Pai, Vice President of Customer Success with Nutanix. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Great to be here, Stu, great to be here, Keith. >> All right, so Venugopal, our audience has seen him a few times. Joe, let's start, your role and inside SAP Labs what your organization does. >> Sure, happy to do that. So Joe Zarb, I head up our global technology partners within our global business development and ecosystems team. Basically helping our customers to respond to their needs and their wants for solutions that span not only SAP, but their whole digital transformation agenda. So we do that with the partners, and we do it with global service providers, we do it with software technology partners, and hardware technology partners. >> And Pai, we talked to Inder earlier today about customer success, but from an application standpoint, tell us why you're here. >> Of course, no thank you, Stu, thank you, Keith. Very good to be here again. So the reason that I'm here with Joe from SAP is we've had a long-standing relationship with SAP. Spanning almost four years. And the reason it's important is as Nutanix becomes the platform that customers start to depend on for the infrastructure, the key elements of what value we provide the customer is to mitigate a lot of the complexity that comes from infrastructure and allow them to focus on the business value of the application. And the predominant application as you start to global enterprises, large customers, SAP tends to be the lifeblood of that company. And the business value of how they drive value. So our partnership with SAP is to really make sure that as we start looking at transforming the data center and moving them to a digital platform that makes it very easy to consume, the ability for transcending the value to an SAP application, making sure that customers have that trust of, if I run SAP on Nutanix, the trust of availability, performance, capability, all the things that they need enterprise vendors to stand up to, we wanted to make sure that our journey with SAP started up early. Our journey with SAP in making sure they understand the concept of hyper-convergence and the impact of what it does for them has been a very fulfilling one and has been a journey that will continue on for a long ways to come. So that's why we're here. >> So, Joe, let's talk about digital transformation and the drivers. You know SAP, rich set of data is, I've heard it called a cash register of the world. So many transactions go through that. With that said, it's also one of those areas that we say, oh thoust dare not touch SAP. It is the system of record. However, it's a rich, rich area for digital transformation. The go fast, break things, part of the IT team, wants access to SAP, they want to get the data from there, they want to update transactions. Talk about that conflicting role that SAP has of, we're steady, rock solid versus go fast and break stuff. >> Right, so that's a great question. And what we're facing at SAP are demands that are coming from our customers around what people term as bimodal IT. They got to run their business, but they also have to innovate. So a big part of our strategy going forward is centered around HANA as you know, which is our real-time database, and it's a translytics database, right? So you could do transactions in it, you could also do analytics with the database within the same data set. So it provides a very powerful platform so that you could do your transactional operations and the analytics in a way where you could innovate. So that bimodal IT, and the relationship with Nutanix and the other hyper-convergent infrastructure players that we work with is really to focus on driving down the total cost of ownership in those operational areas, get to market quicker with those, and free up a technical center of excellence and functional center of excellence resources so that they can help the enterprise innovate. We have an entire platform that's dedicated just to innovation. It's our SAP Leonardo platform with our SAP Cloud platform, with Nutanix, and other hyper-converged players, and our transactional system. So that whole digital transformation really needs to take into account, hey, you got to protect the base, you got to run those core applications, but you can't take your eye off of innovation 'cause digital transformation's all about innovations. Business model reinvention as well as business process reinvention. So I think that's a big part of what we're focused on. >> So talk about Nutanix's role. How do you help customers with that goal of saying, the things that we do before are critically important, you need to keep doin' 'em, we need to do it cheaper, we need to do it faster, and we need to do it more reliably while we look to innovation. >> Absolutely. And I think that's a great story in terms of what Joe talked about in terms of SAP's lead into making sure that the ship is steady as it goes while making sure that the innovation engine is not forgotten, right? Where we start seeing is that the amalgamation between the two saying, I've got the traditional applications running as is, but I got to embrace innovation. And if we look at what Nutanix has done, and continues to do as you saw in some of the announcements at this event, is bringing the innovation in, but making sure that that innovation is brought with the respect of applications running in the data center, and still giving the customer the flexibility of hey, I want to embrace Cloud. I want to embrace the concept of what Cloud means to me, not just taking my data and moving it into the public Cloud, but giving me the way to get the Cloud-like heuristics, the Cloud-like management, Cloud-like flexibility, Cloud-like agility, the consumption of Cloud DevOps capabilities, so the combination of what we delivered in infrastructure layer, become where hardware to software, and tie it to what SAP is doing to drive that innovation from an application level is a very good partnership conversation to have, is hey, how do we now blend this software base in terms of what we're doing in the data center, and tie that to the innovation that SAP's driving at the application level, and together that's when true innovation for customers starts bringing to light. Because they focus the applications, we got the infrastructure, but this partnership then brings the two together. >> So, Pai, let's put some meat on the bone. It takes nine months, 12 months, to deploy SAP infrastructure period. Nutanix rack and stack, I can get a whole cluster up in less than an hour. However, there's still that SAP layer that basis layer that has to be laid out. How are you helping customers get more agile in that so that they wow the business? >> Absolutely. And just to put things in context, our SAP partner who has been around for four years, right? We've been SAP certified for 2 1/2 years, right? Both for SAP NetWeaver running on VMware hypervisors, and then as of a year and a half ago, running on our AHV hypervisor. So we're bringing that hypervisor innovation into the SAP world. Right, so that's one side. When you start looking at our software stack that start disseminating the focus on why things take so long for deploying an application is because the application layer is complex and the infrastructure layer is complex. So what we're doing is with the 40 to 50 customers you already have running on SAP is what we bring is if we can reduce the complexity of the infrastructure layer, the speed to value of deploying an application becomes much, much faster. So that's why customers are gravitating to Nutanix is because the infrastructure complexity has been eliminated as hey, it takes me six months to spin up a infrastructure that's meet variety of where they apply the amount of VM, which server, which storage, and you figure we're networking, and then I spin up the application. When we bring in Nutanix, the ability for us to disaggregate all that layered complexity that comes into play, speeds up the deployment of the application, therefore better time to value for customers saying, hey, I got to spin up the application a few months. I can't wait for nine months because the infrastructure's slowing me down. We start eliminating that complexity. >> Joe, one of the more interesting things to watch in the industry is the change in how customers are purchasing. Especially from software. The days of everything fully shrink-wrapped are long behind us. It's the subscription economy now. Nutanix is going along that journey from buying to software to fully subscription model. Can you touch on what you're seeing in maybe either you or Pai'll connect how that comes together with Nutanix. >> Yeah, I'd be happy to do that. So what we are seeing, and this is implemented in our strategy and our go-to market approach, is really that we live in a hybrid world. And I thought that that was a wonderful quote that I heard here at the conference or driven home in the keynote. So we do. We live in a hybrid world. SAP's strategy recognizes that. That's what our customers want. So we work very closely with Cloud partners like Microsoft Azure and Google, and of course Amazon and others. And of course we have an on-premise suite of solutions. So when we start to look at these business models, it's oftentimes about right-sizing the business model for the workload and the need of that particular customer sometimes for a particular industry. Now where Nutanix comes into play in this hyper-converged infrastructure is, there's some really difficult things that need to get done to make this world a reality. Right if you're going to move workloads and have them run in the Cloud, you might have them run at the edge if it's an IoT solution leveraging our Leonardo platform you might have them running in the core or you might have it running in a branch office. Every time you start adding those layers, you're adding complexity, you're adding cost, and you're adding a requirement for skills. So when we can work with close partners to downgrade the skills, downgrade some of the number of people you might need, create simplicity and create an environment where really it's a Nutanix statement but where our customers have that freedom to move their workload to the right environment to take advantage of it. Those are the partners who we want to work with. >> So SAP Labs, you can't get out of a Labs conversation without talking, well no we can't get out of a SAP Labs conversation without talking mobile and Fiori and all of the great stuff that's happening on just taking advantage of the deep data. Data's the biggest accessor, and mobile and giving that data to mobile, let's talk a little bit about the itch. What's the story between Nutanix, SAP, when it comes to stuff that CIOs care about today and that's Fiori. >> Yeah, so a great question. So if we look at Satyam presented yesterday in terms of our direction around IoT and looking at the edge as a very critical component of the entire operating system, enterprise called operating system model. One of the key things that we are spending a lot of time on is understanding the use cases for verticals and understanding okay when you look at a specific vertical, let's say it's oil and gas, or energy, or manufacturing, right? All of those verticals have a unique perspective on what IoT means to them. So IoT is a good buzzword and a good catchword, but when it comes to use cases and verticals, there's a very specific nomenclature on what they mean by IoT for them, right? So spending a lot of steam and Nutanix making a lot of time in deciphering what IoT means for customers, defining what use cases mean for that vertical and then working with SAP in determining okay, what does Leonardo mean for them because Leonardo is again, is a platform. Within the verticals, we're working with SAP and okay within the Leonardo platform, within the vertical, how do we define what our value prop within the IoT landscape is when it comes to the edge? And so you can see more coming from us, but we truly understand the importance of data like you said, and the creation of data at the edge, and the importance of analyzing the data, maybe in the Cloud. And that transformation of where the edge of data's created and where it needs to be analyzed, that journey is very complex. And if we can make that journey simple, then SAP customers win, SAP application, deployment wins, and we're able to therefore mitigate some of the complexity that comes with making that journey simple. >> You know I might add to that is again, what Pai said is spot on, but if you look at it from a manufacturing point of view, moving to the edge, customers are confronted with the reality of the networking complexity and they're either going to take the processing and move it to the problem or bring the problem to the processing. And so to do that takes hard work. And servers, and so there's a whole new genre of high-performance gateways and hardware that's emerging on the market from players like Fujitsu and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Dell, what have you. And you end up having a plethora of these devices at every well head, on every AMI, AMR meter-reading infrastructure in the utility system or in every single plant floor. So how do you take that level of innovation that's happening now at the plant floor and make it part, not only of your operational system, but of your IT and your data center so you could manage it with all the ilities that IT people do. And I think Nutanix and SAP are working to solve that problem. And our Leonardo platform is what we have to drive that edge and with Nutanix it's a very manageable environment. >> Great well, Joe and Pai, really appreciate the update on where you are today, where some of the direction are, we're going to the future. Getting towards the end of two days of live coverage here at Nutanix .NEXT 2018. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching the Cube. >> Thank you. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. It's theCUBE covering Women in Data Science Conference 2018. Brought to you by Stanford. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Our continuing coverage live at the Women in Data Science Conference 2018, #WiDS2018. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm very excited to not only be at the event, but to now be joined by one of the speakers who spoke this morning. Mala Anand, the executive vice president at SAP and the president of SAP Leonardo Data Analytics, Mala Anand, Mala, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you Lisa, I'm delighted to be here. >> So this is your first WiDS and we were talking off camera about this is the third WiDS and 100,000 people they're expecting to reach today. As a speaker, how does that feel knowing that this is being live streamed and on their Facebook Live page and you have the chance to reach that many people? >> It's really exciting, Lisa and you know, it's inspiring to see that we've been able to attract so many participants. It's such an important topic for us. More and more I think two elements of the topic, one is the impact that data science is going to have in our industry as well as the impact that we want more women to participate with the right passion and being able to be successful in this field. >> I love that you said passion. I think that's so key and that's certainly one of the things, I think as my second year hosting theCUBE at WiDS, you feel it when you walk in the door. You feel it when you're reading the #WiDS2018 Twitter feed. It's the passion is here, the excitement is here. 150 plus regional WiDS events going on today in over 50 countries so the reach can be massive. What were maybe the top three takeaways from your talk this morning that the participants got to learn? >> Absolutely, and what's really exciting to see is that we see from a business perspective that customers are seeing the potential to drive higher productivity and faster growth in this whole new notion of digital technologies and the ability now for these new forms of systems of intelligence where we embed machine learning, big data, analytics, IoT, into the core of the business processes and it allows us to reap unprecedented value from data. It allows us to create new business models and it also allows us to reimagine experiences. But all of this is only possible now with the ability to apply data science across industries in a very deep and domain expertise way, and so that's really exciting and, moreover, to see diversity in the participants. Diversity in the people that can impact this is very exciting. >> I agree. You talked about digital business. Digital transformation opens up so many new business model opportunities for companies but the application of advanced analytics, for example, alone opens up so many more career opportunities because every sector is affected by big data. Whether we know it or not, right? And so the opportunity for those careers is exploding. But another thing that I think is also ripe for conversation is bringing in diverse perspectives to analyze and interpret that data. >> Absolutely. >> To remove some of the bias so that more of those business models and opportunities can really bubble up. >> Absolutely. >> Lisa: Tell me about your team at SAP Leonardo and from a diversity perspective, what's going on there? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think your point is really valid which is, the importance of bringing in diversity and also the importance of diversity both from a gender perspective and a diversity in skills. And I think the key element of data and decision science is now it opens up different types of skills, right? It opens up the skills of course, the technology skills are fundamental. The ability to read data modeling is fundamental, but then we add in the deep domain expertise. The add in the business perspectives. The ability to story tell and that's where I see the ability to story tell with the right domain expertise opens up such a massive opportunity for different kinds of participants in this field and so within SAP itself, we are very driven by driving diversity. SAP had set a very aggressive goal for by 2017 to be at 25% of women in leadership positions and we achieved that. We've got an aggressive goal to be at 30% of women in leadership positions by 2020 and we're really excited to achieve that as well and very important as well both within Leonardo and data analytics as well, by diversity is fundamental to our growth and more importantly to the growth for the industry. I think that's going to be fundamental. >> I think that's a really important point, the growth of the industry. SAP does a lot with WiDS. We had Ann Rosenberg on last year. I saw her walking around. So from a cultural stand point, what you've described, there's really a dedicated focus there and I think it's a unique opportunity that SAP doesn't have. They're taking advantage of it to really show how a massive corporation, a huge enterprise, can really be very dedicated to bringing in this diversity. It helps the business, but it also, to your point, can make a big impact on industry. >> Absolutely, you know, culture is such a critical part of being succeeding in the business, and I think culture is an important lever that can help differentiate companies in the market. So of course it's technology, it's value creation for our customers, and I think culture is such an important part of it, and when you unpeel the lever of culture, within there comes diversity, and within there comes bringing a different diversity of skills base as well that is going to be really critical in the next generation of businesses that will get created. >> I like that. Especially sitting in Silicon Valley where there's new businesses being created every, probably 30 seconds. I'd love to understand, if we kind of take a walk back through your career and how you got to where you are now. What were some of the things that inspired you along the way, mentors? What were some of the things that you found really impactful and crucial to you being as successful as you are and a speaker at an event like WiDS? >> Oh, absolutely. It's really exciting to see that from my own personal journey, I think that one of the things that was really important is passion. And ensuring that you find those areas that you're passionate about. I was always very passionate about software and being able to look at data and analyze data. From doing my undergraduate in Computer Science, as well as my graduate work in Computer Science from Brown, and from there on out, always looking at any of the opportunities whether it was an individual contributor that I did. It's important to be passionate and I felt that that was really my guiding post to really being able to move up from a career perspective, and also looking to be in an environment, in an ecosystem, of people and environments that you're always learning from, right? And always never being afraid to reach a little bit further than your capabilities. I think ensuring that you always have confidence in the ability that you can reach, and even though the goals might feel a little bit far away at the moment. So I think also being around a really solid team of mentors and being able to constantly learn. So I would say a constant, continuous learning, and passion is really the key to success. >> I couldn't agree more. I think it's that we often, the word expert is thrown around so often and in so many things, and there certainly are people that have garnered a lot of expertise in certain areas, but I always think, "Are you really ever an expert?" There's so much to learn everyday, there's so many opportunities. But another thing that you mentioned that reminded me of, we had Maria Klawe on a little bit earlier today and one of the things that she said in her welcome address was, in terms of inspiration, "Don't worry if there's something "that you think you're not good at." >> Mala: Absolutely. >> It's sort of getting out of your comfort zone and one of my mentors likes to say, "getting comfortably uncomfortable." That's not an easy thing to achieve. So I think having people around, people like yourself, you're now a mentor to potentially 100,000 people today, alone. What are some of the steps that you recommend of, how does someone go, "I really like this, "but I don't know if I can do it." How would you help someone get comfortably uncomfortable? >> Yeah, I think first of all, building a small group I would say, of stakeholders that are behind you and your success is going to be really important. I think also being confident about your abilities. Confidence comes in failing a few times. It's okay to miss a few goals, it's okay to fail, but then you leap forward even faster. >> Failure is not a bad F word, right? >> Mala: Absolutely. >> It really can be, and I think, a lot of leaders, like yourself will say that it's actually part of the process. >> It's very much part of the process. And so I think, number one thing is passion. First you've got to be really clear that this is exactly what you're passionate about. Second is building a team around you that you can count on, you can rely on, that are invested in your success. And then thirdly is also just to ensure that you are confident. Being confident about asking for more. Being confident about being able to reach close to the impossible is okay. >> It is okay, and it should be encouraged, every day. No matter what gender, what ethnicity, that should just sort of be one of those level playing fields, I think. Unfortunately, it probably won't be but events like WiDS, and the reach that it's making today alone, certainly, I think, offer a great foundation to start helping break some of the molds that even as we sit in Silicon Valley, are still there. There's still massive discrepancies in pay grades. There's still a big percentage of females with engineering degrees that are not working in the field. And I think the more people like yourself, and some of your other colleagues that are here participating at WiDS alone today, have the opportunity to reach a broader audience, share their stories. Their failures, the successes, and all the things that have shaped that path, the bigger the opportunity we have and it's, I think, almost, sort of a responsibility for those of us who've been in STEM for a while, to help the next generation understand nobody got here with a silver spoon. Eh, some. >> Absolutely. >> But on a straight path. It's always that zig zaggy sort of path, and embrace it! >> Yeah, I think that's key, right? And the one point here is very relevant that you mentioned as well is, that it's very important for us to recognize that a love for an environment where you can embrace the change, right? In order to embrace change, it's not just people that are going through it, but people that are supporting it and sponsoring it because it's a big change. It's a change from what was an environment a few years ago to what is going to be an environment of the future, which is an environment full of diversity. So I think being able to be ambassadors of the change is really important. As well as to allow for confidence building in this environment, right? I think that's going to be really critical as well. And for us to support those environments and build awareness. Build awareness of what is possible. I think many times people will go through their careers without being aware of what is possible. Things that were certain thresholds, certain limits, certain guidelines, two years ago are dramatically different today. >> Oh yes. >> So having those ambassadors of change that can help us build awareness, with our growing community, I think is going to be really important. >> I think, some of the things too, that you're speaking to, there are boundaries that are evaporating. We're seeing them become perforated and sort of disappear, as well as maybe some of these structured careers. There's a career as this, as that. They used to be pretty demarcated. Doctor, lawyer, architect, accountant, whatnot. And now it's almost infinite. Especially having a foundation in technology with data science and the real world social implications alone, that a career in this field can deliver just kind of shows the sky's the limit. >> Yeah, absolutely. The sky's truly the limit, and I think that's where you're absolutely right. The lines are blurring between certain areas, and at the same time, I think, this opens up huge opportunity for diversity in skill set and diversity in domain. I think equally important is to ensure to be successful you want to start by driving focus, as well, right? So, how do you draw that balance? And for us to be able to mentor and guide the younger generation, to drive that focus. At the same time take leverage the opportunities open is going to be critical. >> So getting back to SAP Leondardo. What's next in this year, we're in March of 2018. What are some of the things that are exciting you that your team is going to be working on and delivering for SAP and your customers this year? >> SAP Leondardo is really exciting because it essentially allows for our customers to drive faster innovation with less risk. And it allows our customers to create these digital businesses where you have to change a business process and a business model that no single technology can deliver. So as a result we bring together machine learning, big data analytics, IoT, all running on a solid cloud platform with in-memory databases like Kana, at scale. So this year is going to be all about how we bring these capabilities together very specifically by industry and reimagine processes across different industries. >> I like that, reimagine. I think that's one of the things that you're helping to do for females in data science and computer sciences. Reimagine the possibilities. Not just the younger generation, but also those who've been in the field for a while that I think will probably be quite inspired and reinvigorated by some of the things that you're sharing. So, Mala, thank you so much for taking the time to stop by theCUBE and share your insights with us. We wish you continued success in your career and we look forward to seeing you WiDS next year. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. I'm delighted to be here. >> Excellent. >> Thank you. >> My pleasure. We want to thank you. You are watching theCUBE live from WiDS 2018, at Stanford University. I'm Lisa Martin. Stick around, my next guest will be joining me 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.