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

>> Announcer: Live from Stanford University. It's theCUBE. Covering the Women in Data Science conference, 2017. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE, live from Stanford University at the second annual Women in Data Science tech conference. We are here with the COO of Products & Innovation at SAP, Sinead Kaiya. Sinead, welcome to theCUBE! >> Thanks very much! It's great to be here. >> It's great to have you. You were one of the keynote speakers today. >> Sinead: I was. >> Talk to us about your role at SAP and some of the topics that you discussed to the large audience here today. >> Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things I was happy to open my keynote with was letting them know that I'm actually not a data scientist. Because while I think it's important that that community gets together and shares their knowledge, I'm actually coming from the industry business angle. And for the young women who are here starting out in data science, I thought it's also very interesting and important for them to also hear the business perspective on data science. So that was my main contribution to the talk today. And I got a lot of great feedback, that they really appreciated getting that perspective. >> I can't imagine that you wouldn't, because data science is a boardroom conversation now. You report to the CEO. Talk to us about the connection that you help the CEO understand about the value that data science can bring to organizations like SAP. >> Right. It's actually funny. We have recently re-equipped some of our major boardrooms in SAP with huge digital touchscreens. They're absolutely phenomenal, and the reason is because the CEO truly understands, as do the board members, that the power of many of their decisions are lying today in the data. And what they don't want is a static printout on some slides or some chart that somebody hands to them. They want to be able to touch the data and explore the data, and really try to dig into it themselves. So when it comes to the question of the data, I think for CEO's this is a no-brainer. Right, they're drowning in data. They have a lot of data. They understand that. But the point of my talk today was more about the science. So I think where CEO's need to go next, is understanding that just having reams of data and being able to slice and dice it is not going to cut it anymore. You need the young women in these professions that bring the scientific discipline to that data, which is incredibly technical, around machine learning algorithms, to actually start to make sense of that data. So this is a switch for CEO's. The data is a no-brainer, but the science is a new thing that's starting to creep into the boardroom. And they're starting to learn that machine learning and these technologies are going to be very important in how they drive their businesses. >> What's the perception of that at SAP, and what are some of the things that are going on on the technology side to bring that data science in, to make sense of this data and extract value for SAP? >> So obviously SAP has a very strong portfolio of analytics products as well as our SAP HANA in-memory data platform, but where the power of it, is when we start co-innovating with our customers, because it all comes to life once it reaches the customer. So I gave a couple of examples in my keynote today, on how we're co-innovating with, for example, our customer Trenitalia. So Trenitalia is the largest provider of train service in Italy. They move about two million passengers a day. >> Wow. >> And about 80 million tons of freight a year. And they're collaborating with SAP to not only, how do you say, equip all their trains with sensors and be able to be getting that real-time data, how do they connect that with the IT data in their maintenance systems, so that when a train, let's say we know before it's going to break, before it does, and the machine already has triggered the maintenance technician, has already scheduled it, and everything happens in a very smooth and automated way. So it's once we go to the real problems that our customers are having, and we can apply our in-memory technology to their problems, that we get the real value. >> Right. That's such an interesting example. Like, intelligent train, digital train, how do those come together to enable them to meet their customers' objectives. >> Absolutely. Another interesting topic that I talked about was business without bias. So this is a new feature set that we're building into our HR systems. So SAP SuccessFactors has systems that people use for recruiting, and then taking you through the whole HR life cycle from promotions to talent management to compensation. But obviously, anybody who's been through these processes know that there's a certain element of human bias along the way. So, one of the things I talked about is how we're using machine learning to enhance our HR product, so we can try to at least identify some of the bias, if not start to remove it from the system. So... >> This is, sorry. We actually were speaking with someone on the show earlier today, who was looking at how to remove bias from the recruiting process, and creating technology for college campuses and students to be able to use. It's game-based technology, and I thought it was really interesting, because oftentimes recruiting, looking at GPA's, test scores, maybe some of those other hard factors, but now with data science and the ability to understand and add some of the behavioral insights in, really interesting applicability and how that can influence the next generation of people working for lots of different industries and companies, including SAP. >> And it's not just because it's technically interesting, or because it's the right thing to do. To take it from the CEO angle, CEO's today recognize that if they want to solve the big challenges that are on their plate, they not only need the best talent, they need the most diverse talent. But I can see from my experience, just because the CEO decides that diversity should be a corporate priority, and just because people say "yeah, we think that's a good idea," how do you actually codify that in the systems that your employees are using in the business? So the question of, do we need diversity in business, is no longer on the table. But it's rather, how do we actually start to implement that in a more systematic way, so that it's not just wishful thinking. It's actually something that's built in. >> Right. Talk to us about who your collaborators are within SAP, on things like that. Who do you work with, departmentally, function-group-wise, to help make that "yes, we understand, we need to do this" into actually real-world applicability? >> Well, one of the things I talk to, and some advice I gave the young women today, which is true for software in general, is they have to collaborate with the end user. So if you want to build in these bias checks into the HR system, do not sit alone in your laboratory. Do not sit in front of your computer and try to guess what you think is needed. Go out and shadow a recruiter for a week. Go and sit with the end user. Go and understand and truly see what their problems are, and then really involve them in the solution. So, I think that will also help when we talk about how do the young women here take all the academics and all of the, how do you say, theory that they're creating, and start to apply that in a real business context. If you haven't involved the end user, that's going to be quite hard to do. So one of the things I told them is, go to the user. >> That's great advice. I'm curious though, your perspective, coming from the business side, you know we look at data science, Forbes said it's going to be the best job to apply for in 2017. We're also seeing statistics that show, by 2018 there's going to be a shortage. The demand will be so high for data scientists that there will be a shortage. If we kind of look at the evolution of data science and where we are now, you look at the traditional skills. Stats, math, sciences, computing, maybe former hackers. Some of the things that we've heard today that I'd love to get your opinion on, being a businesswoman, is people are now saying, you know, it's the ability to be creative, to analyze and interpret, but also to communicate the information. Another thing that came up that I thought was really interesting was the factor of empathy when you're evaluating different types of data. I thought that was really interesting. I'd love to get your advice for a young woman who might be thinking about majoring in computer science, but maybe her interests really lie in sports or something that you think, is there a technology there? Well yeah. What advice would you give, and what are some of the additional core skills that you see a successful data scientist of the future needs to have? >> Right. So I love that you brought up the topic of communication, because I see in the business world, this is so important. So when you talk about competitive advantage, all of the companies can go out and hire people with, let's say, equivalent technical skills. So we can all get to the same level of technical prowess, let's say, in an industry. But do you have the people who, like you said, can apply the creativity and then find a way to communicate the results back in a superior way? So I think they are going to find that just having the technical skills in business is never enough to really break that ceiling. You have to have absolutely phenomenal communication skills. >> Definitely. >> I also gave them the advice to take a couple of business courses. It really helps to understand how the decision-makers, who you're trying to influence, what are the strategies that they use? What are the challenges that they face? And how do you actually look at some of the problems of data science more from a business perspective? I told them, what I thought is, absolutely the most hireable data scientist would be someone with some domain expertise, someone with the technical background, but somebody who also knows about business. So we need the full package. >> Absolutely! Well and that's an important point, because technology evolves. It's also the catalyst for our evolution, and naturally, any role will change and evolve. I think communication is a core, a very horizontal skill. But I definitely also would agree with your recommendations that having some business acumen in some form or fashion is really going to be key. Tell us a little bit about, what are some of the things, when somebody's coming on to SAP as a data scientist, if they maybe don't have that business background, are they able to get that within, because the culture at SAP kind of supports sort of, cross-collaboration, cross-pollination, so that they might be able to just start to learn different perspectives, to become that package that we talked about. >> Right. So in SAP, of course we have multiple opportunities for employees to either move between departments and see different areas of the company, but as a data scientist at SAP, the best experience you're going to have is working with our customers. It's one of our greatest assets and our greatest pride, is the wonderful relationship we have with hundreds of thousands of leading businesses around the world. So by joining SAP, you get to collaborate with some of the really top companies and industries. And that is when it doesn't become business theory in books. You actually get to go to the customer and see how it touches their business, and where it becomes real. And I think this is what attracts so many people to SAP, and gets them to really engage and stay at SAP, is that phenomenal customer base that we have. >> That's fantastic. Well, that real-world applicability, there isn't anything better than that. You can learn a lot of theory in textbooks, and maybe obviously be able to apply some of it, but having that expertise when something doesn't go the way that it's printed, is really really key to helping shape someone. Speaking of shaping, I'm interested in how you've been at SAP for quite some time, you've had posts in Germany and France, which is amazing. Now you're based in New York. Tell us how you've seen, because you really clearly understand the business side and you understand the importance of the business side and the data science side, the needs there and how they need to work together to drive more value, innovation, drive products, drive revenue. How have you seen SAP's culture evolve to become open to, for example, business and data science merging and being core collaborators? >> Yeah, so I mean, SAP's industry has changed a lot over the recent years. And we've done that along with our customers. So our customers are obviously in a much more tight competitive situation in the whole digitization side of things. So we've been evolving along together with them. But to go back to my other point, one of the major changes or cultural shifts that I've seen in SAP is this tight collaboration with the end user. It used to be that we were only given access to the IT departments of our customers. So we literally had to work through the filter of the IT department to find out what it is we should build. Suddenly, the IT departments are realizing that the end user in companies have quite a bit of power these days, you know. >> Lisa: Yes they do. >> And they're now opening the doors and asking us to collaborate with them, and that shift has allowed our engineers to get even closer to the end users in our customers. >> Fantastic, and I'm sure that's really a key for driving innovation. Last question for you. We're at the second annual WiDS conference. I mean, what an amazing event. Live streamed, reaching so many people. You yourself were a keynote this afternoon. Diane Greene was a keynote this morning. As you look around this very energetic atmosphere that we're in, what has inspired you? What are you going to take away from WiDS 2017 that you're like, wow, that was really fantastic? >> Well, one of the things is the diversity of the speakers. I mean, the breadth of this topic is amazing. Being a woman in tech, of course it's wonderful to see so many highly intelligent and engaged women in one room, which is something we don't usually get to see. So that's one of the other key takeaways for me. >> Fantastic. Well Sinead, we so appreciate you stopping by theCUBE. We wish you continued success as COO of Products & Innovation, and we look forward to seeing you next time on the program. >> Thanks so much! >> And we want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We are live at the second annual Women in Data Science conference, #WiDS2017, but stick around. We'll be right back.