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

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

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

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

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

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to the CUBE we are in Orlando, at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018, I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend as my co-host. We're in the NetApp booth, and we are very excited to talk to the VP of the Chief Customer Office at SAP, Mark Marcus, Mark, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, glad to be here I appreciate it. >> This event is enormous. One of the things that really struck me in Bill McDermott's key note was, you know, we always here about, oh we are expecting 20 thousand people, he talked about a million people engaging with SAP SAPPHIRE this week, via the in person, and the live, and the on demand video experiences. Massive! 390 thousand customers, hundreds of customer sessions the voice of the customer validating SAP as one of the world's most valuable brands is not only pervasive here its palpable. So talk to us about the Chief Customer Office. What is it, what's it's mission, why was it created? >> Yes, okay that's a great, a great way, so first of all thank you, I appreciate you being here, I live in Orlando so it's great to see this event in my-- People wonder why SAPPHIRE is actually in Orlando, it's because I live here. (all laughing) >> You're the reason! >> You're the reason. >> I'm the reason SAPPHIRE is in Orlando, Florida. >> Okay, you heard it, Mark Marcus, you're the reason. >> No, so what happened is, when Bill McDermott came to SAP, he was a different type of leader, and what he wanted to do immediately is start meeting with customers. So what he did is, he started meeting with customers, and he said if you have any questions or problems, give me a call. And so what happened is, his phone started ringing, people needed help, so he needed somebody that could help him with the customers when he ran North America. And so that was the genesis to Chief Customer Office. So we started off, first, we were extremely reactive. And so what I mean by that is, if the customer had a problem, we'd have to go in, and we'd have to help them. And it's much more difficult when you have a problem, then try to prevent a problem. So what we've been doin' the last several years, is trying to be much more proactive, so instead of waiting for the phone to ring, we've been getting with customers, and making sure, you know, as their project start, begin their steering committee meetings and make sure that things go well. >> So, you've taken that more proactive approach, it's almost how the organization's evolved. What is the focus today? >> Yes, well the focus has always been the customer, but I think it's more of, taking the best practices that we've learned, and actually sharing those with the customers, and helping them explain how other people have done their journey, because what you'll find, is people are in different phases of their journey, and what they like to hear more of is, you know, what did other customers do, what did they do right, what did they do wrong, and how can we be more successful? So we've been able to, over the years, if you think about, just to put it in perspective again, there are, SAP North America has 158 thousand customers, and we're only on, my particular team only has about a hundred of those customers, that we have. So it's a very, very small amount, they're are ones that, you know, are strategic to SAP, that we get involved in. But what we're able to do though, is, through social media and other areas is, customers wanna hear what happened, again, in the past, and how we can, you know, learn from that and move forward. >> So, I'm a big social media fan. Twitter handle has 38 thousand followers, which a lot for your focus on a hundred customers, so I think that, that you're echoing the, the theme very well. Talk to us about how it's changed over the past, 14 or so years, shift has focused from on-premises solutions to hybrid-cloud, to cloud analytics, AI, what's the, what are customers talking about? >> I'll tell you what, you're talkin' my language now, (Keith laughing) okay, because what happened is what we did is, actually what I'm in part, what I'm a part of is actually the cloud ambassador program. And so what that is, is it's focusing on our cloud customers so, you know, success factors, Ariba, Concur, and those kinda things, and so, really what happened, is, you know, when SAP, when I came to SAP 14 years ago, it was all on-premise ERP, alright? So it's very contained, very controlled with what people had now there's Cloud's, we're not really sure what customers are doing, how they're interacting with the solutions, and so what we have to do is we really focus, and again, my group is 100% focused in on that, so. What part of our mission has been is, we're not necessarily know what customers are doing, so we're helping to understand what they're doing, and trying to help educate groups inside SAP to be more responsive and help them. >> So you mentioned having responsibility for some strategic accounts, about a hundred. Do those represent kind of a subset of some of the key areas in which you're looking for the voice of the customer, and their practice using your technology to influence the direction of some of the key technologies? >> Yes, 'cause I'd say they're some of the biggest, most strategic customers that we have, and so what we do a lot of is, we're able to, we align directly with the executives, at the customer, so one of things with Chief Customer Office, is we're aligned at the C level, so it's, the CIO, the CEO, the CFO, at that level, so we're able to say we heard directly from the leaders of the companies, our most important customers, key customers, and we're able to take that back the other areas of SAP, and say, this is the what the leadership's demanding, and that's what we're able to help them with. >> So, as we're going through this phase of digital transformation, through a lot of organizations, that audience is even more important than, what?! (chuckles) Tell me how, as digital transformation has become, more than just a buzzword but a imperative from the C-suite, from CEOs to CIOs, CMOs, CDO, all the C's, CXO! How has the conversation between those groups changed, from the SAP perspective? >> Yeah, I'll tell ya, that is, again, I'm not just sayin' that you are, you're hitting exactly what we focus in on because, traditionally SAP has been focused more on the CIO level, so it's more the IT groups of implemented ERP, it's been more of a back-office type solution, well now, what we're finding is the line of businesses are the people that are actually making the decisions. So what we're finding out is that, it's not necessarily so much that the, technically, how they work, it's more the business processes they have, and how we can help actually, basically automate, and help them run more smoothly. >> Yeah, Hasso Plattner actually, and some of the guys this morning during the keynote talked about that, in terms of, customers were saying, you know, I'm getting kind of confused, there's so many different product names, a lot of acquisitions, he was talking about that, we heard from customers that there was confusion there. So when he was talking about, in the context of C4 for example of, making things simpler to understand, but also to your point, the back office and the front office now has to be connected so they also talked about that, in terms of, the integration with SAP Cloud, and how they really focused on enabling wholistic integration because it's the processes that have to now communicate together, so that, a whole, kind of proactive, customer responsiveness, that was really apparent this morning. 46 years young SAP, you have a new initiative about the customer for life, tell us about that. >> Okay, so customer for life is a new initiative that we have, so what I told you, at the Chief Customer Office we've done, we're able to touch very few customers, but, you know, again, you know we have 156 thousand, in SAP North America, you know, multiply that all over the world, I mean, it's many customers, okay. So what we've tried to do, is take what we've done on a small scale in the Chief Customer Office, and make that pervasive throughout the whole company. And so what we're really good at too is actually, you know, understanding what the customers do, finding them a solution, but now what we wanna do is go through the whole life-cycle of what we do so, I mentioned, you know, having a customer executive assigned to every customer. Being able to be part of the steering committees that we have, and being able to follow them through so we can help guide them, so it's not only selling the solutions but actually helping them through all the way, so the new initiative we set is customer for life, it's something that we're rolling out right now, and we've had, and again, it's taking what we did in the Chief Customer Office and, you know, propagating that through the rest of SAP. >> So, this facility, you like to say it, 16 football fields, American football fields, so that's a big facility. I walked the facility this morning, got in about three thousand steps. Hundred plus partners on the floor, ranging from system integrators, technology partners, and infrastructure space, software SIs. Help us understand as SAP, 20 thousand plus people here at the show, a million people online engaging on SAPPHIRE, SAP is becoming a platform company. How has that changed your role, your conversations? >> Well, I think what has happened a lot is, especially in the cloud projects, again I'm gonna focus more on what I'm a part of is, you know, there's a lot of new partners that come up. Because what happened is that, you know, we acquired several companies, we did, you know Concur, Ariba, SuccessFactors, a lot of big companies, and a lot of different partners. So really what our role is, in the Chief Customer Office is, to basically, to help these partners to understand how to work together, and we do a lot of things in meetings, we have, what we do, is, it's usually like the three legged stool, it is, you know, it's SAP, the partner, and the customer together, and we all do that together. And what I've found is, some of the problems that we've had is not neces-- you know, I always say like, how can take the exact same solution, and it works well in one company, and it doesn't work in another company? And what it is, to your point, with all the partners here, is it's communication, are they working together, you know, is the partner, and SAP, and the customer all working together, and so that's what I'm really focused on today is meeting with all the, you know, do the SAPPHIREs, to meet with the partners, to make sure we're aligned, you know, talk about our key customers, and make sure that we're all working together. >> We talked to one of the gentleman yesterday who was running some of the communities around HANA and Leonardo and, just the massive amount of content that is being generated to enable and educate customers across 25 plus industries, was massive, as well as, leveraging that peer validation from customers, like you're saying, you know, some customers in certain industries have a ton of success with the same thing that others customers struggle, depending on a lot of different variables. So that sort of collaboration and communication, even within the SAP communities alone, was very apparent yesterday that that's one of the big drivers, of I'm sure, the customer for life initiative is, as you have evolved, so have your customers. One thing that struck me yesterday was, you know, looking at, you're now number 17 of the World's top most valuable brands up there with Apple, you know, products that we can engage with and, I saw on a bus yesterday some of the messaging, and ERP you can talk to, and hear from. (Keith laughing) So SAP really set a very lofty ambition of being up there with the Amazons, and the Coca-Colas, and the Googles, and now you have technology that people can, you know, like at home with their digital assistant, talk to and communicate with. I thought that was very powerful message. >> And I'd say that's, I'd say too that, you know, I've worked with SAP for 14 years, and when I came to SAP, nobody had really heard of SAP and what they were, they thought maybe, you know, sometimes on TV when you see SAP when it's translated in other languages or something, that's what they think of SAP, they don't really know what the company is but, yeah, it's been great to see how, you know, people would stop you, you know, whether you're wearin', you know, they'll see somethin' on your laptop, on your shirts or somethin' like that, yeah so it's been good. I think that's been a big focus of getting it out because, one thing is is we have 150 million cloud users, that's a lot of people, so a lot of people use SAP, so. Again, one of the cloud products that we have is called Concur, it's for expense and reporting, and so a lot of times people might not've heard of SAP, but they've heard of Concur, because they all do their expenses, that kinda stuff. So, exactly right, it is pretty good, you know, when you have even family members know who SAP is now. They've done a great job, you know, hiring, you know, with the market department and the people they've hired, it's been great, it's been good. >> So, okay, we talked a little bit about analytics and the customer experience as we're looking at intelligent business. Is that a message that's actually resonating with customers in that top 100 strategic accounts, are they using analytics to actually power business, What are some of the data analysis success stories? >> Yeah, I would say that, what I would say is that, what I've found a lot of times is that, you know, people can get the information in, but they need to be able to get the information out. And so, everybody across that has done it, so, I would just say almost every customer we have has basically needed to get that out, and do reporting and those kinda things, you know? So, part of what we do at the Chief Customer Office is, you know, not only, you know, help them with the reports that they have, but to be able to run that kinda stuff. >> You guys also have, you know, some really interesting use-cases, I'm a Formula One fan, I've worked with Formula One before, I'm, I understand it from a fan perspective. You guys are really involved in McLaren Motorsport, for example, from finance, to procurement, to manufacturing. How are you seeing some of these really big use-cases like Formula One, or Coca-Cola, infuse into some of the, you know, the mid-sized businesses, who, you say, might be using Concur for example. What is some of the value that a small company can get from the massive users? >> Yeah, well I'd say there's a lot of things, because what happens is that from those big massive customers that we have, we're able to put together as we call model company. And so what a model company is, is it takes the best practices you have and puts it into more of a, I'd say nothings out-of-the-box, but makes it much more easier to implement, to be able to do it, so what we're able to do is, you know, with the massive amounts of info like McLaren, I think Hasso mentioned what, there's 400 sensors that they're getting on their cars, and that kind of stuff. So basically being able to take all the information that we have, and then from that, distill it down into where it's a very, repeatable type instance we can use for other customers. So there's a lot, I mean that's what we do with a lot of the, what the customers have, we try to get that back to where other people can use it. >> A Formula One car is basically an IOT device. You said 400 sensors, generating a ton of data, per race weekend, times three days, times 20 events a year. I read from Gartner just the other day that by 2020, which is around the corner, there's expected to be 20 billion IOT devices. What are you hearing from your customer base regarding IOT and being able to synchronize this, you know, modern next-gen data center with myriad devices? >> Yeah, so that is one of our top initiatives that we have right now. Because, one of the things that we've done is, we have an offering that we have called Leonardo, and what Leonardo is, it was named after the inventor Leonardo da Vinci, alright? So, you know, in his time he was, you know, a great innovator, actually went and saw his house and went over to Europe, and I've done a lot with Leonardo, you know what I'm sayin'? To be able to do that, right? But what that is, is that's basically all about, you know, getting devices to be able to get that information in. Because what you do is, you have you know, thousands of sensors and stuff like that and a good, you asked me earlier about a good success story on that, is one of the ones that I think resonates the most on that is in Buenos Aires, they have a massive problem with rain, you know, it rains a lot, and they have severe flooding, and the architecture is antiquated. But what they've found, is the reason that they were having these flooding problems, is because the sewers and the drains were all getting clogged up. So what they did was, they put a sensor in every one of the drains to be able to make sure that they were unclogged and they were flowing freely. So what they did is, they were able to, if the water flow started going down they were able to empty out the drains, even with an antiquated sewer system, because they were keeping it aligned with, you know, using Leonardo now, they can go and keep it cleaned out, they've had massive rains and the flooding hasn't really been there where it is, so now, what's interesting is every time I go by and see a gutter that's all clogged up, I think, you know, they need Leonardo to be able to help! >> I was reading as well about Alicia Tillman, your CMO, who's been at the helm for about nine months now and, in the context of this desire to become one of the top global brands with an invisible product, she said, you know, that one of the most important things for SAP right now is brand narrative, messages and campaigns will change quarterly or, every six months as they should but, she said, you know, to be able to show the value of basically under-the-hood software, you've gotta be able to show how it transforms countries, lives, industries, and that's one of the things that I think is very, very palpable here at the event is how much impact SAP is making in, whether it's rhino conservation in Africa or, you know, helping water scarcity in India, the impact, which is really the most, the biggest validation that you get, right from the voice of your customers is massive. >> Yeah, and I'd say to that, you know I like to say that, you know, it sounds like, you know, yes we're a software company, and, you know, that kinda stuff, but, it is really a noble endeavor, because we are doing a lot of things to help people's lives, and to run their businesses better, and what you realize is that, Chief Customer Office sometimes we see that other side when the systems aren't running properly at times, you know, they're usually runnin' right, but sometimes they have problems, and when they do, you can just see the impact you have on, you know, people's lives and businesses and stuff like that, that it is really running, you know, it is core to what you have, you know. So I'll tell you one of the interesting things that SAP's involved in is, they do a lot with instant messaging, so they have a part of, one of the acquisitions we have does instant messaging, well, you don't think about that but like, when you use, let's say, Facebook Messenger, or something like that, those messages go inside an SAP infrastructure at times, right? So imagine, you know, if you can't change messages, or doin' those kinda things, you know, so. You're exactly right, it definitely does, what we're doing does really impact a lot of peoples lives, so it's important. >> Well mark, thanks so much for taking some time to stop by theCUBE and chat with us about what SAP is doing with customers, how they're really symbiotically working together with you to evolve and transform this company. >> I wanna say one other thing too, it's great to work with two professionals here, you guys have really helped me a lot. >> Aww! >> I don't do this a lot, but it really made me feel comfortable, so you, I appreciate your help, thank you. >> Our pleasure, thanks so much! And, so you're the reason SAPPHIRE's in Orlando, are you also the reason they got Justin Timberlake tomorrow night?! (Mark laughing) >> I would like that. But I would like to say real quick, one thing before we cut real quick, I would like to say one thing just about the NetApp partnership we have. So RJ Bibby is the person that I work with at NetApp, and, just what he's done to basically, because NetApp really helps run a lot of our infrastructure inside SAP, so it's success factors, some of the high-availability in things that we have, and just working with RJ, and kinda learning how we, how we work and can help other customers, they've really volunteered to help a lot of our customers, and so, I just wanna thank NetApp again for helping us sponsor this. >> Great, great closing. We wanna thank NetApp for having theCUBE in their booth. Lisa Martin, with Keith Townsend, we are at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018, thanks for watching! (bubbly music)

>> From Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE, covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018. Brought to you by Netapp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We are in Orlando in the Netapp booth at SAP Sapphire 2018. We are joined by a new person to theCUBE, Amit Sinha, the Founder and Chief Customer Officer at WorkSpan. Amit, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, excited to be here. >> So I'm really excited to understand more about WorkSpan, what you guys do. Tell us a little bit about that and what opportunity you saw in the market with respect to alliances that you went, ah, why is it no one's doing that, and you have this great idea. >> Yeah, absolutely, we had this ah-ha moment. In this day and age of connectedness around the world, there is not a single company that goes to market alone. Right, when the reality's that we all serve the same demanding end customers. We've got to align our marketing, we've got to align our messages. We need to align our innovation, and we need to sell together in order to earn more. Easier said than done, right? So that's where we saw the opportunity. That what if there was a network of alliances that are connected with one another, and if they can truly define a joint innovation, a joint solution, take it to market, co-market it. When they co-market they can get twice the audience at half the cost, and then co-sell. That way they can improve their vend rates, and we are truly seeing that. So that's the opportunity we saw, to really make the life of the alliance manager, the alliance leader, simpler and easier to do in this connected day and age. >> Well, essential because also on your website, 60 to 75% of announced alliances fail. That's enormous. So talk to us about some of the successes that you have had talking with companies, as you say that nobody goes to market alone these days. Did they have those ah-ha moments as well when you came knocking on there and said, hey look what we're developing. >> Absolutely, so look at this large event here. Sapphire is one of the biggest enterprise events out here. Over a hundred strategic alliances are here from SAP and they will all make key announcements here about joint products, big golden markets, but can you imagine three months down the line, 70% of them will be actually catching dust on the ground. They won't be even worth the paper the business cases were building on, and that's such a wasted opportunity. The amount of due diligence that goes into creating an alliance, thinking about the business case, people putting together solutions. But then once they announce it in the key note, that's where the decline really happens. There's no operational support behind, how do you take this to market? That's where WorkSpan comes in. We provide the joint sales plan, the joint marketing plan, the joint solution plan, to really operationalize the people coming together across the partnership. In India we say that a marriage is between families and that's very true. Some brilliant alliances between companies, deep in the company, it's not just the alliance manager working with another alliance manager. It's really marketers, sales force, alliance people. So it's a family of two companies coming together. That's where WorkSpan provides the foundation, the consistent process logic, and a data driven argument around it. So you can take decisions on the base of data to say, okay where is my alliance working and where does it need help? You don't do postmortems after that. You can fix as you're going along. >> So let's talk about that process and, data driven nature of alliances. Alliances are complex setups just starting at the very beginning of saying, you know what, we're two companies. We overlap in areas of competition, but there's these outliers where we really can partner together to make that happen. You look on a show floor, you see brands that are obvious. You know, we're in the NetApp booth for, and we've talked SAP Hana an awful lot and right across the way is the Oracle booth and they're talking heavily SAP on Oracle. So there's this opportunity to cooperate, and there's this area of competition. A lot of that is data driven. >> Yep. >> How do you capture that data and help create the process logic to help companies identify alliances and then execute upon and manage those alliances going forward? >> By the way, that's an excellent question. So when you are living in a network in this interdependent world, you will partner somewhere and you will compete with some places. So for this network world, we need a new security mark. So that only people who are allowed to see something are able to see that thing. We call this Attribute-based Access Control. I compare that to traditional applications which do Role-based Access Control. Just because you're higher up in the organization you get to see everything. But this new model of security, Attribute-based Access Control Mark, allows the right people to get into the right plans, so that they and they alone can see it. So you might be working for SAP on let's say the Google relationship or the Apple relationship, or the Oracle relationship, or the Netapp relationship, only those right people have those accesses, and the owners of those programs can control and secure that data. So what it allows a company to then do is it's even more secure in this day and age. We can argue that in this day and age with GDPR and all those compliance efforts that WorkSpan is far more secure than sending spreadsheets out, which is the current mode of collaboration. So you can enforce a corporate policy around what is your shared data, what is your private data. So in the same opportunity, you can have private data for your own company employees to see that is never shown to partners. So that translucency, not transparency, that translucency is really, really important when you do alliances, and then we understand this model of WorkSpan. >> So how do you help like, for alliances marketing for example, and say there's a joint campaign, Netapp with one of their partners for example, and they wanna do some lead generation activities, events, webinars, lunch and learns, digital campaigns and they're gonna get leads that come in from that and they might say, okay, well, I don't wanna give you all of that. How do help with some of that? I mean, it kinda goes to the competition theme a little bit, from a marketing standpoint, I'm just curious how do you help either reduce or mitigate concerns that companies, alliance partners would have in that space, or do you come in and sort of help them from a strategic area to normalize some of these concerns? >> Yeah, so what we do is we partner with the companies marketing automation systems. So let's say Netapp is working with SAP cloud for Customer. So at this event we announce an integration between WorkSpan and SAP cloud for customer. Similarly other customers may have other marketing automations solutions. Let's say (mumbles) or a salesforce.com. So we integrate with those systems. What happens is marketers can continue their contact database and and delete machine in those systems and figure aggregate result on WorkSpan, to really see which alliances are doing well. So we don't get in to what marketing automation systems do we partner and we to get with them. So that way what happens is we are extending the investment that a company already has made in their marketing automation stack, and we come across as the partner or alliance automation stack. So that way alliances with one another. And why is this important? This is important because if you're like an Intel or a Netapp you may be working with a who ecosystem of povides, and they themselves have their own marketing automation systems. So imagine if you're an Intel or if you're a Netapp or you're an SAP, you can get all this data back because there's WorkSpan in the middle. So as a network you may have just 1% of the data but your overall network is far more intelligent with all the data hat you can collect. >> So again, whenever we get a topic like this, we have to involve John Furrior's name, and get some Blockchain conversation goin' on. (laughing) From a ideal, you know, basically there's just you guys become an authority of authentication, you, there's the reputation, there's all these fundamental infrastructure things that you have to determine. That you think through it, you scale this out beyond just you know, alliances and auto (mumbles) technology in one area. There's all the attributes and manufacturing and other companies. How does this align with, or a more aggressive question, how does this plant like the ideas of smart contracts, with the likes of Blockchain? >> Yeah, absolutely. So Blockchain is a really good implementation of what we really have done in WorkSpan. So in WorkSpan, if you think about it, it's a network. Their transactions are like flowing across different parties and these transactions are trusted, right? Across different parties when let's say an Intel or Netapp sees a proven now platform. The process extends to the partner that they get a contract that's approved. So in some ways, in a living in a connected world you need to have these kinds of smart contracts and trusting data source that is not just your own. We're living in a shared data world, right? So one of the key partners that put, that Netapp works with is both Intel as well as SAP, right. So because SAP program funds an SAP marketing campaigns right here, and so is Intel's and they both come from (mumbles) parties. Netapp is able to trust that data, trust that transaction, execute. So we provide that trust foundation based on technologies on data. >> Sorry Amit, that's kind of the trust foundation, it sort of aligns to what Bill McDermott said in his keynote this morning about you know, trust being this new currency. You gus have been attaining a lot of momentum in the Fortune 500 space. >> Yes. >> Tell us a little bit about how you're doing that and ten if there's a customer example that you, that's one of your favorites that you think really articulates your brand value, share that too. >> Absolutely. So we've been very fortunate that we've been trusted by a lot of Fortune 500 companies to come on the platform. Really want to orchestrate their platform and their ecosystem, and we are seeing this need that the head of alliances is seeing they ought to be very strategic at the board where they want to be data to run and numbers to them. They're no longer saying I'm okay by saying that my alliance with such and such partner is going well. They wanna be quantified, they want to say it's going well by this much. So this is where the mean value prop is, we have had companies on our platform that have genetic for 8% mornings that have reduced their marketing cost by 50%. Intel and SAP specifically, this is their 12 year on our platform, and year on year they have collaborated a more number of campaigns deeper in the regions where their marketers are working with Intel marketers for example. So they are a 24x auto marketing investment. >> Wow. >> Where as they were expecting an 8 to 10x in a total marketing investment. So dramatically increased. For SAP, that meant $100,000,000 more in revenue at your marketing cost. Just because the two companies can unleash their shared potential with shared customers across the world. Now this happened, this is not an overnight success, this is a three year success in the making. Where there's deep partnership and collaboration at the regional level, at the marketing (mumbles) level and all will and up at the head of alliance (mumbles). So Intel's one company, we have SAP of course is a marketing account, they've normally worked with hardware alliances like Netapp and Intel but also their assigned alliance out of WorkSpan so a large, as many a size that you see here, those programs are coming on WorkSpan as well. We have the norm one bite on WorkSpan as well. HPE is on WorkSpan so that's a great example as well for Fortune 500 companies working on platform. >> Wow, a lot of momentum. You know it's for companies lik SAP, like WorkSpan, where you've got software, you've got something under the hood that a lot of people won't know what's happening or for their jobs have, to know or care. It's always challenging for a brand to go how we show a value of our product services when it's not something that we can touch or see or feel. And it's really through the validation, the best you can get is through the voice of your customer. And the stats that you've shared, you must be sort of salivating with, we can actually help you increase legion of 58% or increase revenue opportunities by 40%. I mean, you've got some really substantial data driven >> Yep. >> facts to show how you're transforming a business. That's got to be, that's gonna make you know, doing business a little bit easier that you know >> Yeah. >> you've got such solidity. >> Actually, when you think of the word it's really diverse right. Where you can see patterns from this type. So when you work with a lot of partners and you're orchestrating them on your ecosystem, you're running different kinds of marketing campaigns or different sales, a portion of these. They have different traction depending on how you actually execute it then right? But when you step back and you say, hey webinars don't really work well in Japan. Late evening events work better in Japan but in the U.S. on the West Coast, it seems like webinars work better or such and such partner does a really good job of hiring clients when events. But that this other partner I spent a lot of money with it all seems to go in search or plan advertising that I don't see a lot of benefit of, right. So you can make these data driven arguments by partner, by channel, by investment, by you know, by any metric that you want now. So now the head of alliance, and we, this is exactly where divided platform will expand this, now you can be totally data driven and say this works, that doesn't work, so I should do more of this and spend less there. >> Fantastic. Well Amit, I wish we had more time to keep chatting but thank you so much for stopping by and sharing not only who WorkSpan is and what you do but some of the significant impact that yo can deliver to your customers. >> Thank you so much for the opportunity. Love talking to you about. >> Ah, likewise. We wanna thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAP Sapphire in 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)

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

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

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

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

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

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