[upbeat electronic music] >> Hi everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here with Eric Pennington, Director of Solutions Engineering, and Mike Todaro, Senior Epic Cache Consultant at Sapphire Health. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on theCUBE and chatting about the wave of Cloud, cloud-native, Sapphire Health and Ansible. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> So, let's get started. Can you guys just briefly describe Sapphire Health and what you guys are doing there. The consulting services, the trends that you're seeing. Just take a step, a minute to describe the environment at Sapphire Health and what you guys are doing. >> For sure, yeah. So, Sapphire Health was a consultancy that was founded by the CEO back in 2016, Austin Park, who also serves as a CTO for some healthcare organizations, because he was having difficulty finding an organization that really specialized in Epic infrastructure. So you might be familiar with some of the large players in Epic consultancies, but they are typically focused more on the application side, so configuring like the ambulatory clinical system or something like that. And there really wasn't a solution that he could find in the market for an organization that was focused on Epic infrastructure and some of the more technical components of managing an Epic technical ecosystem. So, Austin founded a team. Mike was one of the early folks to join. I joined a little bit later. But he put a team together to, again, really focus on the technical components of an Epic implementation. And since then, we've been providing managed services for Epic infrastructure for a number of organizations. We've been focusing on platform migrations from, for example, AIX to REL for Epic organizations, and we've been focusing on some growth areas as well in the Cloud. Epic systems is now able to be hosted on the public Cloud, that's a relatively recent occurrence. So, we're working with some organizations in that space as well. Mike, anything you'd add there? >> No, I think that pretty much covers it. We've spent a large fraction of our effort making sure that we're engineering solutions for these clients that move them in the directions towards Cloud readiness, towards containerization, automation, and those sorts of things. I think Eric's description's spot on. >> So, you guys must be busy. I mean, I can only imagine the action happening right now as people realized, with the pandemic specifically, two areas that we've reported aggressive growth on was public sector and healthcare. Both were under massive strains of pressure to get faster. (chuckles) Can you guys just weigh in real quickly on what you guys are seeing and how that's impacted your consulting services, but also the customer. What's going on in their minds? >> Absolutely, we had some customers very early on in the beginning of the pandemic where we were given the cadence of updates coming from Epic, the needs for growth for those customers where both in ICU surge capability as well as just general admittance. There was a flurry of hardware purchasing, provisioning, set up. An increased cadence around patching for various pieces of the Epic environment including Epic code directly. All of those things. The tempo of all of that increased once the pandemic began, and we spent a significant fraction of time trying to find better ways, faster ways to engineer what we were already doing for clients, simply so that we could continue to keep up with the surge in demand without requiring an additional surge in investment in people, where it wasn't necessary. Obviously, some growth was necessary, but we wanted to help our clients get the most out of what they already had so that they could spend that money where it was needed to help patients. >> Yeah, awesome, great stuff. So, we're here at AnsibleFest getting into the action. It's all about automation. So I have to ask you guys, what led you to start exploring automation solutions at Sapphire Health? >> Yeah, so there's quite a few reasons. I would say the most critical is that we've been providing managed services to organizations around infrastructure management for some time. And as you can imagine, infrastructure management has some repetitive tasks, and I'm quoting my colleague, Mike, here, but a good administrator is a lazy administrator. And what we mean when we say that is, if there's a repetitive task that's being performed over and over again, if there's an opportunity to automate it, that's going to save us time. But more importantly, that's going to... Paul, these lights here. Let me move around a little bit, should come back, there we go. But it's going to provide an opportunity for us to focus on more value-add services for the client. It's going to reduce costs for the client in terms of the services that we're providing. And I think most importantly, it's removing the possibility for human error or the possibility for error overall. So it's a natural evolution of us observing the time that we're spending with our client partners, and again, it really provides a lot of value to Sapphire as an organization and our customer partners as well. >> Mike, you want to weigh in on this automation trend. How do you see it evolving? I mean, obviously sounds good when you want to automate things that you do repetitive tasks, but is there more going on that you see in automation that goes beyond just, okay, if you do it three times-automated kind of vibe. >> Sure. Automating repetitive tasks is the kiddie end of the pool. That's how we get... That's how we sell the idea to people who just don't get the concept yet. But there are workflows that really aren't feasible outside of automation. We tend to think of automation, in some cases in this sort of limited way, but automation is really... What we really are targeting with automation is more about workflow. It's less about individual tasks, and it's more about an idea of workflow or a business requirement from its origin all the way through its implementation. So, I've got just the simplest case that jumps immediately to mind, is I have a new hire, I've got to provision them an account. I need to provision it across multiple systems. I've got to do it in our single sign on. They need home directories. They might need access. They need building accesses we need to generate. You got to generate badges for these people. And these are all workflows that are normally disparate. You know, you have to take your sheet to this guy, take your sheet to this guy, here's my new hire form. Really, what you really want is, we got a new hire, everything's checked out, put it in this basket here and let the automation move it through all of these systems all the way across. And that's the sort of thing, like I said, that's a very limited, very simple idea, but that's the kind of thing we really want. We want to get in the door with automation with simple things and then we want to teach... We want clients and ourselves to be challenged, to be creative, to find new ways to apply it that aren't immediately obvious. >> Yeah, I was smiling because I love the example of the kiddie end of the pool because automation is going mainstream, and it used to be kind of, you know, for the geeks who were doing the hardcore stuff who got the whole big picture. Now you're seeing with AI automation moving in and with Cloud, a lot more automation happening. So, I can almost see in my mind mental image of people wearing bubbles in the pool, kind of like going in the deep end, get back over here. Stay in your lane. Yeah, but this is the trend, and I want to get into this because you guys are involved in this Epic migration that's been talked about. So for the folks that aren't in, say the health care space, put a little context around Epic and then I want to get into this whole migration discussion. I think that kind of points to some real value propositions. So, what is Epic for the folks outside healthcare? >> Sure, so Epic is one of the leading EHRs or electronic health records software in the world. It is by far the most deployed in the United States. What's involved in building an Epic, or performing an Epic migration. Epic is hundreds of systems. When you think about Epic as an umbrella concept, it is servers and end-user workstations and all of these things. When we talk about platform migration, what we're usually talking about is the transactional database. They call it the ODB or whichever term I think you feel applies best. When we perform all those migrations, we're usually talking about... When we perform one of those migrations, we're usually talking about an AIX to Red Hat migration, although you can just do hardware to hardware. Involved in that is a number of things. You're building new VMs. You're setting up patch cycles, setting up the patching server. Installing the various administration scripts that Epic provides. Installing the software that runs the DB, which at the moment is either InterSystems Cache or Iris. There's the provisioning of the local security users. There's the configuration of the OS. If you're moving from AIX to Red Hat, you're talking generally about a bit endians conversions, so, big endian to little endian, there's a tool for that. There's a lot of these little stats. And the thing is, is that, they're all very, very well defined and very similar, and so, they look identical in many of these cases from one implementation of Epic to the next. And that's not true for the entire Epic stack necessarily, but at the ODB level, this stuff is all very similar, and this is a very right place to automate. This screams automate, and we do this because, I mean, who wants to make mistakes. If you write and build your script and debug it, the script runs, it doesn't make mistakes. I make mistakes, the script doesn't. So, we do that, and we end up spending less time on these repetitive, unnecessary tasks. We guarantee the correctness of them, or we do a better job of guaranteeing the correctness of them, and all of that ends up saving money in the long run. >> That's awesome, and thanks for the context. I was going to get there on the automation piece. It really sets the table for the automation. Real quick clarification. How much or what kind of software work is involved in a migration? >> Oh, so there's the installation of... You have from the installation of the OS and the configuration of the OS, the building in the patch server, the implementation, testing, and patch cycling. There's those data conversions I talked about. There's environment refreshes where we copy an existing environment on a regular basis to another environment for things like testing, for troubleshooting purposes or for other reasons. There's more than one database for Epic. There's one big production database. You have training databases, and you have playground databases for people to work in so they can learn to use the system better, and then there are, I mean, there's a galaxy. >> Oh man, so it's a huge system. Okay, so I got to ask the security question. >> Sure. >> Is security element as important when selecting automation or how has that factored in? I mean, right now that's super important, obviously, records are key, but honestly, where does that fit into the automation piece of security? >> Yeah, I think that's a very important question, and as you alluded to, security is incredibly important. It's very important in healthcare in particular. And in fact, with healthcare, there's a lot of regulatory requirements. There's a lot of requirements that individual healthcare institutions have that we as a partner to that institution need to follow. So, as we were evaluating automation vendors and automation solutions, a highly secure system was not a nice to have or like a value add, it was something that was absolutely critical and paramount to being able to successfully automate any of the things that we're doing. So I'll turn it over to Mike to talk about some of the specifics, but as we evaluated Ansible, we saw that it really supported robust security. So, Mike, can you comment a little bit more on that? >> Sure. There's a number of ways that we use Ansible to help improve the security posture for clients. One of the ways is Ansible playbooks are written to be runnable against the server and nothing will change unless something is set incorrectly. And this lets us assure that the configuration is where we expect it to be so we don't get drift on these servers. Now, remember I said an Epic environment is a lot of servers. If one or two of these... >> John: Mike, if you don't mind, I need to interrupt. What is, when you say drift, what are you referring to? >> So when I say drift, what I mean is, if there's a bunch of different servers and I as an administrator have to work on one or two of these servers just for little things during the day, I might make a change on one of these servers advertently or inadvertently, and then that server's configuration is now slightly out of phase with the other servers, which could be benign, but it could also be a security hole. Having Ansible able to run nightly and continue to adjust these servers back to the expected baseline, and in the case of things like tower, be able to report that these things were out of position. Let us know, hey, it lets us reduce the attack surface, first of all. It lets us multiply it, like a force multiply our attention across this farm of servers, and it gives us that sort of clarity that we know we're doing what we have to do to make sure these servers continue to be safe. >> That's an awesome service. That right there is, I mean, just going in manually trying to figure all this stuff out, it's just a nightmare. I mean, what a great relief that is. I mean, just the alternative is what, you know, more pain and suffering human wise, that's the labor, and then risk on attack because people go to bed. >> I'm a patient. The thing is, on a personal note, I'm a patient too, all of us are. We all have doctors. We have to go to the hospital for things occasionally. And if we fail when we perform these security audits, if we fail when we perform these security checks, patient data can get lost. It can get sent to people who shouldn't have it. And I'm a patient, I have no desire for my medical information to be available anywhere but in the hands of my doctor or myself. And that's the thought I try to stay with when I'm working on these systems. I'm a patient. It's not that I'm doing this because... I mean, the knock-on effects of reducing liability for the customers cannot be ignored or overstated, and they're critical, but, ultimately, my eyesight is on the patient. >> Yeah and having that stability is huge. Okay, this brings up the whole automation thing as it becomes more mainstream for you guys, specifically, is critical. The system's there, you have to watch farms, all the action happening, it's a huge system. Complex automation is key. How are you guys continuing to push the automation envelope into the Sapphire Health's consulting practice? >> Well, as you mentioned, John, yeah, we're really taking a look at the entire technical infrastructure when we're working with our clients. And we are offering fully outsourced managed services for organizations, not just around the Epic infrastructure but things like networking devices, security and other third party systems. So with that, we're seeing a lot of these things that are going on, and we're always evaluating opportunities for automation. There's actually two areas in particular that we're seeing gain a lot of momentum with our customers, and we're seeing a lot of opportunity for automation. The first is business continuity and disaster recovery, specifically within Epic. So, Epic has very stringent requirements for resiliency, as you can imagine. When the system goes down, a hospital can't really do what it needs to do from a billing standpoint, a clinical standpoint, so very robust disaster recovery and resiliency standards and solutions are very important. However, there's not a lot of automation that's available either from Epic or, as far as I know, other consultancies, so what we did is we built a script that provides failover automation. So some of the tasks that would be very manual in terms of failing over to your DR solution, we've automated that, and that again, removes a lot of the opportunity for human error, really speeds up the failover process. And so with the customers that we work with, that's something that we provide. Another big area that we're seeing is environment refreshes. So within Epic, there are different environments that are, basically, all their data is copied over on a recurring basis from the production environment, and the refreshes can have a lot of manual steps involved, so we found an opportunity and have implemented some automation around environment refreshes for some of our managed services clients. And as we continue to go throughout, you know, building our Cloud practice in some other areas, I'm very confident that we're going to see, you know, infrastructure is code more opportunities for automation around areas like that. >> I mean, you guys got to love the DevOps vibe going on now. Mike, I mean, you guys have seen the movie before in the old legacy going back to the mainframes, so you probably still run into a lot of older systems that still do a purpose. I mean, I have a lot of friends and clients that are working in the big banks, and they still have all the old school that does their job well, but containerization and Cloud kind of give life to these systems because now we're living in this system architecture called distributed computing again with the Cloud. It's the same game, different, different stuff though. >> Absolutely. Years ago, almost every Epic client was running on AIX, and maybe not mainframe but more mini computer. The migration path for almost all of the clients has been to move from those AIX mini computers down to VMs running Red Hat, or running Linux, and the natural evolution of that path is to move at least disaster recovery data centers into the Cloud, and then for some clients, the economics say the whole data center to the Cloud. So, absolutely that path is, it's well forged, it's there. I suspect that we'll see a lot more of clients, even larger hospitals, beginning to move down that road in the near future. >> And for the folks watching who may not have the scar tissue that we have, AIX was IBM's old Unix, a kind of mid-range mini computer. It was kind of client server, it was client server going now again being modernized. So obviously Red Hat is now part of IBM, but it speaks not just to IBM, this is about Ansible, right. So this is like, there is action happening here, so this is a case study of pretty much all migrations. It's not just the fact that it's AIX to Red Hat, it's system to the new thing that has benefits. >> Absolutely. >> What's your take, Mike, on that that kind of paradigm, because a lot of people going through similar situations just change AIX to something else. You have a lot of this migration re-platforming going on with the opportunity to kind of tweak it and add stuff to it. What's your advice and what's your reaction to this big trend? >> My advice for this trend, honestly, my advice is when you're planning these migrations, you know they're coming. Even if you're not in the cycle yet, you know it's coming. My advice is start brainstorming your implementation of the automation now. Get your automation into the system as you platform into your new platform, because it is far easier to build that entire platform with automation as a critical component than it is to bolt it on later, and you will get much more out of your investment and time and effort if you've integrated it from the very beginning. I would say anyone that was looking to perform a platform migration now and hadn't already begun serious consideration of running automation or had no plans for an automation, was setting themselves up for a very long and very difficult road to hell, and I would advise against it at this point. >> Great, great insight, Mike and Eric. Thanks for coming on, appreciate your insight here. You guys want to give a quick plug for the company? What you guys are looking to do, hiring, any update you want to share because great, great content you guys just shared here. Thanks for doing that. Take a minute to put a plug for the company. >> Yeah, I think a quick plug here. Yeah, if you're a talented cache admin, there's not too many Mikes out there, so we're definitely looking for more Mikes. But more broadly, we're really looking to expand into the Cloud space. We're rapidly expanding our managed services opportunities, and what we're seeing is a lot of organizations have like one ODB admin or one client systems ECSA admin. And what they run into is that person will leave, that person will retire, that person needs to get married and go on their honeymoon. It's kind of a problem, so we're working with a lot of organizations to not just fully outsource their environment but to provide a hybrid-managed service to provide overflow, to provide capabilities, to scale up with upgrades and projects like that. So, talk to us, we're pretty darn good at it, as you heard from Mike. We've got a couple of Mikes, again, we could use more, so if you are a Mike, please reach out. >> I think we virtualized him, we just virtualized Mike, you know, virtualization is a huge trend. >> If data writes Mike, we need to do that, yeah. >> Are you a body, are you the real Mike? >> (laughing) As far as I know, my wife would appreciate it if you guys would clone me a few times. >> You know, I've heard horror stories, Eric, around root passwords, like, who has the root password, oh, she left two years ago, kind of situations, this happens. I mean, this is not... it sounds like crazy but people leave. >> Yeah, I mean, nobody works anywhere forever, right? >> Don't be that company where you lose the root password, and never mind the ransomware action. Oh my God, must be brutal. Anyway, we can go another segment on that. Eric, thank you for coming on. Mike, thank you for your insight, really appreciate it, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Absolutely. >> Absolutely, it was our pleasure. >> Stay right here for continued coverage of AnsibleFest 2021. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (slow tempo electronic music)

welcome to the cube I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we are in Orlando sa piece sapphire now 2018 we're very proud to be in the NetApp booth now that sa very long standing partnership with sa PA welcome to Cuba thank you we're so glad you guys are here over a million people are expected to engage with the SH the experience both in person and online that's enormous yes sa P is the cash register of the world 70% of the world's transactions go through si people most of us don't see it a lot of the SI p products like Hybris like Arriba success factors are built on meta meta is 26 years young now and has undergone a big transformation from traditional storage company to more cloud we're gonna be now that data management company for hybrid clouds every customer has a different rate of motion to the cloud that's why we have to spend an awful lot of time listening to our customers don't and then talkative the c-level executives in the business side to say what are your what are your expectations about the technology right whether if the reduction of labor improved quality again overall equipment effectiveness and help them understand what the treaty chuckles on choice we're hearing for customers is I need choice I need to move my data around on-prem into whatever hyper hyper scalar environment you want fast efficient with analytics readouts everybody looks at their phone when we make a deposit we expect to see that deposit instantaneously right the business needs to operate just as instantaneously and a company like NetApp could build this data fabric to connect them seamlessly so that the customers have choice it's interaction of sensors and to way taking IOT data in and then also feeding it back into signals but that's part of the interface of the software people can deploy much more effectively with a lower skill set right so there's not that hurdle really allows the administrators to configure dream workspace where you can get all the data that you need to work with in one place takes all that noise and makes it into one screen so that you can just simply make and change the data the way you would expect to on a spreadsheet sa P is serious about this C for Hana move of being able to say you know what we are going to create an ecosystem of truck if you have a developer and your enterprise and you say you know what I'm a big sa p user but I actually want to develop a custom map or are there some things I might do then s ap makes available to Leonardo a machine learning foundation and you can take advantage of that and develop a customized again not just a products company but an ecosystem company on C sapphire in Orlando is a great example of how they're expanding the brand is that say P can't do everything so we work with a lot of specialists we were critiques we couldn't do this without hardware partners with storage Annette app has proven you know to be one of those partners that could deal with a myriad of data types from a myriad of applications that forces the stretch into voice recognition that voices the data mining and data analytics and the like augmented intelligence to augment humanity this connection of humans and machines working together they're doing all this genomic research personalized medicine for cancer patients throughout Europe using Hana I even know about it public safety if you could think about that that's a big thing to focus on thinking about using drones for first responders smart farming throughout all the Netherlands reducing pesticide use water usage dramatically down and they increased yields by 10% helping customers change their business change industries save lives pretty cool stuff yeah SAV has a little ways to go yet that that's kind of you talk to any HDI customer validated and certified for Hana is a bad word today but s ap understands it in their there they're moving to certify the pot platform for HDI so I thought that was a great example of them listening to customers and continuing to transform over the years we'd love to hear you know from customers hey can I eat with a buddy could I put this object you know on that object together and build a process basically there's almost everywhere place where the net up product will fit but again we have to make session where's the place to start step back and look at what perhaps other competitors have done in their space or in completely different industries are compared to making great content the cute makes great content that content would be found people will take notice you make a great product that impacts people's lives it's no wonder that s ap is near the top of that brand recognition brand value seventeenth on the list so if you want to become a leader or a thought leader in your own specific industry join the SMP HANA community make the investments in SP Leonardo work with SP work with net after and like Bill says let's get it done thank you all for being here we're a static for having the cube in our booth Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend on the cube from the net out booth at SVP sapphire now 2018 thanks for watching [Music]

Phil McDermott always say data's now the currency well today he was saying now Trust is the currency which is completely truth - but from the data being the country currency perspective it's now the endgame for both of us we've kind of pulled in all companies have gone into the middle that that's kind of not only the Mint messaging but kind of central thing we're trying to develop to deliver a value on speaking with a customer early it's like you have an accountability to help me be innovative right and that's a very important responsibility a lot of that revolves around enterprise class security right a lot of that revolves around uptime right with Layton sees between those environments cuts my performance attribute and are you gonna be there with me forever right amazing thing that's going on it thinking about using drones for first responders they actually can know what's going on in 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 so much higher invest more heavily in the cloud in the second thing they want to do is enable digital transformation real digital transformation how did they monetize the wealth of the data that they've acquired through their relationships with their customers and then how do they leverage that for their customer benefit [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 about that, what opportunity you saw in the market with respect to alliances that you went, "Ah why is it no one's doing that." 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 got to align our marketing. We got to align our messages, We need to align our innovation. I mean just altogether in order to be more. Easier said then done, right. So that's 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 vendors, and we are truly seeing that, so that's the opportunity that 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 percent 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, you know, nobody goes to market alone these days, did they have those ah-ha moments as well when you came knocking on there and say, 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 100 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 percent of them will be actually catching dust on the road. They won't even watch the people, the business cases will be the winner. And that's such a wasted opportunity. The amount of due diligence that goes into kind of creating an alliance, thinking about the business case, people putting together solutions. But then once they announce the keynote, 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. People wanting to join sales plan, the joint marketing plan, the joint solution plan, to really operationalize that people coming together across the platform. In India we say that a marriage is between families, and that's very true. So really, an alliance is between companies, deep in the companies, not just the alliance manager working with another alliance manager. It's really marketeers, sales folks, alliance people. So, it's a family of two companies coming together. And that's where WorkSpan, why it's the foundation, the consistent process logic, and a data driven argument around it. So you can dig decisions on the base of data, to say, okay where is my alliance working, and where does it need help? You don't do post mortems 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, I'm, we're two companies, we overlap in areas of competition, but there's these outliers where we really can partner together to make that happy. You look on a show floor, you see brands that are obvious, you know, we're in the NetApp booth and we've talked SAP Hanna a 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, 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. >> Well I think that's an excellent question, so when you are living in a network in this interdependent work, you will partner in some areas and you will compete in some places. So for this network world, we need a new security model, so that only people who are allowed to see something are able to see that thing. We call this Attribute Base Access Control. 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 module of security, Attribute Based Access Control model, 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 relationships, 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's your private data. So in the same opportunity you can have private data for your own company, employees to see that as them as sort of partners. So that translucency, not transparency, but translucency is really really important when you do alliances, and that we understand is 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 wanted to 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, ah, okay, well I don't want to give you all of that. How do you help with some of that, I mean it kind of goes to the "coopertition" theme a little bit, but 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 company's marketing automation systems, so let's say NetApp is working with AP Cloud for customer. So at this event we announce the integration between WorkSpan and this AP Cloud for customer. Similarly other customers may have other marketing optimations, and you should see in a low quarter market, or a salesfirst.com, so we integrate with those systems. So what happens is marketeers can continue their contact database and their lead machine in those systems, and we get aggregate results in WorkSpan to really see which alliances are doing well. So we don't get into what marketing automation systems do, we partner and we integrate with them. So that, what happens in that, we are extending an investment the company already has made in their marketing automations tech, and we come across as a partner or alliance automations tech, so that really the alliances knew 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 whole ecosystem of providers, and they themselves have their own marketing automation systems. So you imagine if you are at an intel or 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 one percent of the data, but your overall network is far more intelligent than all the data you've been collecting. >> So again, whenever we get a topic like this, we have to invoke John Forrier's name and get some block chain conversation going on, from an ideal of, you know, basically there's just, you guys have become an authority of authentication, there's reputation, there's all these fundamental infrastructure things that you have to determine. And you think through, you scale this out beyond just, you know, alliances, and honestly technology is one area. There's all the attributes in manufacturing, in other companies, how does this align with, or a more aggressive question, how does this sort plant like, the ideas of smart contracts with the lies of block chain? >> Yeah, absolutely. So BlockShare 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. There are transactions, they're like, flowing across different parties. And these transactions are trusted, right, across different parties. Let's say an Intel or a NetApp stays approved on our platform, the process extends to the partner and they get a contract, that simple. So in some ways, in living in a connected world, we need to have these kinds of smart contracts and trust in data source that is not just your own. We're living in a shared data world, right? So one of the key partners at Bolt, well NetApp works with this Bolt Intel as well as SAP, right. So, because SAP program funds the SAP marketing campaigns here, and they're both Intels, and they both come from trusted parties, NetApp is able to trust that data, trust that transaction that makes it too. So we provide that trans-foundation based on the qualities that.. >> Sorry, Amit, but that's kind of the trust foundation, as sort of aligns to what Bill Madridment said in his keynote this morning, about, you know, trust being this new currency. You guys have been attaining a lot of momentum in the Fortune 500 space. Tell us a little bit about how you're doing that, and then if there's a customer example that you, that's one of your favorites that you think really articulates your brand values, 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 seen, they're going to be very strategic at the board, where they want to be data driven and numbers driven. They're no longer saying, I'm okay by saying that my alliance with such and such partner is going well. They want to be quantified, they wanna say it's going well by this much. So this is where the main value prop is, we have had companies on our platform that have generated 58 percent more leads, that have reduced their marketing cost by 50 percent. Intel and SAP specifically, this is their third year on our platform, and year on year they have collaborated more number of campaigns, deeper in the regions, where their marketeers are working with intel marketeers, for example. So they got a 24X internal marketing investment, [Lisa] Wow. where as they were expecting an eight to 10x marketing investment, so dramatically increased. For SAP, that meant 100 million dollars more than double at lower marketing cost, just because the two companies can unleash their shared potential with the shared customers across the world. Now this happened, this was 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 marketeer level, and all rolling it up at the head of alliances. So Intel is one company, we have SAP of course as a marketing account. We not only work with hardware alliances like NetApp and Intel, but also their SI alliances are on WorkSpan, so large, as many as size you see here, those programs are coming at WorkSpan as well. People at Novel were invited on WorkSpan, HPE is on WorkSpan, so that's a great example as well of a Fortune 500 company. >> Wow, lot of momentum. You know, it's for companies like SAP, like WorkSpan, where you've got software and you've got something under the hood that a lot of people won't know what's happening, or further jobs don't have to know or care, it's always challenging for a brand to go, how do we show the value of our product and service is when it's not something 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 shared, you must be sort of salivating, with we can actually help you increase Legion by 58 percent, or increase revenue opportunities by 40 percent. I mean, you've got some really substantial data driven facts to show how you're transforming a business. That's got to be, that's gotta make doing business a little bit easier, that you know you've got such salitity. >> Actually when you think of the world, it's really diverse, right, but you can see patterns from this all. 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 opportunities. They have different traction depending on how you actually executed them, 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 US, one of the best course, it seems like webinars work better. Or such and such partner does a really good job of hiring clients in events, but this other partner I spent a lot of money with, it all seems to go in search or non 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, this is exactly where the value profit for spenders. 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 thanks so much for stopping by and sharing not only who WorkSpan is and what you do, but some of the significant impact that you can deliver to your customers. >> Thank you so much for the opportunity, loved talking to you both. >> Likewise. We want to thank you for watching theCube, I am Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, from SAP Sapphire 2018, thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We are just wrapping up day two at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018. Keith, this event is enormous. We were just comparing our step goals. This event size is 16 American football fields. Enormous, 20,000 people. I think, combined, we have around 15,000 steps today. >> That sounds about right. >> Quite a few of them go to your longer legs than mine but this event is really been incredible, the energy that SAP's CEO Bill McDermott kicked off with yesterday morning has really been carried through this event and with our guests on the show for the last two days. >> No, we did 23, 24 interviews and every last one of them was high-energy. The guests were extremely excited about the products, the solutions, and the problems they're solving for, not just enterprise, but for society. I thought that was a really great theme of the guests today specifically. >> It's amazing, and you talk about, you know, the impact on society and SAP wants to be one of the top world's most valuable brands like Apple, Google, Coca Cola, who are all customers of SAP's and who all sell products that we can interact with, that we can taste, you know, Mercedes Benz, we can drive. They've got this invisible software product. They've been around for 46 years. And to your point, the stories that we have heard about how these invisible product, products, are transforming industries, are saving lives, was really something that I did not expect. >> Well when you make a great product that impact lives or... I compare it to making great content. theCUBE makes great content, that content would be found, people would take notice, you make a great product that impacts people's lives. It's no wonder that SAP is near the top of that brand recognition, brand value, 17th on the list. If they continue to do that, if they become the product, the ERP solution that you can talk to and you can ask a question, you know, not just business questions of what were the numbers the last quarter for Chicago, but you can ask a question, you know what, where is the best place to take my family to live in Eastern Europe during the summer months? That becomes value-add that people wouldn't be able to ignore. >> They've done a tremendous job building this partner ecosystem. There were hundreds of partner sessions alone. We've heard from a lot of their partners. We're in the NetApp booth, thanks to NetApp for having theCUBE here. NetApp is a customer and a partner of SAP and we heard a lot about how SAP is transforming to the cloud dramatically with the help of this massive partner ecosystem. >> You know what, we've had Microsoft, Fujitsu, SAP, NetApp, Nvidia, the list goes on and on of customers and partnerships of examples of companies that have come together and they've been consistent. In some areas, obviously Microsoft competes with SAP. In some areas, Microsoft competes with NetApp. But they recognize that without these alliances, without these partnerships, they can't solve these large, complex problems of ridding parts of Africa with mosquitoes. SAP can't do that by themselves. Microsoft can't do that by themselves. And this week was a great acknowledgement and a example of how the ecosystem works. >> They also talked a lot at this event about the intelligent enterprise where it's, you know, it's not just about digital transformation as table stakes. Companies that do it well have, or are working towards getting, this true 360-degree view of the customer which is essential. They talked about enabling that via certain things that they're leading in, or pioneering, which is connecting the demand chain and the supply chain. They really talked about enabling this new, this current SAP that's built for this fourth generation customer experience. Our lives as consumers have dramatically influenced business. We expect to have the ability to, you know, try and buy an app if we want it, right? And they're using that model very well to give customers in many industries, they have 390,000 customers, choice and flexibility. And the partner ecosystem is just part of that flexibility that they have to give. And they do a great job of listening to their customers who really are helping with a lot of the co-development in a very symbiotic way. >> Yeah, SAP is reentering this people-centric view of ERP, CRM, of data, saying that their relationship is about people. Bill McDermott spent a lot of time talking about trust. One of the reasons why people trust the brand of theCUBE is because we're on the ground, we're talking to the users, we're talking to the people. People can reach out and touch and feel you, there's a personal relationship between that brand and the community. The same thing with, got the same feel for what SAP is trying to do of, you know, obviously with over 20,000 people, I dunno if the number is 21,000, 22,000, but more than 20,000 people, a million people online watching the event, SAP the serious about this C/4HANA move, of being able to say, you know what, we are going to create a ecosystem of trust. We talked about trust with the app center and being able to validate applications on the platform. SAP has long been one of those companies that's serious about their partnerships and validation and certification of platforms. So whether it's HCI, storage with NetApp, the deep relationship with NetApp, SAP is going to put its brand upfront and say that if you're going to engage with one of our partnerships, there's a transient trust that goes from SAP to their partners. >> And we talked with a number of folks working in different groups within SAP focused on the customer. This morning we had on their Chief Customer, a guy from their Chief Customer Office who talked about these, kinda top 100 strategic accounts that they partner with who then also they take that information, those learnings and don't just improve the technologies but they also use them to influence much greater than a hundred customers. They're strategically utilizing that data. We talked yesterday with one of the gentlemen running the SAP four, S/4HANA community rather, and the Leonardo community and the amount of engagement that they have in that community, especially in Leonardo which has only been around for a year. The customer engagement is key but also their reaction to it, and I would say even, I think we heard a lot of how they're being proactive with creating content and enabling their customers to be able to learn at the same time as they're learning from their customers. >> Yeah some hero numbers that we heard this week: 6,000 people in that HANA, the S/4HANA community. While the Customer Success Group focuses on the top 100 customers, there were, I think 38,000 people following the Twitter account, so there's obviously outreached stretch. The Leonardo and S/4 communities have created a thousand videos on how-to. So obviously the impact of and the reach of SAP has ambitions of not just raising brand awareness and getting into that Top 10 with Apple and Google, they also have the ambitions of becoming a platform, a ecosystem. You know, we look at Microsoft as kinda one of the ultimate platform companies. Microsoft partners make more money off of Windows than Microsoft makes off of Windows. SAP seems to have the same goal of their partners, there's a hundred partners on the show floor, that should generate more revenue than SAP which would be impressive. SAP, I looked the other day, $136 billion market capital, not a small company at all. >> So you have an interesting perspective, for many reasons, but one you've run large SAP infrastructures before. And here you are now at SAPPHIRE from the press and media, the analyst perspective. What are some of the things that really surprised you in all of your experience as a user of SAP to now covering it from this angle. >> You know what, I don't know if it was a year ago. It was not even a full year, my anniversary for running my company is August. So less than a year ago I ran SAP for a large pharmaceutical. And we're in the throes of selecting where our next platform was gonna be hosted. Cloud was a possibility and it is amazing how the conversations have changed from my peers a year ago, or a year and a half or even a year ago, to now to how readily acceptable customers are of running mission-critical, the core of the business, 77% of the world's transactions, we heard today, goes through SAP, how willing customers are at running those work goals in the cloud. Second piece, which was probably a proof point, how much SAP has improved SAP in the cloud. SAP has marketed SAP HANA and SAP as cloud-ready applications, it was more of something that you... I took legacy application, I installed it on VMs in the cloud, cloud-ready. No we've given examples from the hyperscalers, specifically Google, of how, and Microsoft of how, customers are coming whipping their credit card up, spinning up instances of HANA, spinning them down. Google talked about how you can migrate your whole ECC on HANA to the cloud within 30 minutes to two hours, amazing movement in cloud. I think it's by far my biggest surprise coming to this show. I didn't expect SAP to accelerate their cloud adoption as fast as they have. >> I'm curious to your thoughts too about simplicity, simplicity of message, you know, what's their best-run businesses campaign? Best-run businesses run on SAP. Simplicity has long been part of their messaging. As we look at the SAP cloud platform and some of the announcements there today and you look at, they've got Ariba, and Concur, and Fieldglass, and SuccessFactors, with the C/4 announcement from yesterday, what is your impression on, have they been able to sort of simplify and kind of reduce customer confusion in terms of this breadth of products and technologies that SAP now delivers? >> You know, SAP is a big company and they have a lot of products. They've been around for 46 years. You know, we didn't talk about any legacy database stuff. They still own Siebel so they still own a traditional database company. It's easier said than done to simplify the message. When you come to... You know, we talked to interviewee after interviewee, customers are still overwhelmed when they look at a overall problem. They can even identify SAP as the potential partner to solve it, but 300 products is still 300 products. It's very... You can help simplify the message by throwing those products in categories, sales force, which product you lead with, so new customers, you know, sales force will help you with that. Traditional customers that don't have deep relationships with their sales force and solution providers, maybe, I think there's still a little difficulty around understanding the messaging around all of 300 products. I mean, it's 300 products. >> Well, there's always work to be done and well we have... There was a lot of product announcements, a lot of energy, and evangelicalism that you and I heard consistently throughout the event and on-set here. A third area that I think really struck me is, SAP has been very vocal about having an initiative to raise the profile of women in technology. They did an excellent job of getting women onstage during both keynote sessions, yesterday and today. From their CMO, Alicia Tillman, to Lindsey Vonn and a whole suite of women Olympic athletes that were yesterday in the general session, to some of the women that were doing some of these outstanding demos and I, I really tip my hat to SAP because for being as large and as lengthy of an incumbent as they are, they're really able to focus on some of these key areas and we at theCUBE love to cover that because it's something that really needs consistent awareness. >> Well, I dunno if people would notice but we probably, both of us, are very vested in diversity and Silicon Valley, in general, is always appreciated when companies go, not just acknowledge the challenge of diversity, it is a very, very difficult problem. It's probably one of the most difficult problems in our industry. So to actually put some meat on a bone, announce the problem, announce the challenge, and go forth and put, you know, obviously, extremely capable women and minorities in the forefront. >> Yeah. Well Keith, always a pleasure hosting with you. Thanks so much for working with me the last couple of days, it's been-- >> I always enjoy it. >> I do too. It's really been a really fun, energetic show so thanks for all of your help. >> Thank you. >> Keith and I wanna thank you for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin for Keith Townsend, we're from SAP SAPPHIRE 2018. Thanks for watching. (energetic 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 2018. This is an enormous event, 16 football fields. American football fields is the size of this space. Incredible, we're welcoming back to theCUBE, one of our distinguished alumni. >> Thank you. >> Uddhav Gupta you are the global vice-president and GM of the SAP App Center, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Yes, thank you so much, thank you for having me. And isn't this a lovely event? >> It's amazing. >> It is. >> So much energy and excitement yesterday during Bill McDermott's keynote. He talked about SAP, 46 years old now, has 398,000 customers and is responsible for 77% you said of the world's transactions. >> Yes, yes. >> Unreal. >> And you know the best part about this is we got 77% of the transactions, and if you walk around and ask people about SAP, they don't even know SAP, right? It's funny, I'm from the Bay Area and the first time people started taking SAP and acknowledging the brand of SAP was when they start to see SAP Center. Because that's home. >> The shark tank. >> To the Sharks. >> Yup. >> And they're like, oh, that was the first time. And then the second time we put a building out. We bought SuccessFactors and we got a SuccessFactors building by the airport and then, "Oh yeah we know SAP from the building next to the airport." But now people are starting to becoming really serious of associating themselves with the brand because now they started understanding what a crucial role SAP plays in their lives, right? If SAP doesn't do what it does, the entire supply chain for many large enterprises stops, right? Which means, your beverages don't come, and your food doesn't come in, nothing, right? Your lines are stopped. >> Yeah, we're with you. Your medicine doesn't come. >> Right. >> It is just. >> Yes. >> Well you guys have had Bill McDermott has talked about for a while about, we wanna become one of the world's top 10 most valuable brands but for invisible software you know you talk about, you want to be up there with the Apples and we can engage and touch with so many of these brands, and people probably don't know, a lot of people. >> Yes. >> That they are using SAP that's driving so many businesses, industries, and you guys have done a very good job of articulating your brand value through the voices of your customers who are transforming industries, they're saving lives, and also your partner ecosystem. So talk to us about the partner ecosystem and how they're really enabling partners like NetApp. What you're doing with the App Center to really enable SAP's growth and transformation through your partner ecosystem. >> Absolutely, so one of the good things is, if you look at the different transformations that the software industry has gone and cloud is one big one, right? And right now, with the cloud that one day we've regarded is the Cloud is a completely different dynamics of software. It's a very closed environment, the software itself so not everybody can actually basically just go ahead and deploy anything within the software itself, right? So that's created a huge economy of ecosystem for us where we've got partners that are building Sas Solutions, that extend our core business products. We got partners that are building content services that can actually be consumed within our business products. Similarly, SAP has made this transition from being more of a software applications company to actually being a platform company and now taking it into the cloud. So we've got a whole new generation of partners that we kind of started working with that provide technology services into the platform, right? And that's why we work with partners like NetApp. We work with partners like (mumbles). We works with partners, even SIs. They're starting to build a whole bunch of repeatable solutions, right? So in order to bring all these innovations that are happening around the SAP ecosystem, in the hands of our customers, like NetApp is a customer of SAP, too. How do we bring that easily into their hands so they can discover these products? They can try the products, they can buy these products. And then they can manage these products. And that's the whole idea of the App Center. >> And this has only been around for a year. In fact, you just celebrated your first birthday. >> Exactly. >> But a tremendous volume of apps that are already available. >> Yes, it's amazing. >> For try and buy. >> The ecosystem has really embraced us, they put their hands open, right? So within a year we've got 1100 partners that are on the App Center. We've got 1500 solutions that are on the App Center. And we are growing like crazy, right? We've got amazing endorsements from partners and donor. We've got amazing endorsement from customers. Some customers have come and done repeated purchases on the App Center within a month, right? The number of trials we're executing for partners is huge. On the whole, it's doing really well. >> So let's talk about the range of applications. I know when I think of App Center I think of App Center on my phone. >> Yes. >> And I can go and get something as silly as a flashlight or, in my case, as life-changing as my running app that keeps track of my fitness over the course of several years and I have great data to mine from that. What types of applications and industries, what industries do they serve in the App Center? >> So the App Center is really made for businesses. >> Right. >> So definitely we don't have Candy Crush there, right? (everyone laughs) >> Don't ask them. >> I don't know if that's a good thing. >> Oh, that's good, right, but you have a bunch of fun application for enterprises, right? Which allow them to get a better insight in how the company is operating. And then we have, to give you analogy to your fitness application that gives you a better idea of how your body works. We've got application that basically do the same thing for enterprises, right? So let me give you an example. We've got a major SI that actually has built an audit and compliance application for HR, right? So I can actually tell you, within your organizations what's your diversity ratio, what's your compliance ratio, how are people being paid, gender equality and gender pay, equal pay is a big topic that many CIOs are looking at. It kind of helps on those kinds of areas, right? Then we've got apps or solutions in there that basically deal with helping customers do better sales, right? We have apps in there that basically help provide you tools that can better monitor your platforms, right? Tools that help you migrate. All these things are available on the App Center. >> I'm curious from a differentiation standpoint, SAP has been very vocal about wanting, challenging the old legacy CRM. >> Yes. >> And wanting to be number one. Against their, you know, the (mumbles) competitors. How does the App Center and how you've enabled it so quickly and with such diversity of apps, how does this differentiate SAP? >> Absolutely, so we've owned the back office for a very long time now, right? So now it's time for us to basically get in front of the end users and get into the daily work that they do. It's very important for us to also own different offers. That's a whole big initiative, you heard with C4, right? To enable that, we've got cloud platform, right? And that's the other biggest piece of the puzzle, right? Now when you add these two things up, you don't basically, when you look at customers, the biggest thing for them is time to value, right? The whole concept of the bill versus buy is kind of starting to fade and the customer like, "Here's my problem, is there a solution out of the box "that can actually solve my problem?" If he gets a 100%, great, if he gets 90%, okay. If he gets 80%, I'll take it and then I'll improvise on it. And that's exactly what the App Center does. It gives you an out of the box solution from our ecosystem. So you can get started with it, and then you can collaborate with the ecosystem, to either improvise on it or take a step back and say, "Okay, now we've plugged the hole, now let's find "a more detailed solution to actually build "a more scalable outcome out of it." >> So let's talk about licensing flexibility from apps and App Center. One how do customers pay for. >> Yes. >> Their apps in the App Center? And then two, what are the licensing options for both partners and customers, for those individual apps? >> So the beauty of the apps and then the way we started up is the transaction is directly happening between the partners and the customers. So the partners can actually price their applications the way they wanted, right? So some partners that are basically doing content services are doing it by based on utilization, right? So you actually use this many number of API calls, that's how it's priced. Some of the others are doing SAS applications and they are pricing it by users. So the partners have complete flexibility of pricing and packaging the way they want. Also because we're actually using the App Center to sell to enterprises, it's very unlikely that somebody's gonna go ahead and say, "Oh, he has a gold, bronze, and silver package, "I'm just gonna pick one of them." On the App Center you can actually go ahead and custom package or create custom packages with tailored customs and conditions that are specific to that customer. And the customer can then buy it, right? So we've kind of thought of this from an enterprise standpoint. And that's the beauty, right? When you work with partners like NetApp, that is important for them, right? NetApp is a partner that basically goes ahead and works with some of the largest businesses, right? It's important for them to have the flexibility to go ahead and do the business with them digitally. >> So I'm curious. At every event we talk about digital transformation, right? It's table stakes these days. But at SAPPHIRE 2018 there's been a lot of discussion around the intelligent enterprise. >> Yes. >> I'm curious how this one year old App Center that SAP has built and that you're managing, how are you using the data that you're getting about the types of apps that are being developed and consumed, how are you utilizing that data to transform SAP? >> Absolutely, if you think of the intelligent enterprise, we're doing everything that we can from the platform side. But what's the point of being intelligent if you don't apply your intelligence somewhere, right? And that's exactly. >> You're like my mother. >> (laughs) And that's what we're trying to do with their apps, right? So while the platform is intelligent. It can do a lot of stuff. The apps are the one that will help you derive the value from the platform. And that's where the App Center is super important and the apps that are on the App Center support the product. That's the role within the apps in the place for the intelligent enterprise. >> So Bill McDermott also talked about trust and the trust is the new currency. When you put forth something like the SAP App Center, you're kind of co-signing that, you know what, these apps, these are partners, and this is a partner exchange. Can you talk to the value to the enterprise of wanting to something like a App Center to purchase applications? >> Oh, trust is a big thing, right? These days, I mean, you. Enterprises come to SAP because they know SAP is such a trusted brand. So when we did the App Center we also made sure that every app that goes on the App Center is actually totally validated by an integration and certification center team, right? So you don't find anything on the App Center that has not gone through a vetting process. The second thing you don't know show that on the app center you find apps that are relevant to your SAP landscape and that's not a Shopify, right? You're not going and selling something that has no relevance to the enterprise. The third thing that we've done, and very important for customers is we've actually built workflows that allows them to still have the same comfort of procuring a software but only doing it digitally. So, for example, a customer may say, "Look, not every user "in my company is allowed to buy apps." But if a user is interested in buying an app, he should be able to request purchase, and then somebody who's entitled in the company to go through contracts and negotiate on behalf of the company can actually negotiate it, and then the purchase happens. So we will employ trust at every level of the App Center. >> Security is such a hot topic these days, right? I mean, there's been so many public breaches of corporate data, there's just one again the other day with, I think it was MyDNA or MyHeritage. >> Yes. >> And that kind of opportunity for people to submit a cheek sample and get their DNA is so popular. That's a lot of personal information. So the security woven into the fabric of that is all key. >> Absolutely. >> So you mentioned the number of partners and the number of apps. I think you said thousand partners. >> A thousand partners and 1500 apps. >> 1500 apps in the first year. >> In the first year. >> What are you excited about for the next year? What do you think we're gonna be talking about next SAPPHIRE? >> I think the growth in the number of apps and partners that are gonna come over, it's gonna be a hockey stick event we're completely looking forward to that. But what's gonna be interesting is, as these apps come by, and you've pointed it out, security is one topic, but GDPR compliance is another big one. So one of the things that we've been working with a lot of these partners is to basically become more and more GDPR compliant. Because some of these apps are dealing with HR data. Some of these apps are gonna start dealing with customer data and they have to be GDPR compliant. So that's what we're working on with them and we'll see more and more of those kind of things happen. But the second big thing that we're looking forward is going beyond the apps, right? We call it the App Center, we could call it Solution Center, we could call it anything. But the idea is you gonna have apps, but you're also gonna have vendors like NetApp being able to digitally sell the products to our end customers, right? Somebody bought HANA, they need a HANA appliance, with an adapt storage, that's possible on the App Center. Or some other tools, somebody's existing NetApp customer managing really large SAP landscapes. And they can buy tools that will basically help them manage the NetApp landscape, right? Or SAP landscape running a NetApp gear. So those are kinds of things that I'm looking forward to actually coming into the App Center. The third thing is sensors. People are building IoT Scenarios and we are having tons of partners basically certify sensors against our IoT technology. How about we bring those into the App Center, right? So it's gonna be a huge and beautiful portfolio of solutions. >> Practical question before we let you go is. Simple concept 'cause my mind is working and I come from a traditional SAP shop. So I'm thinking, what interesting things have you seen customers do with SRM and the App Center. I mean, it seems like, App Center, another supplier for SRM should be some integrations? Am I making an assumption? What are some of, as we look at, or even App Center and someone that has SAP core products, what are some of the integration for them? >> Oh, you hit the nail, right? What some of the customers are coming back to us and asking is, can you actually do an App Center specifically for my enterprise, right? Where I as a user can basically go, curate a whole bunch of apps that I've kind of looked at the terms and conditions or have met certain standards, etcetera. And accept the terms of conditions for those products right? Accept those products, negotiate the price, or whatever they do. And then make that open to all of my users of their ecosystem, right? So that way, anybody in that scenario can actually go purchase an app and start using it in production. >> And then I have all of my work full from SRM to approve the purchase of the app. >> Exactly, so it kind of ties in very neatly into that. >> So your 18th SAPPHIRE. >> Yes. >> What are some of the key takeaways that you're gonna go back to the Bay Area with? >> You know, the beauty is every SAPPHIRE keeps growing bigger and bigger and the questions every three, four year we've done a new transformation, right? Last year when I come to this conference, people were still kind of unaware and not really ready to embrace the cloud in an enterprise base. This year, I didn't hear one customer say, "Should we go to the cloud?" Everybody like, "We are on the cloud, how can you help us?" How can SAP and customers and partners like NetApp actually help us get there? And that's a refreshing feel, right? Because now we can talk to them about all the grand plans that we have for them. Prior we were basically still selling them on the concept. Now we're actually walking them and talking to them about how they embrace the cool stuff that we're doing. >> Awesome. >> So it's refreshing. >> It is cool stuff. >> It is. >> Uddhav, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> Talking with Keith and me about what you guys are doing with the App Center and happy first birthday again. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Thank you for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018. Thanks for watching.

>> 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 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

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018. (upbeat electronic music) Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin, in the NetApp booth, at Sapphire Now 2018. We are in Orlando, this is an enormous event, there's more than 20,000 people here, and there's about a million people that SAP is expecting to engage online, that's a lot. We're excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time, Klara Young, the director of Strategic Alliances from AppBuddy and Steven Cox, the head of Global Sales Tools at NetApp, hi, guys. >> Howdy. >> Hello. >> Hi, Lisa. >> Thanks for having us. >> Absolutely, so Klara tell me about AppBuddy. Who are you guys and what do you do? >> So AppBuddy is a provider of a user experience layer that can sit on top of core systems like SAP Sales Cloud or SAP Service Cloud and that really allows the administrators to configure a dream workspace where you can get all the data that you need to work with in one place, and then, the users can interact with that very easily. And so, it's all very user friendly and it allows us to enable sales processes, I want to manage my pipelines, or my accounts, my contacts, all with a very easy to use interface right in the middle of the core system. >> So your target audience would be customers that are already using SAP or customers that are maybe in the transition from, say Oracle to SAP, or something like that? >> So any users that are planning to use SAP or are already using SAP and then want to enhance that user experience, want to give them a faster way to interact with the data, more intuitive, more functionality, right in the same core interface. So those would be good clients for us to enhance that experience, absolutely. >> And what about customers by industry know SAP really kind of being very, very strong in a lot of industries but manufacturing, digital supply chain, but if you look at their customers that are here at Sapphire and there's a million of them, they span so many industries. >> Yeah. >> I think yesterday they were saying HANA is installed in 23,000 customers across 60 industries. Does AppBuddy have a particular suite of industries where you really add even more value, or is it fairly horizontal? >> Oh, that's a real good question. Actually what's the beauty, I think, of AppBuddy's product, is that it is completely agnostic of which process or which industry that you're deploying it in. So you decide what objects, what information I want to put on that. It's not a purpose-built application specifically for one process or one industry. So we serve clients in all sorts of industries. We have a lot in high tech, or in the health care industry, manufacturing, as well but we're not specific to one industry. So really welcoming any use case and we'd love to hear from customers, hey, can I do this? With AppBuddy, could I put this object and that object together and build a process basically, almost in your own app. And we're very looking forward to those feedback from customers and wanting to build those use cases with them. >> And that's been such a huge theme or really an undertone at SAP Sapphire the last few days is how much SAP listens to their customers and really involves them and especially strategic accounts like in a collaborative way and yesterday, Steven, we spoke with your CIO Bill Miller. We talked to him about NetApp and SAP have been partners for 17 years. NetApp is 26 years young now and has undergone a big transformation. Bill talked about some of that yesterday, but you guys also did a big transformation that you were leading within your sales processes and your CRM move into SAP, talk to us about that. What were some of the reasons for that transformation? >> Yeah, it's working with Bill and his team I'm represent the business side and we're looking as NetApp is transforming from a traditional storage company to more a cloud. It's a change in the way we go to market. In the past we shipped boxes to people and they install them or we install them. And in the future, we're looking to more services and cloud-oriented things. And so the kind of infrastructure that we built up to support our large sales force doesn't work as well in the new world. And so we about two years ago, started a pretty big transformation journey to move from this more old-school hardware to more new cloud and through that process, we needed to change our systems. Changing out our CRM became an important component of that 'cause we need more flexibility and we needed to sort of be more contemporary and we worked with AppBuddy and our old system, we used to have Salesforce, and the field was pretty used to using that kind of interface. And when you build stuff like this, you don't always know how important it is to the field. You know, you have guesses at it, and as we looked at things that we had to do to prepare to move this was always something on our list that we felt like was important but we weren't able to do it immediately. It took us an extra release to get it out, so an extra few months. And through those few months, we learned the hard way that the field really wanted it. It was really impacting them. And we had guessed that we thought it was somewhere around 25% improvement in their overall productivity. And what we found was that it's at least that, if not more. >> Wow. >> Because they came back and said, "We can't do our jobs "without this, you guys gotta get it for us." >> So they said either AppBuddy or the highway? >> Yeah, pretty much. (laughs) Pretty much, AppBuddy or they're not happy. They're not happy all the time anyway but I feel like they-- >> Salespeople. >> That by getting that to 'em we were enabling them to go faster in a few things. And it's simple, it's hard to understand, I think, for everybody, it's a simple layer. Whenever you build a CRM or any kinda system, your job is to collect information and then display it back, make it easy to change. And the way CRMs typically work today is, you have a list for you of stuff, opportunities, or new registrations, quotes and you just have to look at that list and then pick one you wanna edit and then go to this details screen and look at it and then go to the edit screen and then edit it and then go back, back, back. And what AppBuddy provides, is it takes all that noise and makes it into one screen so that you can just simply make and change the data, the way you would expect to on a spreadsheet, in a simple experience. And once you give it to the reps, they sorta expect that as the tablestakes, and it's a gap if you look at most CRMs they don't have this kind of in-line edit capability out of the box. And so this is a great, SAP is really excited about this 'cause it gives them a way to solve this problem without having to build it themselves and that's the beauty of these kind of infrastructures where you can add capabilities by just plugging something in. >> Right. >> And it speaks using the APIs to the tool. And so all the rules that we build around the data about who should access it, what should happen when they change stuff, should we protect data. All that is followed, because AppBuddy works right through our APIs, through the SAP provides. And so it doesn't require a lot extra coding or anything. In fact. >> That's right. >> IT guys are standing over there somewhere. They don't like it 'cause I do it myself. I'll actually build experiences for the field really quickly 'cause that I can make a quick custom business process to support something that's needed. >> So, on the AppBuddy website, Klara, I saw, I love stats, and you guys said, we can save time and improve enterprise productivity by 5X to 10X. >> That's right. >> Those are big numbers. >> That's right. >> And you were saying there's been a massive improvement in employment productivity and I imagine in terms of the speed is essential. You know, we were talking, one of the underlying themes here at Sapphire, this year, is the intelligent enterprise, which demands the integration and the embedding of advanced emerging technologies, AI, for example, to make these enterprises truly intelligent, connecting supply chain and demand chain and it's essential, its table stakes these days. >> Yep. >> To be able to drive things faster, right? So that you guys can get what your customers need faster. >> Yep. >> So, you mentioned that huge productivity boost there but also that you were familiar with AppBuddy before your sales guys and gals were like, hey we need to have something that we're familiar with to be able to make our jobs better, so you're also doing, it sounds like a pretty good job of listening to your customers. >> Yeah, I try >> Who are probably very vocal. >> I try, I try, I mean, it's a hard job because you're sort of channeling the sales guys and in our world they're very different. In Europe, they sell very different than they sell in the US and APAC is different. And even within different sections of Europe or in the US, they act differently, and our goal is to try to streamline that so that they can act as much the same as they can across that and we can deploy sort of one experience without having to customize it totally. But tools like AppBuddy give us the ability to be much more targeted and flexible. A simple example I've been given pretty commonly is we have our sales kick-off this week also in Las Vegas and all of our sales guys are going there to learn about how to sell better, how to sell our new products and solutions and leverage some of our improved selling processes and before they go there, we wanted to have them identify a few key opportunities they're working on to say hey, these are the one's that I'm gonna use as my work case as I'm learning these new things, and in theory as we go through and finish our sales kick-off they go back and start the selling process those opportunities should sell at a higher rate then the other opportunities. And so to make that work, I configured a grid, or an AppBuddy list view, and all I put on it was the list of opportunities in one field that says, this is appropriate for our kick-off and so, instead of putting it in the middle of a very complex world, I sent 'em an email, they had a list and they just had to say this guy, this guy, and that guy, and that's all they had to do. And so our response rate on something, which if you sent a list of things to do for the field, they're not gonna respond. They're busy, they're makin' money. But in this case, because it was tied to the new learning and they felt value in it, 80% of 'em responded within 10 days. >> Yeah, wow. >> And you know, you just don't see that kind of response. But it works because it's a simple experience, right? The only thing they could do with that, they get an email that says, do this, they open it, they see the list, they click, yes, yes, yes, and it's done. And that's a whole business process that in the old days could take months to prepare for and create fields and deploy new code and do all the things you have to do. And in this case, I can create the fields in a day, create the grid in five minutes, and then I put it in an email, and done, you know? So this is where you take things to the next level and make it easier for the sales reps to do the things they need to do help us all be successful. >> Did it also sort of abstract, I can imagine, the fundamental challenges that go along with replacing an entire new CRM, going from Salesforce to SAP. >> Yeah. >> Has that been able to help kind of abstract some of the inner machinations of that so that the sales people can just focus on we know this same interface? >> It totally does, because the list views that we create are only the things they have to have. In any system like this you have a bunch of other fields that are specialized for, say, we have a professional services group and they really want to know blah blah but most sales reps, they don't deal with that at all. But you need it on the page, I need to build that. In these views, I can build it for a sales rep view that is perfect for them, right? Meaning there's no extra fields on that list. It's what you need to get your job done. And so it's like a laser focus, and then I can build a separate one for a different kind of role and give that one to them. So without changing the tool, I'm just creating a focused experience. It all uses the same things. You need sorting, you need filtering, you need a simple edit and that's all available and once they learn that core capability then the rest just kind of falls in. >> And then from your perspective it's probably business outcomes that, George, your CEO, is going to be really excited about, cost savings, employee productivity. >> Yep. >> I'm wondering though, we're talking about it in the context of what you're doing within your sales processes and your CRM. Klara, so obviously working with SAP, are there other businesses processes that AppBuddy can sit on top of and help to streamline the interface with? >> Yeah, great question, and actually thank you for asking 'cause I was gonna say, we talked a lot about sales but we could be enabling any other processes as well and services, for example, is a big one. I've got a list, a queue of cases, I want to make quick updates to that. I want to change things or I'm doing some forecasting, some account planning, but our vision, ultimately is to be able to bring from lead to cache all processes and again tailor it for each user, role specifically for them and we're not giving the solution, the customers are defining what do they need for each one of those processes and that's the power, I think, of this configurability and agility that you get. It's not built and hard coded. It's really you who puts it together. But again, we really have that vision of not only linking the CRM data but ultimately we would love to be able to get more use cases of, hey the CRM data together maybe with your ERP data, I want to see my opportunities but I also want to see the orders and I want to see the invoices so get really this 360 view of your customers that I think we've talked a lot about, even Bill McDermott was talking about it. It's so essential and critical to be customer focused is to have that visibility and with this application where you can basically pull data from wherever you need it for that specific view, you give your users that full visibility and therefore much faster answer questions, be in contexts, not lose critical information of a customer. >> Right, you're right, Bill McDermott did mention yesterday in the keynote about really what, SAP's been pretty vocal about for a while, they want to be one of the top 10 global brands. >> Mm-hmm. >> Right. >> Most valuable brands, and they want to be up there with Apple and Google. >> Right. >> And Coca-Cola, and that's for a software company that sells invisible technology, they're on their way. They're now ranked number 17, but he talked about this. >> Yeah. >> Kind of unique position that SAP's in to link and synchronize >> That's right. >> The demand chain with the supply chain >> That's right. >> Which is pretty revolutionary but ultimately, it's not about just having a 360 view of sales automation, it's of the entire customer process. >> Correct, yeah. >> So Steven, sounds like you are a rockstar in that app, with your sales guys going, hey, we need this AppBuddy technology to make our lives easier, our jobs easier. Do you foresee rolling the AppBuddy technology out to include other business processes? >> All the time, yeah, it's all about the data. And change management or getting the field to act in the same way is really hard and it doesn't sound like it should be but, (Lisa laughs) it's like having 1,000 cats on the table and getting them all to look one direction, it just doesn't happen, right? So my job is to make that and if I can have it with a single user experience, right, without having different flavors of screens and extra fields and narrow it down to what they need, bringing whatever data they need to flow from end to end it makes life easier and I've got 'em all trained. You know, we had very high usage in our previous platform and we're building now from that but they all know how to use it now so I don't have to train the cats to look in the same direction, they all know where to go. All I gotta do is add the data, right? And if you look at NetApp's transformation, from a storage company to a data company my job is really data, it's not about the tools as much. It's about how do we facilitate the salespeople to do more with what they have, right? How do I do a cross-sell, up-sell, how do I get them enabled so they can move faster so that's innate and built into what they do? >> Yeah. >> And in that you have to build, and we were just at another panel talking with SAP about, you have to give back to the sales reps and to the people doing the data 'cause CRM's not fun, I mean, it's not like, hey, I'm gonna go play my CRM tonight. (laughs) It's a different deal. CRM requires work and so you need to give them stuff back. Do machine learning, do things that provide scoring, show the probability of close, help them be more successful at their job and bring the data together in one spot. >> You know, I think yesterday one of the themes also was data and trust, the new currency, right? If you can't access it and extract valuable insights immediately and act on them then you risk being usurped by your competition. So being able to enable the data to be accessible, insights gleaned as quickly as possible, you must be the king. >> Well, I don't know about that. >> The data king. (laughs) >> Yeah, it's definitely our job. >> But as we wrap here in the last few seconds, digital transformation and every company has to go through it or you're not relevant but that requires a cultural transformation as well. >> It does. >> And it sounds like what you guys are doing together is helping that at least from the sales force's perspective of where change has to happen. >> Yep. >> Not only is it improving the efficiency of your SAP environment, your CRM environment, but it's also helping, sounds like, from a cultural perspective, as, hey, we've got to go through this transformation, let's make it where we can simplify, let's do that. >> Very much so. Just like I was talking about the cat problem. You've got the reps that are used to doing something the way and you're saying hey, we're gonna evolve and do something different and that change is rough and people don't feel like it's the right thing at times. The great news with this change and the timing of it is that when you're moving from one platform to the other, it's the one time in the life cycle of these products where you can make significant change, drop whole business process and they won't even notice it. I dropped three quarters of the stuff that we had before and just didn't build it. And I don't have people coming to me going, hey, I really miss doing that, and that's good news, we're helping drive the change. >> Yeah. >> Well, thank so much you guys for stopping by theCUBE and Klara telling us about AppBuddy, what you guys do, how you're working together with NetApp and SAP. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you for the opportunity, Lisa, thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin at SAP Sapphire 2018. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

>> From Orlando, Florida It's theCube covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018! Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome, you're watching theCube, On The Ground at SAP Sapphire Now. I'm your host, Keith Townsend. We're in steamy Orlando. Great convention center size of 16 American football fields. Got in about three thousand steps this morning, but you know what, I'm not here to talk about me. We're here talking about the relationship between Microsoft and NetApp. We have Brad Berkey, GM SAP Global at Microsoft and Kevin Zhang, Tech Solutions Pro, and this is a mouthful, SAP on Azure Intelligent Global and you're a black belt? >> Yes. >> Oh wow! >> Yes, I can kickbox. >> You can kick some SAP butt. >> Yes (laughs) oh no, yes, yes we do great solutions. >> So first off let's talk about the NetApp, Microsoft relationship as it pertains to SAP. What's the story behind NetApp and Microsoft? >> The great thing aout NetApp and Microsoft is you both have the same vision, right. For us, it's about our responsibility to help our customers innovate. And NetApp is a key partner for us in our ability to help our customers innovate and provide solutions around SAP. >> So, let's talk about those solutions around SAP. One of the things that's getting pushed an awful lot is that SAP is now cloud ready. We can go to the cloud. We can go to these hyperscalers, such as Azure or As-zure and swipe a credit card and get up and running with HANA. Tell us about that experience. How does that go exactly? >> Kevin? >> Oh yeah, so I don't know if you have heard. We just announced we released a 12 terabyte memory size virtual machine. Our Halo logging instances can go up to 24 terabytes. So we ran the largest SAP workload in the world. There are so many customers, about 400 SAP Azure customer. Personally I work with about 30 SAP on Azure customers and over 77 or 80 SAP HANA on Azure customers. So, it's very exciting and we see that the trend is picking up, the demand is picking up worldwide. >> Wow! Bill McDermott on stage yesterday gave the numbers around SAP HANA in general, 1800 customers. So Microsoft having 400 SAP HANA customers. >> Sure, just to be clear on that. So when we talk about customers that are sitting inside of Azure for their SAP Landscape, that's both traditional NetLever base and HANA base and I think the number that you have is closer to 70 of that larger number. The real important thing that customers are seeing today is the... When people think of cloud, they think about cost reduction. I'm gonna save money because I'm gonna be renting equipment. The true value is in your ability to be nimble to innovate, right? So imagine a customer puts their SAP Landscape inside of Azure and it's NetLever based say the older stuff. At any point along that journey, they can call us up and say, "I want the infrastructure for HANA." They can innovate at will. If they buy hardware that sits on-premise, that hardware's set to run that particular landscape, it's not set to run HANA. So there's some opportunities for the customer to innovate using Azure. It's not just cost savings, it's around efficiencies and the ability to innovate at will. >> So let's talk about hybrid clouds scenarios around that very concept. We had another NetApp partner on that talked about the scenario in which customers have this desire to innovate quickly. Traditionally, in a traditional enterprise, to your point, if I wanted to spin up a HANA workload, I'd have to procure hardware, I'd have to get my bases team to lay down the NetWeaver stack along with HANA. It could be a couple of months before I'm up and running. Then I can innovate, do my innovation. How does Microsoft help shorten that cycle? >> I can speak to it. We actually have another partner here with there model, as well, SUSE. HANA is drawn SUSE right ahead and different flavors of Linux. and they're running on Azure. Today, we are able to deploy the entire SAP Landscape using alternative scripts inside Azure. In 30 minutes, you have the entire SAP Landscape deployed including the large virtual machine M series for your HANA cluster. You also have the ESCS, the central instances and also the AFS Cluster as well as your application servers. All of those things running your automation, your cloud speed in 30 minutes instead of three months. >> So one of the obviously manages of cloud, in general, is this ability to get to agility. There's a concept that once I've innovated in the cloud, I know what the workload is, it's stable, it's not changing that I bring that back in house. Is that something that you're seeing, are people continuing to run these workloads steady state in the cloud as well? >> I think they're gonna run more so in steady state. We don't see them kind of moving it back. The idea that in a traditional SAP Landscape is that everything is always on. >> Right. >> Right. Since the lights are always on, why not I have my own equipment as opposed to renting just compute from a hyperscaler like Microsoft. The reality is, is again, back to that notion of innovating. If I'm gonna role out, let's say, S4 on top of HANA, so you think about Suite on HANA and then S4, I'm gonna set up all of these test environments, multiple test environments, versions of it as I roll out. I'm gonna be really big for a short period of time then I'm gonna roll it out and shrink back down. Also, when I do upgrades, you think about it like if you're doing payroll at the end of the month, I'm gonna be big for short periods of time. So we call that bursting, and it's that bursting that allows you to continually to reduce costs you wouldn't bring back on-prem, where you can't burst, right? Makes sense? >> That makes sense. So let's talk about some of these business conversations that you've had with customers. What have been some of the primary drivers other than the obvious agility? What are some of the conversations that you look at the broader Microsoft portfolio solutions that you're able to bring into customer conversations? >> Two things come to mind. One of which is when you think about enterprise-class security across all domains, right? So right now we provide Azure for Office 365. That's an Azure tenant. And we can give you advance security for that. Imagine that I can provide that same security for your SAP system. I want to give you an example of the type of security solutions. We have an intelligent IOT-based security model that sits inside of Azure that will predict hacks. They'll look at your environment and say, "you look just like a customer who has been hacked" or "you have the attributes of a customer "who could get hacked" and they'll proactively come in and say you need to make these adjustments That kind of stuff sits inside of the cloud in Azure. So it's not just... And again, I think the misnomer is it's just about cost savings 'cause if it was just about cost savings, then at some point, your depreciation models for on-premise hardware as long as you can stay and not change, so not changing would save you a lot of money. So that's why I get back to you, it'll allows you to change without burden of impact. >> Talking about change in the industry, we can't have a 7.5 billion dollar acquisition and not talk about it on theCube. We kind of eat this stuff up. You guys acquired GitHub. Let's talk about the relationship of developers, one of the things I haven't heard a lot, at least in conversations I've had on theCube so far this week have been about the developer. Talk about the importance of the developer relationship and potential integrations with GitHub, if you can, and SAP. >> First, that is one of my favorite topics I have. I came from a development background we call enable agility allow you to run continuous development and continuous integration, and the GitHub has been a integrate part of Microsoft Solution already. We are probably the largest contributor in the GitHub before Google and Facebook where if you ranking based on the history. The open source has been cultural after the Satya takeover as CEO has been our winning grace, open source, and we actually... The majority of our code and our deployment is in the GitHub. In the SAP world, the ARM templates for automation templates, JSON templates, and all the automation scripts we deployed in the GitHub, and we share with customer as a community. If they actually use those scripts through their deployment, continuously improve the scripts for automation. >> So, continuous integration, continued development is not a term that we hear a lot in the SAP world. As we're bringing these concepts from I think thought into reality with services such as GitHub to store DevOps scripts, automation scripts, what has been the business impact of being able to bring a continuous integration, continued development practice to SAP which is usually not big? >> I'll give you a good example. For example, when Brad Berkey mentioned earlier doing the SAP Landscape deployment, you have no N+1 deployment and you want to do a test environment, you want to do a Sandbox to troubleshoot the incidence. Today, with the scripts automation, you can spring up an entire system in three hours, four hours, including S4, including the time old system when you put in the business object BI and the other things together. You can test this and then shut down the entire system and delay the resource group inside Azure. As we move that system, they re-spring up as necessary. Also, we're working with SAP called Landscape Manager which allows you to clone the system inside the Azure. The scripts behind it is actually a computer integration into the dual element type of scripts allows you to replicate system files, allow you to deploy another testing system or training system. It gives you a lot of modern deployment methodology to give you fast agility to the business. >> So Microsoft, the ultimate platform company, one of the things that designates the platform company is that your partners basically make more money than you off the platform. Windows is a great example of a platform. So you have platform, Azure is definitely becoming known as a platform, and then we have NetApp, the data driven company. Talk through the value of the NetApp data fabric, data driven technology and platform as it pertains to the ability to have the same data operation strategy on-prem and in the Microsoft Cloud. >> Okay, I'll give you an example. A lot of our customer, Brad sells a lot of SAP on Azure to many customers. I've supported those customers. Many of them because NetApp has a super, very high speed fastest management, snapshot management to data protection and data recovery and backup, and also the DR capability, customers demand asks us can we actually work with Microsoft in the cloud or use a similar technology. So they deployed the NetApp ONTAP inside of Azure today. And we're able to support AFS file services to file sync from on-prem to the cloud, from one Azure region to another region, leverage those ONTAP snap mirroring and all the technology as well. So to enable to provide an enterprise level file sync, file protection, file recovery and warning replication as well. >> So, you guys are pretty good. I'm trying to throw you curve balls but you're pretty much knocking 'em out the park, so I'ma try to throw another curve ball. Bring the hybrid IT story in for me from a Microsoft perspective when it comes to Azure stack. How does Azure stack play a role in the overall vision whether it's Edge, Core, or like stationed into the cloud, how does Azure stack play a role in it? >> In Azure stacks. It's not for SAP. >> Yeah, okay. Azure stack is a very important overall view from Edge to the entire cloud. We have the 50 regions globally. We have many data centers combined. The largest of public quota from region perspective, but still they're areas, for example, like a cruise ship, like a defense department, they may actually require Edge inside a prime type of technology stack. Azure stack allow you to use the same interface, same view to deploy the technology. When you actually connect it, you can synchronize your subscription. So it can allow you to have end-to-end access from your on-premise into the cloud. Microsoft has the perfect hybrid cloud strategy here, and it allow you to do not only the IaaS and PaaS and also the SaaS solution to our customers. >> So, okay, let's bring the conversation back up a couple of levels and talk, Brad, what have been the conversations here? After the keynote this morning, talking about the intelligent business, the conversations yesterday with Bill McDermott with the super-high energy about SAP going into CRM, what has been the conversations with customers? >> We've had a privilege for a lot of customer meetings in here. The great thing about SAP Sapphire is you got about 20,000 customer attendees here. They're the big ones, and at the C-Suite, so we get to have some great conversations. The customer conversations have been around the notion of the responsibility that Microsoft and SAP have to them. To the point where I was speaking with a customer early, he says, "You have an accountability "to help me be innovative." That's a very important responsibility. A lot of that revolves around enterprise-class security. A lot of that revolves around uptime and legacies between those environments. "What's my performance attribute?" and "Are you going to be there with me forever?" Now when a customer chooses Azure or they choose SAP and they choose Azure, certainly, it's really a three-part partnership. The customer, Microsoft, and SAP as a partnership. If I had to add a fourth one to that, it would be the systems integrator because in the case, Microsoft doesn't upgrade, migrate, move or install anything. So we rely on all the many partners that are here to do that set of work, everywhere from Accenture to Gemini to Brave New World. That was ABC, right? I got those out, right? All of those partners are very key to both Microsoft and SAP to ensure customer success. So a lot of the meetings that we've had here have been with those partners and those customers. >> Wow, to be a fly on the wall for those. I would love to go into more detail. We've run out of time. I'm getting the wrap sign, but I would love to have a conversation around support, integration, way more areas than we have time for. We'll have to get you on theCube again. You're now Cube veterans. From Orlando, this is Keith Townsend for theCube. Stay tuned or stay in the YouTube feed to find out more about what's going on about SAP Sapphire Now On The Ground. Talk to you soon. (lively 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. This is a huge event. Not just 20,000 people here but there's about a million people SAP SAS are going to engage with their life and on-demand video experiences for Sapphire, amazing. We are excited to welcome for the first time to theCUBE Jinesh Jain the VP of Global Delivery at CenturyLink. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you guys for having me here. >> The theme in this event is really around what SAP is doing to enable the intelligent enterprise. This is really beyond digital transformation where customers have to have a customer centric view. It's about infusing and embedding emerging and advanced technologies, AI machine learning into business processes. How is CenturyLink helping customers on that transformation journey? >> I think that's a great question. Let me give you a little bit of background behind what CenturyLink is all about because this is all SAP here in this event right? CenturyLink is all about connecting customers in the in the digital world. And we recently acquired Level 3, and with that Level 3 acquisition we became now, we provide trusted connections to all the connected world, you know all the network world. So you can imagine in a digital transformation you need a very strong foundation when it comes to connectivity, network, infrastructure and security behind that and that's what CenturyLink does. That's our core business and with that journey as we started the journey, we have 60 plus datacenters as part of CenturyLink core strategic assets. We have around 500K miles of fiber optics, which is one of the, we are the second largest in the United States when it comes to network connectivity and redundancy across. And in 60 plus countries, I think all this strategic assets mix provides us very strong foundation for any customers who is embarking this digital journey. It reminds me of one of those recent survey done by McKinsey Global Institute, where they said that they figured out that digitization index for Europe was 12% and for North America was little better around 18%. But look at the gap, how much of gap is there in terms of exploring the full potential of digitization. So I think our journey in terms of giving the digital transformation starts from our strong foundation of our strategic assets of data centers network and security, along with that as you mentioned about the intelligent enterprise, we have a very strong practice in terms of not just descriptive analytics, but we do prescriptive analytics. We do machine learning. We have IOT and we do big data analysis as well. So all these things combined together provides a complete end-to-end solution. And of course SAP plays a big play here and we can talk about that in terms of what we do on the SAP side as well. >> So let's add some more color to that. When I think of CenturyLink, I think about the 60 data centers. Even when I think about SAP what I normally consider CenturyLink's role traditionally in a SAP relationship is that you know what CenturyLink to get me better either closer to my customers so that data injection can happen faster with lower latency. When I think of CenturyLink, I think of lower latency to hyper scale cloud providers so that if I have hold on applications I can get closer to my core SAP data, but what I'm hearing is that CenturyLink has greater SAP capability outside of that. Tell us about the SAP practice at CenturyLink. >> I'm glad you asked that because everybody is wondering about CenturyLink and SAP relationship. In fact let me go back in time here. Six years, few years back I would say six, five years back, CenturyLink acquired Cognilytics. Cognilytics was all about deep HANA expertise, deep analytics and all about BI strategy. And then recently a couple of years back, they acquired SEAL Consulting. So these two organizations which CenturyLink acquired, that gave us deep roots into SAP ecosystem in terms of what CenturyLink and SAP can work together. So now let's look at Cognilytics. They were all about HANA, core HANA expertise. They co-innovated with SAP in terms of that HANA analytics. They came out with number of used cases symptoms of predictive science and then when they acquired SEAL Consulting, it was all about yes for HANA transformation, which is absolutely the theme across this Sapphire and for all the SAP customers globally. From SEAL perspective, which is now of course part of CenturyLink, but now we can provide infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, OSDB as a service, which is already part of CenturyLink. Now with SEAL and Cognilytics coming into play, we are end-to-end sharp in terms of SAP strategy, digital transformation strategy, using SAP tools and products, implementation upgrades, application management services, and continual improvement as part of the digital transformation every customer is looking for. I think that's how we are using the strategic assets of CenturyLink as part of with the SAP expertise coming into play. >> So every customer, digital transformation to any business is just, it's you got to do it right or you will lose relevance and go out of business and we've seen a lot of incumbent retailers for example go away because they haven't been able to transform digitally. I read a stat recently that said 70% of siloed digital transformation projects fail. So how does CenturyLink and your expertise with SAP as for with HANA, how do you help customers be successful? Do you come in and see these siloed projects that you know maybe shadow IT had evolved and helped them to break down those silos, so that they can actually facilitate what it is that they need which is that that 360-degree view of their customers. What they want, when they want it, to be able to predict what they're gonna want next. How do you help break down those silos? >> Right, now I think is a known problem, known challenge across all of the customers who are embarking this journey. I'll tell you what. I'll give you a simple, the way we work, our digital strategy is very much aligned with our customer's business and IT goals. So what we do first and foremost is we want to align ourselves with what the business and IT goals are. Let's double click on that right. So if I look at the business goals, so most of the customers today, A, they want to make sure they want to protect the revenue stream right? B, they want to make sure they have real-time position, no latency in terms of their business decision making. And C, they want to make sure that they go into the new markets. They just can't stay silent to same market there. Plus know the unfamiliar competition, which comes up many times. So that's the business aspect of the goals. We want to look at that and make sure that we align our implementation, our strategy to those business goals. If you look at IT side of that, and I tell you what, these are the things which are being missed out with most of the partners in this ecosystem. If I look at the IT side of it, first and foremost we want to make sure that IT think goals are, it's all about innovation. They want to be innovative. They want to have minimal shelf wear so that they can innovate all the time. They want to evolve the resources so they are aligned with the lines of business all the way and that way everybody has a career path, and they are evolving to the market needs. And then lastly it's all about making sure that all the mundane tasks you know if I look at they need to focus on core competency and offload all the routine tasks. And we very much aligned as part of the journey to those business and IT goals. So if you look at our mission, we won't just look at our mission in terms of overall CenturyLink for SAP customers. We want to provide them a private managed secured cloud, which is scalable, which can be commissioned in a week's time with full automation, completely secure, data protected and an uptime of 99.99% and take care of all the lights on kind of routine tasks, so they can focus on their main core competency about business decision, new business, business process design and things like that which are being lagging behind. So that's our key theme in terms of how we drive all the SAP information. >> There's a lot of complexity behind getting this much value out of any platform, whether it's complexity at the data analytics layer, whether it's the networking that needs to be done, the design and deployment of NetApp stack. We're in a conference where all the hyper scalers are here. >> Yes. >> The company smaller than CenturyLink provides larger than CenturyLink. How is CenturyLink uniquely positioned to basically go to whether it's a Fortune 100 customer or someone down level to basically add value where these other providers potentially will trouble at. >> Alright, no I think it's very true, we need to be nimble. I mean you know we can be a big ship, but should not take time to turn. And I completely agree with that. I think what we do is I'll tell you, one of the unique position we have in this market space is you know we can proudly say that we are, we don't need to go to any third party when it comes to data center locations. We have our own 500k lines of fiberoptics. So network is where we provide, we can provide minimal latency from network perspective. We are all over the, we are 60 plus countries. We are into 350 metros. We can do a metro tier. I think if you look at our network, our hosting capabilities our infrastructure capabilities, we are uniquely positioned compared what the customers need today as a one-stop shop or a one hand to shake to make things happen for them. At the same time, we are very nimble for many customers because that's how CenturyLink has grown up. They acquired us, and we were 800 people company. So was other acquisition as well. We can very easily adapt, innovate, comprehend and adapt to the needs of the customers based on our core competency, our solutions which are available, and strategy which is very much fitting most of our customers in the retail space, in CPG space, in manufacturing space, in healthcare, and in life sciences. We have some designated industry solutions as well, which can help us drive those values quicker. At the same time measurable. >> Being nimble I think of you know being adaptive and being flexible but adaptive struck a big, actually Hasso Plattner this morning in his keynote talked about SAP being adaptive in the context, I think he was talking about intelligence. And everybody wants to paint intelligence all over everything and they talked about SAP being adaptive. That kind of aligns with something I read recently that Bill McDermott said, which is where SAP was the last to accept the status quo. I think he was talking about in relation to CRM specifically but the first to change it. So with that spirit of being nimble, being adaptive how are you helping customers adapt to needing to bring on you know edge core millions of devices or customers that go you know what I want to be able to use advanced technologies like AI to make you know my manufacturing smarter or to be able start connecting my supply chain with demand chain? How are you harnessing that, your adaptability to meet their needs on some of those emerging trends? >> Absolutely, this can be very overwhelming and if you really look at what everybody's talking about, where do you start with and I think we have been doing this for last six years, even before the keynote announcement to be honest to you guys. We have documented 60 to 70 used cases in this case. So what we do is when we approach a customer or a prospect, we come out with some specific used case for their line of business. It can be in a marketing campaign. It can be in a supply chain. It can be in financials. It can be in insurance. So depending on what the needs are, we have those documented used cases, so what we do is for each of these used cases, we break it down in terms of what problem are we gonna to solve, what is the problem definition. And for that problem definition, what's my used case, how do I solve this, what are the alternatives, and how do I reach to my measurable value of that solution. And then we have built-in data models ready to go for each of these used cases behind the scene. So that helps us build something which is nimble, because the data is available. We just need to customize to 20% of what the customer needs are, and then provide that value right away. And once that pilot goes live for a small segment of user community, then we expand that to the larger audience to see the value of whether this is a predictive science machine learning or just pure KPI driven analytics. So we do that and then we expand that. This is what we have done with number of Fortune 500 companies and we're really proud of what we do in terms of being big, but being nimble. >> So speaking of being big, talk about customer engagement, not necessarily the actual customer conversations, but how do customers engage with CenturyLink. One of the simple things that you look at the hyperscalers, I can go to the website, and when I have a question, I can type it in and I'll get a script that answers me in an hour or so. What is the engagement model for interacting with CenturyLink for new customers? >> I think, actually let me go back on this one. I was reading a survey in a CIO magazine. Actually this is a recent survey last year it was, that around thousand-plus CIO's who were interviewed and most of the CIO's, all the CIO's had SAP systems in their companies. And 40% of them said they want to move from on-premise to cloud. Right there that's our engagement strategy there. That we come as a one-stop shop for all these customers who are planning to move from on-premise to cloud. Why? Because number one, they want to reduce their CAPEX, upfront reduction in your cost. They want to make sure that their steady-state cost for keeping the lights on is bare minimal. So whatever budget is left out they can focus more on innovation. We take the sliver line of keeping the lights on and moving them from on-premise to cloud as part of our engagement strategy to start with number one. As we do that, they realize, customer realize that we are not just hosting partners. We just don't provide scalable private managed security cloud for our customers, but we can also do SAP implementation end-to-end, which is whether this is ECC upgrade to S/4HANA or this is a digital strategy for S/4HANA going forward, or just HANA as a pure analytics tool. Or the different SAP suite of products, whether this is Hybris, whether this is Ariba or other suite of products which are very much in a SAS model aspect of SAP, we support that end to end. Our support model is based out of the United States. We have offshore centers in India. So globally follow the same kind of approach. We do this between our number of you know units here in US and in India. That's our engagement strategy across. >> So last question is we're now in our booth here at SAPPHIRE NOW. Tell us about what CenturyLink, NetApp, SAP are doing within the context of automation. >> Wonderful yeah great. That's important actually because I think if you really look at the pace of what customer needs today, the pace is changing so fast. In a typical SAP landscape, you want to commission a system, a development system or a production system within weeks or within days. Gone are other days where you need two months and three months. I mean you miss the business goals for doing all these things. So what we have done is we want to get into the automation mode, and we are heavily investing in that part with help of Cisco, UCSKS. NetApp plays a very big role here in terms of providing their data-driven strategy, their hyper-converged infrastructure as part of the storage system and working with another partner Vnomic to make sure that entire, all these gears behind the scene have a very good orchestration layer to automate the whole process of building the infrastructure, building the application, building all the services and handing it over to our, to the customer team for them to start the journey. So that whole cycle can be reduced by the automation. So I would say NetApp plays a big role there, no doubt about that because most of the IT organizations are data driven today. The SAP workloads are changing and you can't wait for those change manually to be operated. So these are all application driven workloads which changes you know, which can adapt to all these changing workloads and this is where we are going right now in terms of automation. >> Well thanks so much Jinesh for stopping by. I wish we had more time but talking to us about what CenturyLink is doing with SAP, with NetApp for example to help customers on this arduous digital transformation journey. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much I mean this is great, thank you, enjoy rest of the day. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAP Sapphire 2018. Thanks for watching. (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. We're in the NetApp booth, and we are excited to welcome to theCUBE, Ray Russ from Fujitsu, the Senior Director of SAP Solutions. Ray, this is your 21st SAPPHIRE. >> That's correct. >> This event is enormous. There's upwards of 20,000 people here, in Orlando, but what Bill McDermott, their CEO, said in his key note, is they're expecting about a million people to engage. For a software company, that sells an invisible product, that's really incredible. You've been involved, you've been at Fujitsu for a few years, but you've been involved with SAP for a long time. Talk to us about your, kind of the history that you've seen with SAP, and now what you're doing with them at Fujitsu. >> Yeah, so you know I go back 20, 22 years ago as an end-user. Started in the manufacturing space, a company that was implementing SAP for the first time, and then my second end-user, before I got into consulting. I'd seen a lot of change in the companies I worked for and wanted to go and help other companies go through the transition. I really got involved right before Y2K, and if you think about digital transformation, I kind of think of it that way. Digital transformation, when talks about it, is like this new buzz word, but as an SAP expert and as a company, we've been doing digital transformation for years, we just didn't quite call it that, right? To the point where CIO's say, "Stop calling it digital, just tell me how I'm gonna, "fix my business, "or help me become more efficient in my business." So I've seen it change quite a bit. One of the, you know, some of the big things that have changed now is technology that's allowing companies to actually get out outside their four walls, and extend that enterprise, to supply chains, or assets. So that's something that we focus on at Fujitsu. You know, my background has been in manufacturing, and while Fujitsu focused on a lot of different industries, a big part of our business is in the manufacturing space. We're a manufacturer, we run SAP in our own plants, as well as 84% of our customers globally are in the manufacturing space. So we work very closely with companies in this particular space, helping them understand the journey for S/4HANA, what does that mean for them? Would there be operational efficiency? But also extended beyond their enterprise. Some of the challenges that we see with companies right now is that over the years, they've continued to upgrade their SAP systems. My first implementation was 3.1I, I believe, and now it's ECC 6.0, before S/4HANA. They've continued to upgrade, and maybe not take advantage of new functionality, and the new version of SAP, the enhancement packs, and that. So they've kinda still got some custom code going on, and now they are asking SAP, and partners like us, okay, S/4HANA, we really wanna see the value, not just an IT business case, but what is the business to the company's and organization's strategic goals. So part of our job, and part of our role is to go and help these companies understand the business value, whether it be reduction in closing the books, or overall equipment effectiveness in their plant, right? You see, those overall outcomes to the business and help them define the business case, and when the move to S/4HANA would come. The other area of expertise for us, Industrial IoT. We've been doing this, we've been really one of the global leaders in SAP, in what they call digital manufacturing, which is now part of the Leonardo family. We've been doing Leonardo IoT for years, we just, no one called it that, okay, right? (laughs) And that's one of the things we're showcasing here. We work very closely with SAP's Leonardo team, that's in the digital manufacturing space. Some of the solutions customers might know is MII or ME. We're doing co development with our customers, I'm sorry with SAP, as well as our customers as well, in innovation projects, and seeing what they can get out of Industrial IoT for their projects. We were here, at the Leonardo event on Monday. Some of the things we're showcasing in our booth this week, and talking to customers about, is something we call our Smart Factory. Many times we've seen IT-led IoT projects, whether it be a shop-floor application, or something at a plant-level, and I said it last year, I spoke in SAPPHIRE last year, and I said it, I go, "I hear from CIOs all the time, "If we're going to fail, fail fast." And I really believe now that, why fail at all? And actually, talking to Gartner this week, as well, he said the same thing, C-level executives don't wanna hear that anymore. They wanna understand the roadmap, and there was this concept of throwing a project to a developer, having them develop something without the business, and then taking that down to a plant, or something to a user, they were like, this is not exactly what we wanted, we don't see the business outcome. So what we do now in our framework is actually help these companies build their long-term roadmaps. So going in and talking to the C-level executives in the business side and saying, what are your expected outcomes? Let's start with the outcome, not the technology, right? Whether it be reduction of labor, improve quality, again, overall equipment effectiveness, and help them understand what their strategic goals are, and then work with the business units, and the users as well to help define what their needs are, at the plant level or at the corporate level. And part of our methodology and approach is build a maturity model, where they sit at that time, and then also using a result chain process to actually build in every initiative or IoT project, with the business cases, or where is the real value, right? And then making sure there's outcome based approach to this, and build that long-term roadmap. >> So yesterday on stage, Bill McDermott talked about the value of augmenting people with technology, but the importance of process. So Fujitsu, obviously, big manufacturing and operations, outside of servers and IT equipment, there's always been this battle, traditionally, between what we call OT, traditional manufacturing operations, and IT. Obviously, as part of this transformation, organizations need to go through CIOs, plant managers, that traditional line of business has to have this new way of working together. Can you shed light on how that's changed within Fujitsu, and then with customers? >> You hit it right on the head, and IT-OT integration has been a challenge for a lot of companies over the years. In fact, I think one of the biggest challenges CIOs have had with shadow IT is at the plant level, right? Because maybe the IoT projects weren't being rolled out fast enough as corporate was trying to focus on the ERP application. I think the plants didn't think of SAP as an OT-type application. >> And so there are a lot of challenges, next thing you know you had major companies, with multiples plants, having multiple different applications, but none of them rolled up, so a COO could actually see the operations of all of his plants, right? With this, some of the acquisitions SAP's done and some of the development they've done, and the advances in IoT, now when I talked about some of those problems with the CIOs, trying to, failing fast, what we do is go and work with these companies, and actually go down to the plant level and work with them. So we talk to them, what you are your business process like? When you got a developer up in corporate, trying to design something for a plant operator, or a plant manager and doesn't know the process, you're never gonna give them what they need, or what they want. >> You can't automate a process that doesn't exist. >> Exactly, exactly. So working with them, we helped define what those processes are and then actually build applications that fits their needs. Whether it be condition-based maintenance applications, which you need to do before you can do predictive analytics. Some of the innovative things we're doing, and we're showing today, are we've augmented a HoloLens, into the process where, for example, even in our own plant, down at Richardson, Texas, we make network communication equipment, which is a complex assembly, and an operator has to look at a manual sheet, and actually look at the numbers and figure out what slot it goes in. With the HoloLens augmented reality, I can see a digital overlay, and pick up a part and plug it right in, it tells them, and we've been able to reduce cycle time on that assembly by 42%. So, I mean, that's huge. >> That is huge. So you mentioned business outcomes a number of times, and you're talking to the C-Suite, and the CDO who needs to drive digital transformation, and cultural change, and the CMO who needs technology to drive marketing and align it to sales. Give us an example of one that you think really articulates what Fujitsu and SAP are delivering, that's impacting a customer's business, whether it's developing a new product, increasing revenue, increasing profits. >> So good point. So a good example of one we've just done recently, and I actually spoke on this recently, the four major outcomes this customer is looking for in this roadmap was reduction in labor hours, right? Reduction of machine time, right? The big two areas for them was improvement in quality. So, by being able to monitor and get real time information, on our application for the plant, we're getting information to plant managers real time, it's not the next shift or the next day, right? We were able to actually improve quality in a lot of our customers' plants by anywhere between 30 to 40%. And then customer satisfaction is huge as well. You mentioned customer again. One of the things we're doing too, now, is actually being able to, servitization is kind of a new buzzword, it's been around for awhile actually, right, but as companies are looking, in the manufacturing area, how do we create new routes to market, right? There's a customer of ours, we actually put sensors in some of their high-end assets, they sell to their customers as well, we're able to get that information now, and actually help them monitor their equipment. And we can actually help them, then, reduce their customers' maintenance costs and so forth, and that's adding value to not only our customer, but our customer's customer. Those are some of the big things we're seeing in manufacture right now. >> So, talk about the value of partnerships, especially with a company like, we're in a NetApp booth, so NetApp would be a great example. When we're talking edge, which is where all IoT data is happening, industrial data happens at the edge, core, where some of that data needs to be processed, and then back to cloud. How does Fujitsu partner with SAP, NetApp, the customer, to bring value from all three of those end-points? >> You got it, and you know, it's interesting, over the years, somebody asked me the other day if I ever worked, I never worked for SAP, but I've been in the ecosystem forever. I get accused, if you caught me I'd bleed blue, and I've found over the years is that every company is realizing they can't do it all. You gotta do what you do well, right? And so, SAP realizes that we work, and NetApp's been a strong partner of ours for a long time, right? So you know, I talk about Smart Factory framework, one of the things we try to do when we go in is actually look at the business outcomes and then the domain areas, line of business we're gonna focus on and that, but then we look at the technology. And if it's technology that's not our core competency, we want to make sure we bring in the right partner. NetApp's one of those partner, SAP is one of those partners, and we have a group of partners that we bring in, to make sure we're bringing the best solution to our customer, right? If we can't do it well, then we're gonna make sure we work with a partner that has strength in that area. >> I may expect that choice, that, flexibility, right? That word is used, flexibility, agility, at every, you can't go to a trade show without hearing those at least 50 times each, but it's really the customers that are driving that, and their needs. We've heard a lot of that in the last day and a half that we've been here, a lot of that value articulated through the customer, as well as the importance, and it sounds like SAP does this well, of listening to the customer. What are you needing that we're not doing? Who should we be partnering with, to be able to deliver this solution that you need, to your point, that's going to drive these business outcomes, because that's where the conversation, this day and age, needs to be. >> Exactly, yep. >> Well Russ, Ray. Ray Russ. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing what you're doing with Fujitsu. Fujitsu and SAP have been partners for 40 years, you've got 8,000 plus customer and counting, and I imagine that you're going to carry the momentum forward that you're feeling here at SAPPHIRE, and your 22nd SAPPHIRE next year. >> Absolutely, I appreciate it. Have a great show guys, thank you very much. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you so much. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, we are at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW, in the NetApp booth in Orlando. Lisa Martin, Keith Townsend, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(techno music) >> From Orlando, Florida, it's The Cube. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to The Cube. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we are at SAP Sapphire Now 2018 in Orlando. This is a massive event. Not only are there 20,000 people here but there's about a million engaging with SAP this week online. Amazing! We're joined by a Cube alumni. Welcome back to The Cube >> Thank you Lisa. Chris Hallenbeck. You are the SVP of Database and Data Management at SAP. >> What they tell me. (laughter) >> That's what they tell you. That's what your cards say? >> It is. >> Alright. Well, thanks for coming onto The Cube. So this event is enormous. Sixteen American football fields is this space. You really can close your rings. >> Well, and it is, is the energy is just crazy. It's actually different than other years. I don't know why but it really it is. >> You know yesterday, that's what Keith and I were saying yesterday. Bill McDermott really kicked things off with such enthusiasm and genuine energy. It was really amazing to see that. You don't see that with a lot of, see levels on day one. That energy was really palpable as was. >> Enterprise applications aren't that sexy huh? (crosstalk) >> Apparently they are. >> Well, apparently they are now. >> Who knew? >> Well, and that's the thing too. You guys wanting to be one of the top ten most valuable brands in the world. Up there with Apple, Google. And one of the cool things I saw yesterday on a bus out here was ERP that you can talk to and hear from. So taking this, what was an invisible product and making it now something that people can engage with like a digital assistant at home. Remarkable. >> Well, yeah. No. The user interface which has been a huge, huge thing. We have these massive UX labs throughout the world. We have ones in Palo Alto. We have ones throughout Germany and other locations. And we've been really looking at how people engage with the software. And it's not only through a screen although that's it and we win all these Red Dot awards, the Preeminent Design Award. We get those consistently now, many a year, for the work we're doing within UI which is fabulous work. But we're also again, a lot of people aren't in front of computers anymore. So how can I actually just speak into my phone and get all the information I need? How can I have the device speak to me? How can somebody wearing gloves on an assembly line, automatically they vibrate if they're reaching for the wrong bin and would have grabbed the wrong part which create a faulty defective product. So it's all built in, our actually shoes vibrating if something else happens. And so actually this interaction of sensors in two way, taking IOT data in, and then also feeding it back into signals but that's part of the interface of the software. It's not always sitting in a screen and if you are in front of a screen, they're actually pretty great to use. >> So speaking of these consumer technologies, we've had this expectation and these technologies have changed the expectations of what our business tech is. We expect to be able to do things such as, hey, say what's the latest score from last night's game. And now there's these intelligent streams of having conversations with computers. All that is powered by the data on the backend. SAP traditionally hadn't been. We talked about it on stage this morning. SAP hadn't been known for the type of company to sub at to the real-time data entry, real-time data analytics. >> Yeah. You're all about data management. We heard something on the stage this morning. What was it? Data management suite? (crosstalk) The mature database now. (crosstalk) What is that? What's that about? >> Well, now what we're finding, you know, HANA enabled these incredible use cases and originally we were all, we actually didn't run underneath SAP applications an entire database but really a data platform that people were doing these incredible innovations on. And then of course it really started to get swept underneath and it went under BW and then it became part of Sweden HANA and everyone just focused said, oh yeah, HANA is just gonna be like Netweaver. It's just a system that runs underneath SAP and we kept saying no, it's not, no, it's not. And it was sort of but that was its main, that was where it was mostly getting deployed. And then what you're actually seeing here at Sapphire is this massive breakout of technology in full use use cases. That people are using it outside even non-SAP customers are using it to solve their individual problems. Really going after that huge, that 80% of data which is non-SAP but the challenge there with is how do you handle that? Data is now sitting out in all these different clouds. HANA was known for orchestrating data but it was really designed to do it on premise because we knew not everyone's gonna put data into our system. We came in late, right. And yeah we're the fastest growing but data was sitting in Oracle, and the TIZA and that's coming up and going into data lakes, running on ADO and we could orchestrate and move that data into HANA or do it in place. Go to the cloud, it's totally different. Average customer and CIOs are telling you they have six to eight clouds and you're like, wait, how did you get to six to eight? And you're like, yeah, they've got data in storage just in Azure, in AWS, and in Google but they've also got in all these different cloud applications and a lot are from SAP but a lot aren't and yet and so companies are telling us we've lost the view of who our customer is. We've lost view of our business. Which is the opposite of what you would have expect from this data explosion and, you know, digital transformation which was like showed up and disappeared in like two years but so how do you handle that? If I have data. So much data sitting out there. IOT data in the edge, love file data sitting in object stores, I've got data in different applications, data still on Fram. How can I actually possibly move that? You can't. There's no way to put it all together in one cloud. Everyone says, oh, bring it to my cloud. It's not viable. >> Right. So how do I actually push compute, get the data I need, refine it in place, and orchestrate and move that together with the ultimate security in governance? Which is what our customers are wanting. They're saying, how Chris for our non-SAP data and SAP, can I move data for application integration? How do I do analytics? How can I pre-press data and load it into a data lake, into a data warehouse and then I'll come back and do some other cool stuff on it with data science? And that's all about by combining HANA and data hub together in a suite with deep integrations, technically from a data center readiness it's all as a service runs in the cloud but because we're SAP it's also on Prem enabled if you still want to run it that way. And it allows you to solve these huge data problems and we also help you. We bring SAPs intellectual property of data models to this so you can use things like Enterprise Architecture designer and say look we don't have a model of customer. I'm like, well yeah, what kind of industry are you in? Okay, I've got a high tech customer model pre-built for you so then you don't have to build that from scratch. We bring the things to you. So now you can get very, very quick value right from the implementation within weeks. >> And that speed is obviously essential. >> Well, how does it. (crosstalk) >> HANA's a terror, which it's known for. >> But you're right, sorry Keith, you're right that in the consumer world because we have access to everything everywhere from so many devices, we as business people expect the same thing. >> Yeah. And so that speed is critical. You talk about, you know, multiple clouds, data in so many different sources. It's not valuable unless you can actually harness it and extract insights that may only be viable for a quarter or something like that. >> But nobody even knows where the data is and so you look at like we're about to, we were talking about HANA. I just came back and we're coming out a little bit later the year with HANA data hub 2.3 which is part of HANA data management suite and that actually has a whole metadata repository. So someone who knows what they're doing goes in and maps out where all this data is located and actually they don't have to do it all themselves, it's got heuristic-al and semantic search to automatically map and categorize data. I can then map that back to like my definition of customer or supplier and other things. Now everyone doing all the analytics and doing exactly what you're talking about Keith where can I just say into my phone, hey, someone in board meeting goes hey what were our results within two peak last year over this year and show and break that down by city and have it just pop up. Just like you say to somebody, hey high school football game, didn't those two play together? Anyone can do that on a mobile device but we don't know the data in our own company. How do you do that? And then let HANA data management suite will automatically know where the data is, orchestrate, go get it, pull it together, and deliver that back to a mobile device that you might have spoken into. >> Do you have a favorite customer that articulates just what you said? >> I do. I just actually walked out of a session. It was just and it sounds a little boring but it's incredible what people are doing. So I just walked out of a thing with the Swiss Federal Railways. Sounds boring but you know where. I live in Europe and everything is by rail, right? And so they're doing about 60 percent of the rail traffic there is passengers, 1.25 million passengers a day plus the balance of 40 percent of the trains are freight. They're having a huge problem because you use huge, it's all electrical and they're trying and so when you get up and it's growing rapidly. So they're, and they do their own power with power plants and when they go up with power plants, when they go over peak they have to spot by at just massive times a premium on that data on that. And we're actually doing this a lot of place out of rail but they also use electricity on heaters and other stuff in the cold winters and air conditioners. They're now streaming information off the trains, off of the points all the way along the signals and from all the power plants. They know peak usage. It automatically detects when they're going to go over and rather than going into the plants, it actually cuts the heaters off for a second here or there. There's heaters in all the switching equipment. They know how long they can do it. HANA managed this, this is automatically so it's IOT in but it's automatically making automated business decisions, shutting down systems programmatically, intelligently actually using machine learning and keeping it. So now what they do, so now they don't need to go out to the spot market in buy energy anymore. It has cut their electrical usage by a third. >> How much money have they saved? >> No, what's a third is how much money they've saved. The electricity is still high but they're not buying that really, really >> The premium. expensive premium and so you're streaming data, it's all over, it's all happening in real time, and it's automatically kicking out business processes without human intervention. And then it's a platform for them where they're adding all this new capability to save in other ways and so it's just, you know, simple but clean really good use. Good for the planet. It's great for the customers. And now they have, and by the way, when you hit those peaks, that's when they short-out systems and that's when trains stall out. So actually you're getting better servicing of the trains. So, yeah, it's good storage. >> So edge core cloud, great breakdown of kind of the use case. The data is being collected at the edge. Data may not even be collected in a SAP system? (crosstalk) We're doing great! >> It's reality. >> It is reality and one of the things that I think architecturally that enterprises have a hard time wrapping their head around, HANA in-memory database defeats latency when you're inside the database, when you're inside of the data center, however you were thinking about HANA data management. How does the in-memory database impact and data management impact data retrieved from the edge? Help explain the importance of metadata and willing down that data so that we can get it back to the cloud and process their important data. >> Keith, it's a great question. Sometimes, HANA is not, you know. Although we like to go it's a hammer and we think everything's a nail but sometimes you don't which is why we have data hub. And it has unique capabilities for doing something called data pipelines and movement. So we can actually do all the data transformation movement calling tensor flow in flight. We do this as the data is in movement so we're actually doing all of that processing as it's moving through. If you need extra horsepower and want to combine different data types and there's certain capabilities pipeline engines don't solve well. HANA is a service which HANA is now completely cloud native. They can actually bring up HANA in a few seconds. It will take the data flow in, compute it, it's not being used as database, it's a compute layer out at the edge, the data flows out to move on to the next step usually via a data pipeline from data hub and that service gets shut off. So you just pay from small compute when you need to bring out the big guns and then it moves on. And maybe that data never comes back into a HANA system, maybe it does, but you're using the technological underpinnings of in-memory computing in this way as just literally a flow through compute engine. >> And I think that's the disconnect a lot of organizations have because you associate s4 bases, BW, all these applications on top of the database. They don't think of HANA as something that you can spin up, spin down. >> But that's brand-new and that is what we just announced and went live last week. So HANA was, there's traditional on-prem system, bare-metal, it run virtualized but I mean talking about big arm running HANA systems. Now to actually have it, so HANA as a service came up. We rewrote the entire thing to make it completely cloud native and orchestrated. It's all containerized in elastic. It runs, it came up last week running an AWS and available also in GCP. Our target is a little bit later this year. I always have to use a safe harbor language. It'll be coming up on, it'll be coming up in Azure and after all the rest of SAPs data centers and then also coming out and in Asia through Huawei and coming up in those data centers as well as some others we have planned. And that's where you actually get this fully elastic HANA that's able to come up and come down automatically. >> So this massive transformation that you guys have achieved in 46 years, say 46 years young, 390,000 customers. >> Yeah. SAP didn't get to where it is without having a really robust symbiotic partner relationship ecosystem. We're here in the NetApp booth. There's a 150 partner sessions alone at Sapphire this week. Talk to us a little bit about how the partner ecosystem is helping you guys give customers the flexibility and the choice that they need. >> Yeah, no, and it is. SAP can't do everything. And so a lot of the aspects are that we look at in very different ways. Of course, some companies and the big corporations we deal with need strategic SIs, these strategic integrators to do consulting and other pieces and we work really closely with them on and they have specialized practices and other things on both HANA. They're extending out into the HANA data management suite. We do the same thing since we realize you need boutiques. We're the fastest geospatial engine in the world but that's a very niche piece although geospatials may be the hottest data type out there happening right now. Those are very specialized boutique firms. So we work with all of those and to help our customers when they need that. So we work with a lot of specialists. We work boutiques but we couldn't do this without hardware partners, with storages which is why we allow. There's still a lot of folks running on Prem. So we still have to have all these things so we have HANA tailor data center integration so you can certify your systems like NetApp. You can certify everything else on prem so you don't have to rebuy new hardware. Use what you have. I'm not trying to get you to buy a bunch of new appliances. And then the other one is a lot of is via and OEMs have started building out on HANA but now what they really want to do is go directly on HDMS as the cloud offering because it runs both in any cloud, which is a very unique differentiator that we run in every major cloud out there, as well as coming back and running on-premise. They can play their applications very risk-free with the extreme security and governance we're providing within that stack to build applications that they want to sell and use for enterprises. >> So you've been with SAP about six years you said and even Bill McDermott said in his keynote on day one, biggest Sapphire ever. You've seen a tremendous amount of growth. The momentum here is so palpable. The types of validation that SAP is getting through the voice of the customer, through partners like Netta, the different partner ecosystem. That validation is electric. >> Yeah. >> What excites you about everything that was just announced in the last couple of days about the rest of 2018? Where do you go from here? >> Oh my god! Okay, it's like asking me to pick my favorite child. (crosstalk) But, you know, honestly I get to. You get to see the innovations that I still enjoy. I love the full use use cases because I'm like a compute guy at heart but I see all the applications that we've done in these demonstrations. The fact that people have applications that are giving all of the analytics in line with the transactions on these gorgeous UIs. I mean you run these things on a mobile device that means the data layer has 20 milliseconds to actually not only grab the data but to do all the predictive analytics and everything you see to give you that nice two second screen to screen time on your mobile device and that's what we've worked for six years to enable. And now we're seeing that potential coming out at places like Swiss Rail. Just was talking with Gustav Rossi through the biggest cancer research labs and hospitals throughout all of Europe. They're doing all this genomic research, personalized medicine for cancer patients throughout Europe using HANA. I didn't even know about it, you know, or other ones we talked about beef farmers. Talking about smart farming throughout all the Netherlands. Reducing pesticide use, water usage dramatically down, and they increased yields by 10 percent. I mean and they're doing this on native HANA. So this area for me, the excitement of people and busting out of the SAP core traditional CIO market and moving into this 80% of data is to me exciting that people are seeing that HANA is not just an SAP appliance but it's really a general-purpose data platform for these innovation use cases. >> Helping customers change their business, change industries, save lives, pretty cool stuff. >> Yeah, I think so. >> Chris, thank you so much for stopping by The Cube and sharing with us your enthusiasm and your excitement for what you're doing at SAP. We appreciate it. >> Well, thank you very much. This was awesome. Thank you guys. >> We want to thank you for watching The Cube. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend at SAP Sapphire 2018. Thanks for watching! (techno 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 The Cube. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to The Cube. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend in Orlando, at SAP Sapphire Now 2018. We're in the NetApp booth and we are having some great conversations, really understanding how SAP and their ecosystem of partners have really helped to transform 390,000 plus customers. We're joined next by Sue Waite, who is one of the directors of the Global Center of Excellence for Database and Data Management at SAP. Sue, thanks for coming to The Cube. >> Thank you very much for letting me join you. >> So SAP, 46 years young company, like I said, 390,000 customers and 25 plus industries. You guys have, probably, many Centers of Excellence. Give us a little bit of understanding of the COE for database and data management. >> I will, happy to do so. So, the team that I'm very, it's my pleasure to be a part of, focuses on helping our customers understand what are the new opportunities that are out there. Many customers are so driven by the day-to-day operations. How do we take that opportunity to step back and look at what perhaps other competitors have done in their space, or in completely different industries. And what are new ways that they could be looking at approaching their business, approaching their engagements with their customers, and helping them grow, as well. And our database and data management solutions are the platform that helps enable that in a truly comprehensive data management way. >> It sounds pretty symbiotic. >> Very much so. >> Where, they're actually, you're helping them, but customers are also helping you. Tell us maybe some examples, like Data Hub, for example, of one of the things that maybe that symbiotic relationship-- >> Love to. >> Helped to evolve. >> Yes, yes. So, a little history in our database and data management solutions. Of course, SAP HANA is a cornerstone to our core platforms. Very much a groundbreaking technology eight years ago in introducing a completely comprehensive platform. But one of the things we've learned as we've worked with our customers over time, so many clients, and in fact SAP itself, has our different pockets of enterprise systems. We have our CRM applications, our ERP, our finance, our, you know, supply chain. But in today's environments, we have so much more information coming at us. There's the whole big data space. Everybody's trying to pull and collect information from, of course, social media feeds. That's the one everybody thinks of. But another new space is internet of things. Collecting information from sensors off their machines, from, you know, telemetry from where their trucks are, to facial recognition as people are coming into our stores, or image recognition as we're manufacturing sheet metal on the plant floor. It's amazing the amount of information that is now available to be collected and mined to bring further insight into business operations. So, great, we can collect all of that fabulous new data and store it in Hadoop or Amazon S3 or object stores, but how do we get at that information? >> Right, and extract valuable insights-- >> Exactly. >> That they can then use to generate new products, new revenue streams, new businesses. >> Completely so. >> Yeah, and a simple example is, well, not example, but S/4 and HANA. The journey to S/4 and HANA starts mostly with BW. So if the original data warehouse and the capability that that brings to organizations, one of the first things that happens when you deploy BW on HANA is other businesses look up, other business units look up and say, "Hey! I want that capability. I want that instant analytics, that instant search." >> Yes, yes. >> Talk to the evolution of that. After we go BW and the focus is still on analytics and data intelligence. >> And it should be, you know. It is about making important decisions, in an instant now. >> Right. >> I mean, everybody looks at their phone when we make deposit. We expect to see that deposit instantaneously. >> Yes. >> Right. >> The business needs to operate just as instantaneously and with BW it has a tremendously powerful system that works hand-in-hand, as you said, with S/4, ERP, and the whole business suite itself. But then the goal was, as well, to bring in this larger context, from these other large-data environments that are being captured in Hadoop or S3. So the genesis of the idea to help address that marrying up of data, stored in our classic enterprise data warehouse, like BW, is the solution that we call Data Hub. And what Data Hub does, what's different about it, is it truly is an umbrella solution that transcends the big data environment as well as the classic enterprise systems. And in doing so, one of the first problems was we have all this fabulous information collected in our data lake. How do we get to the information that's truly useful, to combine with information in BW? Or even feed into S/4 itself? So Data Hub helps pre-process, refine, and enrich that information, and the key is doing so where the data lives. Let's not move petabytes of data around, just trying to derive intelligence from it. So Data Hub allows customers to pre process, refine, and enrich that data in their data lake itself. Get from petabytes of information to, say, gigabytes of data that is useful to combine with information in BW, or within HANA, or S/4, or whatever other systems may be useful to bring that together. And the trick with all of that is having visibility into the information that truly lives within each of those systems, which is also something that Data Hub brings to the table, because it has the ability to collect metadata. So, information about the data that lives within each of those environments, so the data analysts, who are bringing those data sets together, can intelligently know, this is the data set I want, this is how I need to refine it, and I want to combine it here, and they can set that up through pipelines and orchestration within Data Hub. It is tremendously powerful in simplifying that end-to-end scenario, and the whole goal is to make it easier for the business to get to those useful insights. Really help me have a competitive differentiator because of the great set of information I can now bring together, and bubble that up through our analytics tools. >> Yeah, access at speed, that was one of the things that Hasso Plattner-- >> Completely so. >> Plattner talked about this morning, is, everything has to be realtime. We expect it, as consumers, right? >> Yes, yes. >> And then as consumers who are also business people, which many are, you also expect that. One of the things, too, that you reminded me of, that Bill MCDermott talked about yesterday, was customers in every industry need a 360 of their customers, right? But, SAP is moving it's away from the 360 of just sales automation to really having a true, enabling a true 360 of the entire customer experience. And one of the things I liked yesterday was the notion, in a not-creepy way, but we expect that, and customers have to connect. If you can connect finance and procurement and supply chain and marketing and sales and extract those really valuable insights, faster than your competition, that's what today's digital businesses need. >> One of the simplest statements I've heard that I think is so powerful is, "Understand more about your customers, so that you can do more for your customers." That's what it's all about. Truly providing that end service to help them achieve their goals and move to that. >> So let's talk about some of the, from a high level, some of the technology to makes this capable. When you're talking about petabytes and petabytes of data, you can't move all the data, different systems have different capabilities when it comes to data transformation. I love the insight that you provided that data analysts need to be aware of the metadata, so that they can set up the transformations needed to get the reporting that they need. How does Data Hub enable the power of metadata to all these different systems, whether it's Hadoop, unstructured data, systems that we don't even control, such as social media data. How does Data Hub bring all that metadata together? >> So one of the capabilities that enables that visibility into data content is through what we call a data discovery mechanism. And Data Hub includes metadata crawlers. So it literally, anytime Data Hub has a system that it's been authorized to connect to, we can then go out and collect the metadata about the information, the data itself, that lives within those environments. And so it comes back and there's a repository within Data Hub that holds information about the tables, the column names, and then things like data types, as well as, even basic profiling information, such as, you know, minimum, maximum, how often values showing up, cardinality, even the frequency of different values that are there, down to the ability to even preview, literally look at the content within the tables. And that's so powerful for the data analysts, because they no longer have to alright, go, you know literally crack open a file, to look at the content. It's at their fingertips. And that's just an amazing tool, that, once they have that, then they can move on to the truly value-added activity of how they want to refine, enrich, mashup, that information to get to those insights that are at their fingertips. >> With so many, the C-suite, like we've talked about before, is changing so dramatically, the CDO, the CIO, the CMO, the CXO, they all have need, different needs, a need for this data. Your customer conversations, where do you start at the C-suite, in terms of, you know, they've got all of this data that they know, there's golden nuggets in there. How do we find it? And also, exploit insights for marketing, for sales, for finance, for procurement. Where do you start in terms of that conversation within a customer? Do you help unite the C-suite to understand how they can team together? >> That is always the goal, of course. And it's important to understand each customer's individual, you know, what their business is, what their market is, as well as, that company themselves, what their goals are, what they're trying to achieve. So that we can truly be, I know you've heard the term trusted advisor, but we really take that seriously, because understanding what their challenges are and where they're trying to grow their business, along with, you know, the very technical aspects of which technologies they're using today, and what roadblocks are they experiencing that are preventing them from achieving those goals. Of course, our objective is to help them cross those roadblocks, cross those bridges, and if we can help with SAP solutions to achieve those goals, it's not about rip and replace, it's helping them bridge those challenges to reach those goals. And that's the role we play. I love what I do. >> So, the Data Hub is a great example of a platform that can be expanded upon. Can you share about some of the successes that you've had with the ecosystem around Data Hub? To extend, not just the analysts who can interact with Data Hub directly, but what we like to call bolt-on applications, that extend the overall capability of whether it's analytics, AI, machine learning, the examples, or automation, business process automation. What are some of the successes coming out of making Data Hub? I know it's only a year old, but what are making the Data Hub available to your ecosystem of partners? >> Yep, so, some of the successes have been, truly, you know, efficiency, obviously, but in that ability to bring those data sets together. For example, we've been working with one customer who's, we'll just say they're a manufacturer. And they have their own team of data scientists, and they have petabytes of information they've been collecting in their data lake, and we talked with them about Data Hub and what we were seeing, and they're like, "Yeah, love the story. But, you know, our data science team is really good. I think we've got this." They literally came back to us six months later and said, "It's a whole lot more work, than we ever expected it would be." Because in a classic environment, it's a lot of hand coding, it's a lot of scripting, it's creating those predictive models which is the lifeblood, that's why we hire data scientists. But they were spending so much time and data manipulation and trying to find the right information. They're like, "Please, you know, white flag." >> Yeah, the can bring back a lot of data. >> Yeah, it literally seems like a great opportunity for the overall market to start adding value on top the, on top of Data Hub to basically shorten that timeframe for internal data scientists. They should be figuring out what questions to ask, versus figuring out how to organize the data. >> Exactly so, that's why they're being paid the big bucks. Let them do the job that we hired them to do, you know. >> Well, Sue, you said you love your job, and it's evident. Thank you so much for stopping by The Cube and sharing what you're doing within the COE for database and database management, specifically, >> Thank you very much. A pleasure to speak with you this morning. >> With Data Hub, we can't wait to hear what's next for next year. >> Alright, excellent. >> We wanna thank you for watching The Cube. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, from SAP Sapphire Now 2018. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> 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. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin, with Keith Townsend, and we are with NetApp in their booth at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018. Welcoming Mike McGibbney to theCUBE, from SAP. You're the SVP of SuccessFactors Service, Delivery and Operations. Welcome. >> Well, thank you. >> So, SuccessFactors, largest people cloud in the world. So you probably a little bit busy. >> Just a little bit. >> Tell us about what you're doing at SuccessFactors. >> So I'm responsible for the delivery and operation of the cloud service. So we service all of our customers and continue to introduce new capabilities into that cloud. We support them from payroll, all the way through recruitment. Basically, from hire to retire. >> So Mike, not your first cloud. Little background and history. Me and Mike have been on the, well probably one of the toughest projects, politically, I've ever been on. >> Yes, definitely. >> So there's history, but great history. We deliver success. This isn't your first cloud. >> No. >> You've built clouds before. What's fundamentally different about the SAP people cloud versus clouds you've built in the past? >> I think the speed. The way this is accelerating, both the breadth of the capabilities that we're offering when you think about the integrations into SAP, and the growth. So this is moving truly at cloud speed. The things that we're shooting for today are already past. So we constantly have to be focused out there on the horizon. We've gotta adapt very quickly. And we've gotta implement very quickly. Our customers need it to accelerate their business. And our services need that support underneath them as well. >> So you guys, as you said, have this, have this long history, so I'll let you guys chat in a minute. But in terms of customer experience, customer engagement, customer influence, that was kind of a lot of undertone in the keynote this morning. 50 million business users on SuccessFactors and 60 industries. How do you, needing to get to the speed that you just mentioned how do you get that customer feedback to drive evolution of the product as fast as they're demanding it? >> Well, so the product and engineering team have a whole system around customer engagements with delivery panels and steering committees. But from an operations side, we felt that it was important as well. We have a whole organization that is focused on engaging the customer. We built our operational centers. And we do probably about 60 customer tours a year through our operational centers. We also do about 200 customer calls from the operational team a month. So globally, we work with the pre-sales, the CEE groups, and some of the other SAP support groups, to make sure that we have boots on the ground, understanding what our customers want, understanding what their experience is, so we can continue to adjust and reset the bar where it needs to be. >> So Lisa, I'm not gonna dominate the conversation. Me and Mike can probably, we'll crack open a beer in a minute, (laughter) and we'll continue. But there's other hero numbers on the stage. Let's talk about the high level first and then me and Mike can geek out. What are some of the other Xers reveals? >> Oh, good question. I think just some of the industries. I always like to see which industries are kind of leading edge here. So he mentioned 23,000 HANA users and 25 different industries. And I'm curious, that's a lot. And I'm curious to see what some of the key use cases are that you guys are driving with helping some customers in many industries that hire to retire. What are some of the key use cases that you're helping those customers to drive? >> Well, I think we have a good presence in about every vertical, from both the public and the private sector. The suite of tools that we have, service the entire, each of those use cases. I think when you start to think about the SAP suite and the integration story that they talked about, with the intelligence and the analytics on top, that just takes it to another level. And I think that's really underlying important message. I think and that's what's gonna help, not only SuccessFactors, but SAP continue to drive and lead across the board. >> So can we talk a little bit about customer interaction? I think traditionally, you've served up infrastructures to developers directly. But a lot of cases, your direct customer may be your actual business user looking to transform digitally. Talk about the experience, the difference in experience of running the cloud that was consumed by other technologies, to potentially running a cloud that's centered on people who are thinking about people and customers. >> Yeah, that's a great question because these are business-critical activities. You think about something like learning, right? That's used to certify pilots before they can take off. So we can actually, the availability and the delivery of that service, is critical. Large amusement parks have to certify all the ride handlers. So this thing has to be available 24 by seven, 365 days a week. And that's just something like learning. When you think about some of the other facets, they are entrenched in our customers' modern business processes. And they're all critical. So when we look at these, we have to look at 'em like we used to, some of the most critical functions in the backend. So we run them like you would, from an operational perspective, like a bank, okay? With that resilience, those practices, that focus. But we also have to do it at the speed of cloud. (laughs) >> I was just gonna ask that question. You have two competing episodes. You know, I like to, well, people. Well, SAP process is 70 percent of the transactions in the world. It is called, has been called, the cash register of the cloud. It is the ultimate system of record. Therefore, it should never be touched. However, we have to move fast. We have to digitally transform their commercial entities that want to build cool new applications on Fiori, et cetera. There are other business integrations. How do you weigh those two, what seems like competing interests? >> I think Bert laid out the data strategy and how we're gonna integrate the data across the suite. And that's gonna be the key, right? Instead of integrating and porting to, we're gonna have single sources of data where data is gonna reside. We're gonna use that as a system of record, as the suite evolves. That'll give it the data integrity that it needs, also the performance and integration perspective. >> So we're sponsored by the data driven company, NetApp, who is powering one of the most powerful data platforms on the planet, SAP. Talk about the relationship and importance of NetApps, NetApp vision in supporting your vision. >> So NetApp was here at SAP long before I started, but I have a, probably a 20 year, probably 17 to 20 year history, with that app. And you know, data is critical. The storage, the access, the performance. And they've been a critical part of almost every architecture I've worked on today. Rock solid performance, rock solid reliability, but more important to me, is the partnership with the company, and the support that we get. Not just on the stuff that we're doing today, but thinking about how we're gonna change in the future, and supporting us as we evolve, and helping us plan and think through that as well. >> One of the things that Bill talked about this morning, as well, is getting to this 4th gen of customer experience. That these expectations, we've talked about speed. That it's, everything has to be done yesterday, right? How are you guys working with NetApp delivering that 4th generation customer experience, internally and to your 50 million business users? >> Well, I think you touched on bits and pieces of it. It's a whole suite of-- It's a whole program of plans, right? Between Fiori, you know, all those things in the front end, where the customer touches. But in the backend, it's about speed and reliability to their data, right? So our architectures are getting simplified. Our data's getting condensed. We need the compliance pieces and that's where NetApp kinda play a core role in, in those pieces. >> So back in traditional infrastructures and operations, we could tell speeds and feeds as one of the best features of why you should use one service over another. As you describe the way, everyone expects speeds and feeds. What are some of the value props or KPIs for your new environment? >> So, we've really shifted. So one of the things that we've done is we've actually added operational intelligence. So we have basically a brain that sits on top of our cloud environment. It looks at all of the transactions. It filters out all the noise. So the speeds and feeds are part of a, now a service or a business function, that we're delivering. That metric down by itself is important. But unless you can correlate it to some business impact, or something happening, it doesn't really have the weight that it needs. >> Right. >> So now what we're looking at is we've ingested and mapped all of the business transactions. We can proactively focus on the ones. So we filter out 99 and change percent of the noise. And then we prorate the things that we need to kinda pivot and focus on. We have three global operational centers around the world. One in Budapest. One in Bangalore. And one in Reston. And then we have a global operation center that sits on the top, so the regionals sit in the region. And they look at all of that feedback from that intelligence. >> So getting those key performance indicators out of the system As I looked at LinkedIn, I looked at some of the common folks we have. You have a pretty consistent core team that support you over the past two or three different major iterations you've done. Talk through how collectively your team has looked at new innovations and operation deliveries such as DevOps. And you've changed the way that your core team approaches these challenges and the outcomes that you've been able to realize. >> So for us, it's about, you know the architecture and technology evolves. As it evolves, it makes a few things simpler. And also, introduces some usually more complex challenges. But it's mitigating risk, delivering performance and reliability, and maturing your actions. So if we do those basic things as we mature the technology underneath, we can drive that. So the team has been focused on, when we think about DevOps, we think about delivering seamlessly new capabilities, features into the cloud. How do we do that with a minimized risk, through automation, and seamless, right? So it's how we segmented the application, how we built the resilience in, how our processes understand and validate and be able to stand in if something happens. >> I'm wondering on that, from maybe a pivot is, we talk about often times, at different events. Whether we're talking about advanced analytics or data science skills gap. Or I think Bill even said like, upskilling. Think I heard that term this morning. I'm curious, as you were saying that, that the folks that you've been working with for a long time on different projects. What are some of the skills that they're able to, you may be able to enable them to learn, by being part of SAP? Is it something that helps accelerate their ability to develop even better, more competitive products? >> Yeah, so SAP has one of the best talent pools I've ever seen across. Some very brilliant people in every business line. So there's best practices that can be learned from everything that we do. All you have to do is be able to have the conversations and look around. When we brought the team in, about two years ago, we did a whole skills analyses, gap analyses, of the skills that we had. We looked at our operating model, created a new operating model that was enabling us to evolve from an operational perspective. And then put plans in place, and use the tools that we sell to help deliver development to the team. So basically, we became our own customer. We drove development of our, upskilling our existing resources, and we supplemented where needed. And we also pulled from the collective knowledge of SAP. So doing those three things, helped us really accelerate and execute something that typically would take three years in less than 12 months. >> Last question, Mike, for you. This morning's energetic keynote, we've talked about it a number of times already today. Really, I think somebody on the show earlier said, likened Bill McDermott to kind of, really an evangelist, which is really refreshing. You don't see a lot of C-levels that are that, where you can feel and kinda see their passion. The SAP has been very vocal for a while about really wanting to disrupt the marketplace for CRM. Some big news coming out today. I'm just wondering, kind of culturally, to wrap this up, what excites you about this train that you're on at SAP? >> I think that the message is electrifying. And inside of SAP, you feel that. So we've been feeling it as these bits and pieces have been coming out over the last year. So this is just a culmination of all the little pieces that we've known inside and we're able to share externally. So I'm extremely excited about where we're at and where we're going. And obviously, anytime I get to hear Bill speak, it just amplifies it. >> Yeah, that energy was really, you can feel it from wherever you were. It was awesome. Mike, thanks so much for stopping by and catching up with your old buddy Keith and me and sharing what you guys are doing with SuccessFactors. >> Excellent, excellent. Thanks very much. >> Thanks for -- Oh sorry, and thanks for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, from SAP SAPPHIRE in the NetApp booth. Thanks for watching. (fast tempo music)