>> Narrator: It's theCUBE covering Sapphire Now 2017 brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Welcome back everyone to our special Sapphire Now 2017 coverage in our Palo Alto Studios. We have folks on the ground in Orlando. It's the third day of Sapphire Now and we're bringing our friends and experts inside our new 4500 square foot studio where we're starting to get our action going and covering events anywhere they are from here. If we can't get there we'll do it from here in Palo Alto. Our next guest is Satyen Sangani, CEO of Alation. A hot start-up funded by Custom Adventures, Catalyst Data Collective, and I think Andreessen Horowitz is also an investor? >> Satyen: That's right. >> Satyen, welcome to the cube conversation here. >> Thank you for having me. >> So we are doing this special coverage, and I wanted to bring you in and discuss Sapphire Now as it relates to the context of the biggest wave hitting the industry, with waves are ones cloud. We've known that for a while. People surfing that one, then the data wave is coming fast, and I think this is a completely different animal in the sense of it's going to look different, but be just as big. Your business is in the data business. You help companies figure this out. Give us the update on, first take a minute talk about Alation, for the folks who aren't following you, what do you guys do, and then let's talk about data. >> Yeah. So for those of you that don't know about what Alation is, it's basically a data catalog. You know, if you think about all of the databases that exist in the enterprise, stuff on Prem, stuff in the cloud, all the BI tools like Tableau and MicroStrategy, and Business Objects. When you've got a lot of data that sits inside the enterprise today and a wide variety of legacy and modern tools, and what Alation does is, it creates a catalog, crawling all of those systems like Google crawls the web and effectively looks at all the logs inside of those systems, to understand how the data is interrelated and we create this data social graph, and it kind of looks >> John: It's a metadata catalog? >> We call you know, we don't use the word metadata because metadata is the word that people use when you know that's that's Johnny back in the corner office, Right? And people don't want to talk about metadata if you're a business person you think about metadata you're like, I don't, not my thing. >> So you guys are democratizing what data means to an organization? That's right. >> We just like to talk about context. We basically say, look in the same way that information, or in the same way when you're eating your food, you need, you know organic labeling to understand whether or not that's good or bad, we have on some level a provenance problem, a trust problem inside of data in the enterprise, and you need a layer of you know trust, and understanding in context. >> So you guys are a SAS, or you guys are a SAS solution, or are you a software subscription? >> We are both. Most of this is actually on Prem because most of the people that have the problem that Alation solves are very big complicated institutions, or institutions with a lot of data, or a lot of people trying to analyze it, but we do also have a SAS offering, and actually that's how we intersect with SAP Altiscale, and so we have a cloud base that's offering that we work with. >> Tell me about your relation SAP because you kind of backdoored in through an acquisition, quickly note that we'll get into the conversation. >> Yeah that's right, So Altiscale to big intersections, big data, and then they do big data in the cloud SAP acquired them last year and what we do is we provide a front-end capability for people to access that data in the cloud, so that as analysts want to analyze that data, as data governance folks want to manage that data, we provide them with a single catalog to do that. >> So talk about the dynamics in the industry because SAP clearly the big news there is the Leonardo, they're trying to create this framework, we just announced an alpha because everyone's got these names of dead creative geniuses, (Satyen laughs) We just ingest our Nostradamus products, Since they have Leonardo and, >> That's right. >> SAP's got Einstein, and IBM's got Watson, and Informatica has got Claire, so who thought maybe we just get our own version, but anyway, everyone's got some sort of like bot, or like AI program. >> Yep. >> I mean I get that, but the reality is, the trend is, they're trying to create a tool chest of platform re-platforming around tooling >> Satyen: Yeah. >> To make things easier. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> You have a lot of work in this area, through relation, trying to make things easier. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> And also they get the cloud, On-premise, HANA Enterprise Cloud, SAV cloud platform, meaning developers. So the convergence between developers, cloud, and data are happening. What's your take on that strategy? You think SAP's got a good move by going multi cloud, or should they, should be taking a different approach? >> Well I think they have to, I mean I think the economics in cloud, and the unmanageability, you know really human economics, and being able to have more and more being managed by third-party providers that are, you know, effectively like AWS, and how they skill, in the capability to manage at scale, and you just really can't compete if you're SAP, and you can't compete if your customers are buying, and assembling the toolkits On-premise, so they've got to go there, and I think every IT provider has to >> John: Got to go to the cloud you mean? >> They've got to go to the cloud, I think there's no question about it, you know I think that's at this point, a foregone conclusion in the world of enterprise IT. >> John: Yeah it's pretty obvious, I mean hybrid cloud is happening, that's really a gateway to multi-cloud, the submission is when I build Norton, a guest in latency multi-cloud issues there, but the reality is not every workloads gone there yet, a lot of analytics going on in the cloud. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> DevTest, okay check the box on DevTest >> Satyen: That's right. >> Analytics is all a ballgame right now, in terms of state of the art, your thoughts on the trends in how companies are using the cloud for analytics, and things that are challenges and opportunities. >> Yeah, I think there's, I think the analytics story in the cloud is a little bit earlier. I think that the transaction processing and the new applications, and the new architectures, and new integrations, certainly if you're going to build a new project, you're going to do that in the cloud, but I think the analytics in a stack, first of all there's like data gravity, right, you know there's a lot of gravity to that data, and moving it all into the cloud, and so if you're transaction processing, your behavioral apps are in the cloud, then it makes sense to keep the data in an AWS, or in the cloud. Conversely you know if it's not, then you're not going to take a whole bunch of data that sits on Prem and move it whole hog all the way to the cloud just because, right, that's super expensive, >> Yeah. >> You've got legacy. >> A lot of risks too and a lot of governance and a lot of compliance stuff as well. >> That's exactly right I mean if you're trying to comply with Basel II or GDPR, and you know you want to manage all that privacy information. How are you going to do that if you're going to move your data at the same time >> John: Yeah. >> And so it's a tough >> John: Great point. >> It's a tough move, I think from our perspective, and I think this is really important, you know we sort of say look, in a world where data is going to be on Prem, on the cloud, you know in BI tools, in databases and no SQL databases, on Hadoop, you're going to have data everywhere, and in that world where data is going to be in multiple locations and multiple technologies you got to figure out a way to manage. >> Yeah. I mean data sprawls all over the place, it's a big problem, oh and this oh and by the way that's a good thing, store it to your storage is getting cheaper and cheaper, data legs are popping out, but you have data links, for all you have data everywhere. >> Satyen: That's right. >> How are you looking at that problem as a start-up, and how a customer's dealing with that, and what is this a real issue, or is this still too early to talk about data sprawl? >> It's a real issue, I mean it, we liken it to the advent of the Internet in the time of traditional media, right, so you had you had traditional media, there were single sort of authoritative sources we all watched it may be CNN may be CBS we had the nightly news we had Newsweek, we got our information, also the Internet comes along, and anybody can blog about anything, right and so the cost of creating information is now this much lower anybody can create any reality anybody can store data anywhere, right, and so now you've got a world where, with tableau, with Hadoop, with redshift, you can build any stack you want to at any cost, and so now what do you do? Because everybody's creating their own thing, every Dev is doing their own thing, everybody's got new databases, new applications, you know software is eating the world right? >> And data it is eating software. >> And data is eating software, and so now you've got this problem where you're like look I got all this stuff, and I don't know I don't know what's fake news, what's real, what's alternative fact, what doesn't make any sense, and so you've got a signal and noise problem, and I think in that world you got to figure out how to get to truth, right, >> John: Yeah. And what's the answer to that in your mind, not that you have the answer, if you did, we'd be solving it better. >> Yeah. >> But I mean directionally where's the vector going in your mind? I try to talk to Paul Martino about this at bullpen capital he's a total analytics geek he doesn't think this big data can solve that yet but they started to see some science around trying to solve these problems with data. What's your vision on this? >> Satyen: Yeah you know so I believe that every I think that every developer is going to start building applications based on data I think that every business person is going to have an analytical role in their job because if they're not dealing with the world on the certainty, and they're not using all the evidence, at their disposable, they're not making the best decisions and obviously they're going to be more and more analysts and so you know at some level everybody is an analyst >> I wrote a post in 2008, my old blog was hosted on WordPress, before I started SilicionANGLE, data is the new developer kid. >> That's right. >> And I saw that early, and it was still not as clear to this now as obvious as least to us because we're in the middle, in this industry, but it's now part of the software fabric, it's like a library, like as developer you'd call a library of code software to come in and be part of your program >> Yeah >> Building blocks approach, Lego blocks, but now data as Lego blocks completely changes the game on things if you think of it that way. Where are we on that notion of you really using data as a development component, I mean it seems to be early, I don't, haven't seen any proof points, that says, well that company's actually using the data programmatically with software. >> Satyen: Yeah. well I mean look I think there's features in almost every software application whether it's you know 27% of the people clicked on this button into this particular thing, I mean that's a data based application right and so I think there is this notion that we talked a lot about, which is data literacy, right, and so that's kind of a weird thing, so what does that exactly mean? Well data is just information like a news article is information, and you got to decide whether it's good or it's bad, and whether you can come to a conclusion, or whether you can't, just as if you're using an API from a third-party developer you need documentation, you need context about that data, and people have to be intelligent about how they use it. >> And literacies also makes it, makes it addressable. >> That's right. >> If you have knowledge about data, at some point it's named and addressed at some point in a network. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> Especially Jada in motion, I mean data legs I get, data at rest, we start getting into data in motion, real-time data, every piece of data counts. Right? >> That's exactly right. And so now you've got to teach people about how to use this stuff you've got to give them the right data you got to make that discoverable you got to make that information usable you've got to get people to know who the experts are about the data, so they can ask questions, you know these are tougher problems, especially as you get more and more systems. >> All right, as a start up, you're a growing start-up, you guys are, are lean and mean, doing well. You have to go compete in this war. It's a lot of, you know a lot of big whales in there, I mean you got Oracle, SAP, IBM, they're all trying to transform, everybody is transforming all the incumbent winners, potential buyers of your company, or potentially you displacing this, as a young CEO, they you know eat their lunch, you have to go compete in a big game. How are you guys looking at that compass, I see your focus so I know a little bit about your plan, but take us through the mindset of a start-up CEO, that has to go into this world, you guys have to be good, I mean this is a big wave, see it's a big wave. >> Yeah. Nobody buys from a start-up unless you get, and a start-up could be even a company, less than a 100-200 people, I mean nobody's buying from a company unless there's a 10x return to value relative to the next best option, and so in that world how do you build 10x value? Well one you've got to have great technology, and then that's the start point, but the other thing is you've got to have deep focus on your customers, right, and so I think from our perspective, we build focus by just saying, look nobody understands data in your company, and by and large you've got to make money by understanding this data, as you do the digital transformation stuff, a big part of that is differentiating and making better products and optimizing based upon understanding your data because that helps you and your business make better decisions, >> John: Yeah. >> And so what we're going to do is help you understand that data better and faster than any other company can do. >> You really got to pick your shots, but what you're saying, if I hear you saying is as a start-up you got to hit the beachhead segment you want to own. >> Satyen: That's right. >> And own it. >> Satyen: That's exactly. >> No other decision, just get it, and then maybe get to a bigger scope later, and sequence around, and grow it that way. >> Satyen: You can't solve 10 problems >> Can't be groping for a beachhead if you don't know what you want, you're never going to get it. >> That's right. You can't solve 10 problems unless you solve one, right, and so you know I think we're at a phase where we've proven that we can scalably solved one, we've got customers like, you know Pfizer and Intuit and Citrix and Tesco and Tesla and eBay and Munich Reinsurance and so these are all you know amazing brands that are traditionally difficult to sell into, but you know I think from our perspective it's really about focus and just helping customers that are making that digital analytical transformation. Do it faster, and do it by enabling their people. >> But a lot going on this week for events, we had Informatica world this week, we got V-mon. We had Google I/O. We had Sapphire. It's a variety of other events going on, but I want to ask you kind of a more of a entrepreneurial industry question, which is, if we're going through the so-called digital transformation, that means a new modern era an old one movie transformed, yet I go to every event, and everyone's number one at something, that's like I was just at Informatica, they're number one in six squadrons. Michael Dell we're number in four every character, Mark Hurr at the press meeting said they're number one in all categories, Ross Perot think quote about you could be number one depends on how you slice the market, seems to be in play, my point is I kind of get a little bit, you know weirded out by that, but that is okay, you know I guess theCUBE's number one in overall live videos produced at an enterprise event, you know I, so we're number one at something, but my point is. >> Satyen: You really are. >> My point is, in a new transformation, what is the new scoreboard going to look like because a lot of things that you're talking about is horizontally integrated, there's new use cases developing, a new environment is coming online, so if someone wanted to actually try to keep score of who number one is and who's winning, besides customer wins, because that's clearly the one that you can point to and say hey they're winning customers, customer growth is good, outside of customer growth, what do you think will be the key requirements to get some sort of metric on who's really doing well these are the others, I mean we're not yet there with >> Yeah it's a tough problem, I mean you know used to be the world was that nobody gets fired for choosing choosing IBM. >> John: Yeah. >> Right, and I think that that brand credibility worked in a world where you could be conservative right, in this world I think, that looking for those measures, it is going to be really tough, and I think on some level that quest for looking for what is number one, or who is the best is actually the sort of fool's errand, and if that's what you're looking for, if you're looking for, you know what's the best answer for me based upon social signal, you know it's kind of like you know I'm going to go do the what the popular kids do in high school, I mean that could lead to you know a path, but it doesn't lead to the one that's going to actually get you satisfaction, and so on some level I think that customers, like you are the best signal, you know, always, >> John: Yeah, I mean it's hard, it's a rhetorical question, we ask it because, you know, we're trying to see not mystical with the path of fact called the fashion, what's fashionable. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> That's different. I mean talk about like really a cure metro, in the old days market share is one, actually IDC used a track who had market shares, and they would say based upon the number of shipments products, this is the market share winner, right? yeah that's pretty clean, I mean that's fairly clean, so just what it would be now? Number of instances, I mean it's so hard to figure out anyway, I digress. >> No, I think that's right, I mean I think I think it's really tough, that I think customers stories that, sort of map to your case. >> Yeah. It all comes back down to customer wins, how many customers you have was the >> Yeah and how much value they are getting out of your stuff. >> Yeah. That 10x value, and I think that's the multiplier minimum, if not more and with clouds and the scale is happening, you agree? >> Satyen: Yeah. >> It's going to get better. Okay thanks for coming on theCUBE. We have Satyen Sangani. CEO, co-founder of Alation, great start-up. Follow them on Twitter, these guys got some really good focus, learning about your data, because once you understand the data hygiene, you start think about ethics, and all the cool stuff happening with data. Thanks so much for coming on CUBE. More coverage, but Sapphire after the short break. (techno music)

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

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

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

>> Announcer: It's theCUBE covering Sapphire Now 2017 brought to you by SAP cloud platform and HANA enterprise cloud. (electronic music) >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here for special Sapphire Now coverage inside theCUBE studios covering all the action in Orlando, Florida SAP Sapphire Now happening in Orlando. CUBE has been covering Sapphire, this is the eighth season covering Sapphire watching the innovations from SAP happened over the past eight years. It's been incredible. And our coverage continues here with Scott Harrison senior director of Sr Director America's ISV Platform as a Service with SAP. Scott, welcome to this CUBEConversation during our special coverage of Sapphire Now in Orlando. >> Thank you, thank you very much for having me. >> So you're role is partners in ISV and so the cloud has become a great enabler for partners. You seeing them transform their business and look at real lucrative opportunities. Both in making money but also extending their customer base. So what are customers expecting to see and what are they hearing at Sapphire this year? >> Well I think what customers are seeing at Sapphire is that there is some tremendous new innovation from SAP. We are the cloud company powered by HANA and we're delivering great solutions to help customers digitize their business. The transformational journey of the digital enterprise is real. SAP is leading the way. And in regards to partners, partners are key to helping SAP and customers be successful. We're enabling them to build solutions, to enable those solutions and deliver them to customers so that the customers can not only get the benefits of SAP but the get the benefits of some of the partner's innovation in real time. >> Talk about the growing ecosystem because SAP certainly has been changing. And in talking to Bill McDermott over the years there really hasn't been a course correction for SAP. They've been on this trajectory for awhile. Certainly maybe some some zigs and zags and some acquisitions here and there, but for the most part the journey trajectory has been the same. But the opportunities are shifting. Talk about the landscape of the ISV ecosystem that you guys have and what tweaks are you making where are you putting the pedal to the metal where are you pulling back what are you doubling down on? >> Sure, we're really doubling down on our partners and partner innovation. We have 600 partners globally that are building on SAP cloud platform. That's a fantastic number and that's just the partners building on cloud platform. We have over a thousand applications that our partners have built that have launched into the SAP app center which you're hearing great things about at Sapphire. So we're doubling down on partners helping us innovate we're doubling down on an end-to-end program to not only help partners build solutions that solve customer problems but jointly going to market with them so that they can be successful. Creating new revenue routes to market for their organizations. >> Your SAP is no newbie when it comes to partners I mean, look at the SAP. They run software. The biggest companies in the world going back to the old days. I mean, old days, showing my age here. But in the late 80's, early 90's during that boom SAP set the table, became, now running the software on some of the biggest businesses in the world. And McDermott's always got a quote "The top fortune 100 all run on SAP." Or something like that. But the landscape has changed. So I always looked at the partner ecosystem or the partner story and the partner traction as the canary in the coal mine for company's success. So here at Sapphire what Because partners are always about "what's in it for me?" They won't say the directly but it's ultimately the proof point. If it's not good for the partners it's probably not good for business. What's the impact at Sapphire this year for partners? What's the big impact, announcement, trends that are really going to get the partners super excited? When they say hey, this is going to help my business. >> Yeah, I think there's a couple things that partners are really excited about to help their business. Number one is some of the announcements coming out around cloud platform and the multi-cloud capabilities that SAP will have. Additionally it will be in terms of revenue routes and go-to-market as you know we have launched the SAP app center which is not only just an app center to discover new applications, but to actually transact and drive revenue through the SAP app center. So we have partners that are showcasing their solutions on the SAP app center. And customers have the ability to discover, try and buy those applications. That's a real impact for partners in terms of driving new revenue and routes to market and minimizing the cost of sales the best that they possibly can. >> Talk about the Go-to-Market and the subscription models because one of the things I find fascinating about the cloud is it's an evolution and a continuation of some of the things, we talked about the old days. But really the business models are changing. Talk about the specific things that you're doing with partners. Because the digital transformation is no doubt a huge opportunity but it's a business model change and technology changing in real time. What's the big go-to-market tweak that you feel the partners are excited for? >> I think what partners are really excited for is the idea of creating a subscription based revenue model for their organization. Whether they're a traditional SI or whether they're a reseller there are more pressures on the margins than ever before. And what we're providing for partners is the ability to create a new revenue model where they can offer subscription based services powered by cloud platform. So it's their innovation and IP running on cloud platform and it gives them that subscription based revenue model so that they can change the dynamics of their company. And be able to increase valuations of their company have additional revenue flowing through. >> Scott, one of the themes this year at Sapphire and certainly last year really put the stake in the ground was the Apple deal. The iOS, you're starting to see cloud native developers really extending the range, if you will of the traditional SAP reach. Which, you know, huge developer community. You know, SAP in particular. And you're seeing others, like Cisco moving outside their quote, swim lanes, around developers going after these cloud native developers. We're hearing the same thing from partners inside theCUBE and we talked to the, whether it's the large SIs, the ISVs. SIs are a little bit different because they have the big money. But a lot of the ISVs are really doubling down on their development staff. Which, those roles are changing. You don't have to be a hardcore full-staff developer >> Right. >> to be a developer any more. How are you seeing the impact of some of the things happening at Sapphire that are going to really go to the ISVs saying it's okay to staff up and be developer focused. And that's really where the action is. What's the story there? >> Yeah, it's a great story that we've done in conjunction with Apple and the iOS SDK, right? And that being announced within cloud platform. So we have great partners that have been a part of that >> John: So you have a good story for developers? For ISV? >> We have a fantastic story for ISV and developers. One of the examples, and there are many is one of Innovapptive. They are a start-up company of four years ago. They develop mobile solutions on cloud platform and they have been part of this launch to be able to use the iOS SDK to develop mobile applications within the HANA cloud platform and leveraging that SDK. >> Alright Scott, final question for you. Bottom line, the ISV partner that's out there on the show floor at Sapphire Orlando, and the folks potentially watching online here. Bottom line me, what's in it for me? I'm an ISV, I'm a partner, what is SAP doing? What's different now? Why is it good for me to continue and extend or double down my relationship with SAP? >> Yeah, we really have made it very easy to partner with SAP. You can come in and build solutions on our technologies very easily. And we can help you take it to market. You get instant access to all of the SAP customers worldwide. so whether you're a developer with an idea or you're a very large traditional SI you have the ability to build new innovation you have the ability to easily showcase that in the app center and other places within SAP and you have the ability to go-to-market jointly with us. So we want you to win. Because as a ISV developing a solution when you're successful, and only when you're successful is when SAP is successful with our partners. >> John: And what are you guys doing specifically to make that frictionless for the partner? >> We're enabling them with key technologies we're giving them the ability to build easily and then we're putting together go-to-market plans for the partners to be able to execute and sell successfully. >> Final, final question. What's the big take-away from Sapphire this year? What's the ah-ha? If you kind of look at the stage, look down on the stage and watch all the action happening >> Yeah >> in Orlando. What's the big walk-away there for you and the partners? >> I think the walk-away for the partners is that SAP is 100% behind you in terms of helping you and most importantly your customers with their digital transformation. We're making it easy for you to innovate. We're making it easy to showcase who you are. And we're putting some of our best cloud solutions into our partner ecosystem so that they can extend those and create new routes to market. >> Alright Scott Harrison here on the special SAP Sapphire Now 2017 coverage from the studios here at Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. More continued coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

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

(lively music) >> Announcer: It's the CUBE, covering SAPPHIRE NOW 2017, brought to you by SAP cloud platform and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with the CUBE with our ongoing coverage of SAP SAPPHIRE 2017 down in Orlando. Really exciting day today, day two, 'cause we got to see Hasso Plattner. Got up and gave his keynote. Joined by George Gilbert. George, great to see you. I know you've known Hasso for years and years and years. Impressions of the kfeynote. God, there is so much stuff that we can dig into. I'm looking forward to it. >> Hasso almost never disappoints, 'cause he's just got %a richness of history and of vision that goes all the way back to the beginning. He was probably the technical visionary from the very beginning. He was the guy who took them from the first super integrated mainframe ERP package all the way to the client server age with R3, and now beyond into sort of in-memory, cloud ready, and with machine learning and iOT baked in. >> But he really speaks like a developer. You can really tell that he likes the technology, he understands the technology, he's kind of a no-BS guy. Some of the Q&A afterwards, people were trying to trip him up and challenge him on stuff. And he would either say, "I don't know," or, "I don't believe that," or, "Here's our impression." Really you could tell he's a humble guy, smart guy, and really has a grasp of what the heck is going on here. Let's jump into it. So many themes we could talk about. But the one that started out early in the conversation was, he literally said, "We need to get as quickly "to the cloud as possible." This is coming from a guy who built the company based on on prem ERP heavy lifting. And even he said today, 2017, "We need to get to the cloud as quickly as possible." >> I think there are a few things going on behind there, when you unpack it. One is, they did start building for the cloud in the early 2000's. It was meant to be a product for the mid-market. In fact, actually its first objective wasn't to be cloud-ready. The first objective was to be highly configurable so that you could bend it to the needs of many customers without customizing it, because typically with the customizations, it made it very difficult to upgrade. In making it configurable first and cloud-read second, they kind of accomplished neither. But they learned a lot. So they started on this next version, which was, okay, we're going to take an in-memory database which we're building from the ground up, 'cause Oracle wasn't building it at the time, and then we're going to build SAP ERP from scratch on top of this new database, 'cause database was so high performance that they didn't have to sepyarate analytics from transactions the way traditionally you do, you had to do in all applications. So they could simplify the app. Then, in simplifying it, they could make it easier to run in the cloud. And now, just like Oracle, just like Microsoft, they now build cloud first and on-prem second, because by building it cloud first, it sort of simplifies the assumptions that you have to make. >> Right, and he talked quite a bit about so much effort now is around integration connectors, to get stuff in and out of this thing. And that's a big focus, he said. It's not that we're ignoring it, it's just a big, hard, hairy problem that we're attacking. >> Yeah, and this is interesting and there's a lot of history behind this. Oracle, in the 90s, up until about the late 90s, their greatest success was in their industry-specific applications, where they took different modules from different vendors and stitched them together. That was how they built, like, a special solution for a consumer package goods company. But it turned out that that wasn't really workable because the different modules for the different vendors6 upgraded at different rates. So there was no way coherently to integrate them and tie them together. And SAP had said that all along. They were, like, this wasn't going to work. Fast forward to the last five-plus years, SAP started buying products from a bunch of different vendors, Ariba, SuccessFactors, Concur, Hybris. So you're, like, "Aren't they doing the same thing "Oracle did 10 year, 15 years before?" But no, and this is what Hasso was talking about today, which was, once those apps are in the cloud, you only have to build the integration points once. It's not like when it's on every customer's data center, you have to build integrations that work for every version that every customer has. So I think that's what he was talking about. You put it all in the cloud, you integrate it once. >> Another thing that he talked, he really, he spoke in tweets. (mumbles) goes to buy Twitter feed, I was basically, like, bang, bang, bang as he was talking. He talked about databases, and databases in the cloud. Nobody cares, right? It's a classic theme we hear over and over. "We presume it works. "We just want it to work." You know, it should just work. Nobody really cares what the underlying database is. >> But he was, in those cases, referring to these purchased apps, Concur, SuccessFactors, Ariba, Hybris. He was, like, "Some of them work on SQLServer, "some of 'em work on Oracle. "But you know what? "Until we get around to upgrading them to HANA, "it doesn't matter because you, the customer, "don't know that." If they were on prem and you had to support all those different databases, it might be a different story. But he's, like, "We'd rather give you the functionality "that's baked into them now "and get around to upgrading the databases later." >> Another thing that came up, and he actually reference the conversation with Michael Dell from yesterday's keynote, about the evolution of compute horsepower. You know, you had CPUs and CPUs kind of topped out. Then you had multicore CPUs. Now we have GPUs that he said you can put 10s or 100s of 1,000s on the board at one time. Basically he's smart guy, he's down the road a few steps from delivering today's product, saying that, you know, we're basically living in a era of unlimited free compute and kind of asymptotically approaching. But that's where we are. And how does that really change the way that we look now at new application development. I thought that was a pretty interesting thing. >> And sort of big advances in software architecture come from when you have a big change in the relative cost of compute memory, network storage. So as you were saying, cost of compute is approaching zero. But the same time, the cost of memory relative to storage is coming way down. So not only do you have these really beefy clusters with lots of compute, but you also have lots of memory. He was talking about something like putting 16 terabytes of memory in a server and putting 64 servers in a cluster, and all of a sudden, I can't do that math, being that I was a humanities major, but all of a sudden, you're talking about huge databases where you can crunch through this stuff very, very fast because it's all, you have lots of processors running in parallel and you have lots of memory. >> It's pretty interesting. He made an interesting statement. He used a sailor reference. He said, "You know, we are through the big waves "and now we're in the smooth water," and really saying that all this heavy lifting and now that this cloud architecture is here and we have this phenomenal compute and store technology, that he can kind of take a breath and really refresh a look out into the future as to, how do we build modern apps that have intelligence with basically unlimited resources, and how does that change the way that we go forward? I thought that was an interesting point of view, especially 'cause he has been at it for decades. >> You know, I think he was probably looking back to some of the arrows he had in his back from having done an in-memory database essentially before anyone else did for mission critical apps. I think when he's saying we're out of the choppy water and into the smooth water, because we now have the hardware that lets us run essentially these very resource-intensive databases and the apps on 'em, so that we no longer have to worry, are we overtaxing the infrastructure? Is it too expensive to outfit the hardware for a customer? So his, when he talks about rethinking the apps, he, like, "We don't have to have separate analytical systems "from the transaction systems. "And not only that. "We can simplify because we don't have to have" what he's calling aggregates. In other words, we don't have to, we don't, let's say, take an order and all the line items in an order, and then pre-aggregate all the orders. It's, like, we do that on the fly. And that simplifies things a lot. Then, not only that. Because we have all this memory, we can do, like, machine learning very inexpensively. >> A whole another chapter in his keynote was about modern software design. A lot of really interesting things, especially in the context of SAP, which was a big, monolithic application, hard to learn, hard to understand, hard to manage. I remember a start, that were were (mumbles) using is a core V to C commerce engine. And to add 16 colors of shirts times 10 neck sizes and 10 sleeve sizes was just a nightmare. You're not going to have some merchant that works at Macy's to put that into the system. But he talked about intelligent design, which is pretty interesting. We're hearing that more and more in a lot of work done over at Stanford, intelligent design. He's talking about no manuals. He's, like, "If I can't figure it out, "I need to understand." He talked about intelligent applications that continue to learn as the applications get more data. And specifically, the fact that machines don't get bored testing 100s or 1,000s or even millions of scenarios and grinding through those things to get the intelligence to start to learn about what's going on. So a very different kind of an application, both development, delivery approach, than what we think of historically as R3. >> Yeah, like the design thinking was, they have this new UI called Fiori. I mean, if you go back 10, 15 years, let's say, when they started, 15 years, when they started trying to put browser-based user interfaces on what was a client server system, they had 10s and 10s of 1,000s of forms-based screens. They had to convert them one by one to work in a browser. I think what he's saying now is, they can mock up these prototypes in a simple tool and they can essentially recreate the UI. It's not going to be the exact same forms, but they can recreate the UI to the entire system so that it's much more accessible. On the machine learning front, he was talking about one example was, like, matching up invoices that you going to have to pay. So that you going to train the system with all these invoices. It learns how to essentially do the OCR, recognize the text. And it gets smarter to the point where it can do 95% of it without-- >> Human interaction. >> Yeah, human inter-. >> You know, it's interesting, we were at Service Now last week, as well. And they are using AI to do relatively mundane tasks that people don't want to do, that machines are good at, things like categorization and assignment and things that are relatively straightforward processes but very time-consuming and again, if you can get to a 70% solution, 80% solution, 90% solution, to free people up to do other things on the stuff that's relatively routine. Right, if the invoice matches the anticipated bill in the system, pay it. Does somebody really have to look at it? So I thought that was really interesting. Something I want to dig in with you, he talked a lot about data, where the data lives, data gravity. He even said that he fought against data warehousing in the 90s and lost. A lot of real passionate conversation about where is data and how should apps interact with data, and he's really against this data replication and a data lake and moving this stuff all around, but having it kind of central. Want to just get your thoughts on that history. What do you think he means now, and where's that going? >> It's a great question. There's a lot of history behind that. Not everyone would remember, but there was an article in Fortune Magazine in the late 90s, where it described him getting up in a small conference of software CEOs, enterprise software CEOs, and he said basically, "We're going to grind you into dust, "because everything comes in our system integrated. "And if you leave it up to the customer "to try and stitch all this stuff together, "it's going to be a nightmare." And that was back when everyone was thinking, "One company can't do it all." And the reality was, that was the point in time where we really had given go past go, collect $200, to every best-of-breed little software vendor. It did prove out over the next decade that the fewer integration points there were, that it meant much lower cost of ownership for the customer. Not only lower cost of ownership, but better business process integration, 'cause you had the (mumbles) integration. I bring this up because, well, actually, I was there when he said it. (laughs) But I bring it up because he's essentially saying the same thing now, which is, "We'll put all the machine learning technology, "the building blocks, in SAP. "If you need any contextual data, "bring it into our system. "You don't want to take our data out "and put it into all these other machine learning programs "'cause there's security issues, "there's, again, the breakdown "in the business process integration." He did acknowledge that with data warehouses, if you have 100s of other sources, yes, you may need a external data warehouse. But I think that he's going to find with machine learning the greatest value with the data that you use in machine learning is when you're always adding richer and richer contextual data. That contextual data means you're getting it from other sources. I don't think he's going to win this battle in terms of keeping most of it within SAP. >> It kind of bring up this other intersection that he talked about. In now delivering SAP as a cloud application, he said, "Now we have to learn how to run our application, "not our customers," a very different way of looking at the world. The other thing that piggybacks off of what you just said is, we've seen this trend towards configuration, not customization. It used to be probably, back in the days, if you had the big SI's, they loved customization, 'cause it's a huge project, multi-years. I used to talk to one of our center partners, like, "How do you manage a multi-year SAP project "when most the people that started it "probably aren't even there the day you finish it?" But he had a specific quote I wanted to call out now, what you just said, is that he said, "Only our customers have the data, "the desire, and the domain knowledge "to make the most out of it." So it's a really interesting recognition that yes, you want customers to have this configuration option. But we keep hearing more and more, it's config, not-- >> Both: Customization. >> For upgrades and all these other things, which now when you go to a cloud-based application, that becomes significant. You don't want customizations, 'cause that's just complicates everything. >> You can't. I don't know if he said this today. I guess he must have said it today. But basically, when you're in the cloud, I forgot the terminology for the different instances. But when you're in, like, the SAP cloud, you can only configure. There's essentially a set of greater constraints on you. When you go to the other end of the spectrum, let's say you run it in your own data center, you can customize it. But when you're running it, essentially sharing the infrastructure, you're constrained. You're much more constrained. And they build it for that environment first. >> Right. But at the same time, they've got the data. Again, this has come up with other SAS companies that we've talked to, is hopefully, their out of the box business process covers 90% of the basics. I think there's been a realization on the business analyst side that we think we're special, but really most of the time, order to cash is order to cash. So if you got to tweak your own internal process to match best-of-breed, do it. You're much better off than trying to shape that computing system to fill your little corner cases. >> It's funny that you mention that, because what happened in the 90s was that by far the biggest influencers in the purchase decision and the overall lifecycle of the app were the big system integrators. They could typically collect $10 in implementation and change management fees for every dollar of license that went to the software vendors. So they had a huge incentive to tell the customer, "Well, you really should customize this "around your particular needs," because they made all the money off that. >> Right, right. Another huge theme. Again, it was such a great keynote. We watch a lot of keynotes, and I have a very high bar for what I consider a great keynote. This was a great keynote by a smart guy who knows his stuff and got history. But another theme was just really about AI. He talked a little bit, which I thought was great. Nobody talks about the fact that airplanes have been flying themselves for a very long time. So it is coming. I think he even said, maybe this is the age of AI. But there always have to be some humans involved. It's not a complete hand-over of control. But it is coming, and it's coming very, very quickly. >> I actually thought that they were a little further behind than might expected, considering that it's been years now that people in software have seen this coming. But they have in the dozens of applications or functions right now that are machine learning enabled. But if you look out at their roadmap, where they get to predictive accounting, customer behavior segmentation, profile completeness for in sales, solution recommenders, model training infrastructure for the base software foundation, they have a pretty rich roadmap. But I guess I would have thought it'd be a little farther along. But then Oracle isn't really any farther along. (mumbles) has done some work for HR. For whatever reason, I think that enterprise application vendors, I think they found this challenging for two reasons. On the technical side, machine learning is very different from the traditional analytics they did, which was really essentially OLAP, you know, business intelligence. This requires the data scientists and the white lab coats and instead of backward-looking business intelligence this forward-looking predictive analytics. The other thing is, I think you sell this stuff differently, which is, when it was business intelligence, you're basically selling reporting on what happened to department heads or function leaders, whereas when you're selling predictive capabilities, it's a little more transformative and you're not selling efficiency, which is what these applications have always, that's been their value preposition. You're selling transformational outcomes, which is a different sort of selling motion. >> It's funny, I heard a funny quote the other day. We used to look backwards for the sample of the data. (laughs thinly) Now we're in real time with-- >> Both: All the data. >> Very different situation-- >> And forward-looking. >> And forward-looking as well, with the predictive. >> That's a great quote, yeah. >> Again, he touched on so many things. But one of the things he brought up is Tesla. He actually said he has two Teslas, or he has a second Tesla. And there was question and answer afterwards really about the Tesla, not as the technology platform. And he poked fun at Germans. He said Germans have problems with simplicity. He referenced, I presume, a Mercedes or a Porsche, you know, the perfectly ergonomically placed buttons and switches. He goes, "You sit in a Tesla "and it just all comes up on the touch screen. "And if you want to do an update overnight, "they update your software, "and now you have the newer version of the car," versus the Mercedes, where it takes 'em three years to redesign the buttons and switches. I thought that was interesting. Then one of the Q&A people said, "But what about the buying experience? "If you (mumbles) ever bought a Tesla, "it's a very different experience "than buying a car." How does that really apply to selling software? It was pretty interesting. He said we're not there yet. But he has clearly grasped on, it's a new world and it's a new way to interact with the customers, kind of like his no manuals comment, that Tesla is defining a new way to buy a car, experience a car, upgrade a car. >> Operate it. >> At the same time, he got the crazy mode, fanatical mode, like, ludicrous mode, so that he could stop and tell the Porsche guys that you're falling behind further every single day. So I thought, really interesting, bringing that kind of consumer play and kind of a cutting edge automotive example into what was historically pretty stodgy enterprise software space. >> You know, it's funny, I listened when you're saying that. That was almost like the day one objective from SalesForce, which was, we want an enterprise app like Sebol, but we want an eBay-like, or Yahoo-like experience. And that did change the experience for buying it and for operating it. I think that was almost 20 years ago, where that was Marc Benioff's objective and he's saying it's easier to do that for CRM, but it's now time to bring that to ERP. >> The other thing he brought in which I was happy, being a Bay Area resident, is the Sharks. Because he's a part owner of San Josey Sharks, obviously it's SAP Center now, also known as the Shark Tank. It used to be owned by another technology company. But he made just a funny thing. "I like hockey, so I should like SAP," and he was talking about the analysis of how often the logos come up on the telecast et cetera. But the thing that struck me is, he said the analysis is actually now faster than the game. Pretty interesting way to think about this data in flow, in that the analysis coming out of the game that feeds Vegas, it feeds all these stat lines, it feeds fantasy, it feeds all this stuff, it feeds the advertising purchase and the ROI on my logo, is it in the corner, is it on the ice, is it in the middle, is actually moving faster than the hockey game. And hockey is a pretty fast game. Very different world in which we live, even on the mar-tech side. >> That was an example of one of the machine learning-type apps, because I think in their case, they were using, I think, Google image recognition technology to parse out essentially all the logos and see what type of impact your brand made relative to your purchase. >> I mean, I could go on and on. I've so many notes. Again, I live tweeted a lot of it, you know, he's just such a humble guy. He's a smart guy. He comes at it with a technology background, but he said we're a little bit slower than we'd like, he talked about some things taking longer than he thought they would. But he also now sees around the corner, that we are very quickly going to be in this age of infinite compute, and we are already in an age of, no one's reading manuals. Just seemed very kind of customer-centric, we're no longer the super-smart Germans that, "We'll do it our way or the highway, "and you will adapt your process to us," but really customer-centric point of view, design thinking, talked about sharing their roadmap as far out in advance as possible. I think he specifically, when he got questioned on design thinking, he's, like, "You know, the studies show that a collaborative effort "yields better results. "It's no longer, 'We're the smartest guy in the room "'and we're going to do it this way "'and you're going to adapt.'" So really progressive. >> And he talked about, with Concur, he said their UI is so easy that you really don't need a manual. In fact, if you do, you failed. And I think what he's trying to say is, we're going to take that iterative prototyping capability agile development and extend it to the rest of the ERP family. With their Fiori UI and the tools that build those screens that it'll make that possible. >> You've handled CAP. We don't spend enough investment on design in UI, 'cause it is such an important piece of the puzzle. But George, we're running out of time here. I want to give you the last word. You've been paying attention to SAP for a very long time. Hasso's terrific, but then Hasso gets off the stage and he said, "I don't run the company any more. "I only make recommendations." As you look at SAP, and Bill McDermott was yesterday, are they changing? Are they just stuck in an innovator's dilemma because they just make so much money on their historical business? Or are they really changing? What's your take as they develop, where they are now, and what do you see going forward for SAP? >> Well it's a really good question. I would say, I look at the value of the business processes that they are either augmenting or automating. I hesitate to say automate because, as he said, you still want the pilot in the cockpit. >> Jeff: In proximity to take control. >> Right. And he was, like, "Look, when we do the invoice matching, "it's not like we're going to get 100% right. "We're going to get it," I think he was saying, like, in the labs right now it's, like, 94% right. So we're going to make you more productive, we're not going to eliminate that job. But when you're doing invoice matching, that's not a super high value business process. If you're doing something where you're predicting churn and making a next best offer to a customer, that's a higher value process. Or if you have a multi-touchpoint commerce solution where you can track the customer, whether it's mobile, whether he's coming via chat, whether he's in the store, and you're able to see his history or her history and what's most appropriate given their context at any one moment, that's higher value. And then it's super high value to be able to take that back upstream towards, "Okay, here's where the inventory is. "I have some in this store. "I can't fulfill that clothing item directly from the store, "but I can fulfill it from this one," or, "I have it in another warehouse," when you have that level of awareness and integration, that's high value. >> Yeah, but I want to push back a little bit on you, George, 'cause I do think the invoice ma-, if he can automatically match 94% of the invoices, that is tremendous value. I just think it's so creative when you apply this machine learning to tasks that feel relatively mundane. But if you're speeding your cash flow along, if you get 94% of your invoices done one day faster and you're a multimillion dollar business, what is the direct dollar impact on the bottom line, like, immediately? It's huge. And then you can iterate and move into other processes. I think what's termed a low value transaction is actually a lot higher value than people give it credit. It's just like again, another one we hear about all the time, automation of password reset. Some of these service desks, password reset, I heard a stat, and one of them was 70% of the calls are password reset. So if you could automate password reset, sounds kind of silly and mundane, oh my gosh, it's like 70% of your calls. It's humongous. >> I hear what you're saying. Let me give you another counter example, which was, I think he brought this up. I don't know if it was today or when Michael Dell spoke, which was that Dell's revolution wasn't that they were more efficient than doing what Compaq did. It's that they had a different business model, which was specifically, they got paid before they even procured or assembled the components. >> Or paid for them, right? >> George: Yes, yes. >> They had no inventory carry costs. >> In fact, that meant their working capital, their working capital needs were negative. In fact, the bigger they got, the more money they collected before they had to spend it. That's a different business model. That wasn't automating the invoice matching. That was, we have such good systems that we don't even have to pay for them and then assemble the stuff until after the customer gave us their credit card. >> Right, right, right. >> I think those are the things that new types of applications can make possible. >> Right. Well, we see it time and time again. It's all about scale, it's all about finding inefficiencies, and there's a lot more inefficiencies around than people give credit, as Uber showed with a lot of cars that sit in driveways and Amazon and the public clouds are showing with a lot of inefficient, not used utilization and private data centers. So the themes go on and on, and they're pretty universal. So, exciting keynote. Any last comment before we sign off for today? >> I guess we want to take a close look at Oracle next and see how their roadmap looks like in terms of applying these new technologies, iOT, machine learning, block chain. Because all of these can remake how you build a business. >> All right, that's George Gilbert from Wikibon. I'm Jeff Frick from the CUBE. We are covering ongoing coverage of SAP SAPPHIRE 2017. Thanks for watching, we'll be back with more after this short break. Thanks. (lively music)

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

>> Narrator: It's theCUBE, covering Sapphire Now 2017. Brought to you by SAP Cloud platform and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Welcome, this is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. Special Sapphire Now 2017 coverage here in theCUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier and I'm with Frank Pulambo with Cisco, on my left Margaret Anderson with SAP and Gary Gauba with CenturyLink. Some significant news announcing, in conjunction with Sapphire is the relationship between you guys around a significant cloud and cloud computing deal. Margaret, congratulations. This is significant because customers want more flexibility. They want to have a cloud native, they want to have the flexibility of a data center. Frank, talk about the deal from a Cisco perspective and the relationship to the context of this deal. >> John, we're super excited to be part of it, and especially with CenturyLink and a vendor like SAP. Really, our role in it is to help our customers run on print, run in the cloud and really our infrastructure products need to provide the simplicity to performance and the security for them to do that. >> Margaret, talk about the deal specifics. What does the deal entail? >> Well, it's a unique deal, because CenturyLink was already on of our partners for the HANA Enterprise cloud business. Then when the Cisco team came along and said, "You know what? "If we put our gear into the CenturyLink data centers "and power the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, "that would be a tremendous win for everybody." And so, we're very excited about that. >> Gary, I find this deal interesting because you have the engine of the SAP, you have the network and all the benefits that Cisco brings to the table. You're dealing with the implementation and manage to serve the customers. What's the important takeaway from this announcement? >> To me, I think if you take a step back, as we're siting down with some of the top SAP execs, and Chuck from Cisco and our CEO, Glen Post. We're talking, "Okay, how do we leverage "our joint assets together? "How do we create more value for our customers?" If you look at today, every customer the number one priority is digital transformation. The cloud obviously is part of that equation, right. The other bigger priority is, "Okay, how do I monetize this data "in this new connected world?" You're looking at 1.8 trillion connected objects by the year 2020, which will be generating 43 zetabytes of data. But let me quiz you out, how many zeros in a zetabyte? >> I think I knew this answer going in, since I got it wrong on our previous take. So, 12, it's 21. >> Maybe. (panel laughs) >> Okay. >> It's a lot. >> All right, I'm going to say 21 too. >> All right. >> Well, just a lot. It's a lot of data, a lot of devices. >> Yeah, I got to go with 21. It sounds like a good number. >> These are my cheat sheets, right. Anyway, they had-- >> Too many zeros. >> Too many zeros. >> Margaret: Yeah, too many zeros. >> And a significant, it's getting worse, the data tsunami is coming, it's already happening. >> It's happening. You think about the amount of data which is being generated. What we want to do is we want to provide highly secure, automated and in this case SAP certified private cloud platform from CenturyLink. Where we can really have the customers laser focus on the business they do. We help them with the deep platform which can help them monetize their data, help them drive their top line, increase the bottom line. Mitigate the rest in a fast manner and a highly secure manner as well, I'll talk more about that. >> Gary, you bring up a good point, and I want to get Frank involved in this and next I want to double down on the data comment. Because you factor in even the IoT, Internet of Things growth. It's going to be even more significant. Then, the security question pops up, because as the data centers move to the cloud and the hybrid and or pure cloud, the perimeter is gone. Now, the perimeter is how we managed security in the past. But now with the perimeter-less environments security is critical. How does this customer feel secure? And if you guys comment on the security aspect of how this relationship will roll out and the non-disruptive nature that you guys bring to the table? Because that's what customers want to know. >> John, from a Cisco perspective and Gary mentioned, when we talk about the digital transformation. And that's the buzzword in the industry, but most customers are looking for a business outcome. Really, to get that business outcome they have to make a business decision probably based off the technology like SAP HANA. This is mission critical information. At Cisco that's why we're in tune for what the network can do, because it's going to provide security at a lot of layers. Whether it's at the edge, whether it's at the aggregation point or all the way back to the data center, or into the cloud. The security at multi-layers and multiple places. With the bad actors out there that's the way you need to implement it. So you can start to bring this stuff together and give the customers the confidence that, "Hey, this transactionous data is going to be secure." >> Gary, the outcome that we're talking about is no hacks, no breaches, secure? >> Yeah, well it is highly secure, but you got to always be prepared. If you think about it, CenturyLink, we have 550,000 miles of fiber. Once we complete the level three acquisition, we'll add another 200,000 miles of fiber. You're talking about 750,000 miles of fiber touching 100 countries over six continents and 35 person of the global internet traffic going to our network. Once the level three acquisition is complete, we'll be the second largest network and we're critical to countries' infrastructure. There's a deep focus on cyber threats, things we do to avoid the bad actors getting in. >> I think that network intelligence too is going to give you more data to fight the actors as well. >> Absolutely, but to your earlier point, we truly, the situation gets compounded with this connected world revolution. When you are connecting these 1.8 trillion objects, you got to ensure each of these objects is secure. This is where the intersection of cyber security and IoT kicks in, and that's right in our wheel house. >> Don't forget latency, a word that's reering its head. More importantly it has people move across with IoT and across the cloud. Margaret, talk about the role that the HANA Enterprise Cloud plays in all of this. Is it the glue, is it the connecting tissue? What's the role of the HANA Cloud platform? HANA Enterprise Cloud, sorry. >> Yeah, I was just going to say. From a HANA Cloud perspective, it's a private managed cloud. We do an awful lot of work from an SAP perspective to make sure that the customer's environment is totally secure, but is also accessible all of the time for the customer. Because today, most businesses run 24/7 and they run all around the globe. When some team is working and this is their prime business day, later in the US business day, it's prime business time out in Asia, it's prime business time in Europe. You need a cloud that's always available, always up and it's secure. You can guarantee that no other data is leaking into it or out of it. That's really important for our customers, because if you think about it, we have customers today that are SAP customers running in the HANA Enterprise Cloud that are competitors to each other. You have to make sure that you can guarantee that there's not going to be any, data is going to sneak out the back door here or something is going to get in the back door over there. We have a fairly large security team at SAP. We have very stringent standards at SAP. Every time we form partnership with somebody, we say, "Here are our standards. "If you can't comply to these, "we can't do business with you as a partner." From our perspective, it's very important to know that anybody that we work with takes security as serious as we do. >> Well, certainly these guys are big partners, they're known companies, Cisco and CenturyLink. This is big. Talk about the unified, how you guys are going to help with the unified competing architecture that Cisco has. Because you guys have mastered this in the data center and you guys have a lot of experience with now the cloud. What's your vision on how this is going to play out from a Cisco standpoint? >> As Margaret described, their multi-tenancy in the SAP environment is a pillar for them, they have to make that work for the customer and that's something we've been driving at Cisco for a long time. When it comes to the computer platform, which we call UCS, we've been really the leader in converge infrastructure platforms for a long time with UCS and most recently now we're the number one platform for SAT with UCS in the converge environment. It's those attributes that have enabled us to really get inserted there to provide the customer value. >> You get the packet level of the network transformations, >> Yeah, John. >> So picked very nicely. >> You're more of a geek than I know. You're pretty good. >> Well, we follow Looking at the 5G network transformation you're seeing a lot of end-to-end architectures really winning out. I think why I'm excited about this new is essentially it's a partnership that's providing an need-to-end solution. Gary you are in the front line, you're the manager of service. Talk about the impact that you see this deal, because now you have to turn up services and have that customer touch point. >> If you look at how we're pulling together the solution. Obviously if look on the compute side we're using the UCS and on the switches there's the Cisco networking switches and then you're looking at the-- >> Nexus, Gary, Nexus. >> Nexus, all right. >> I didn't get to that. >> I wanted to make sure Frank is paying attention. (panel laughs) Then you're looking at the net app storage and the VMWare for virtualization. Then another key element we're using is Winamix, which integrates with the UCS and is pretty much integrating all the APIs for all these components. Obviously the powerful in memory HANA engine. All these things are pulled together to create a platform which we are providing to the customers, so that they can really focus on what they are good at, their business and they're delivering a powerful rally to their customers. What it does is, with the UCS and the Winamix and some of the other elements, we can onboard customers within this. What used to take us 32, 33 days now we can do that within 9 to 11 days which is a big big plus when a customer approaches us. >> It's a huge shape in the business model first of all, the client delivery on your end and service is significant. There's a lot of automation involved. In fact I was talking to a venture capitalist recently here in Silicon Valley and we were talking about network transformation, digital transformation and they invest in infrastructure. He goes, "Oh no, not a lot of new companies are coming out "with an infrastructure making hardware just as the cloud." He says plumbers are turning into machinists kind of indicating that a lot of automation is happening at the lower end of the stack and the action is happening higher up in the stack to your point. Things are happening faster in terms of level of services. >> Absolutely and I think another thing which we also bring to the table is that the deep essence expartice if you look at some of the mission critical applications whether it is SVOHANA, suite on HANA the ECC or the entire BI suite enterprise portal and the list goes on right. And that becomes critical so we can get them up and running very quickly and give us all in one on to the country. >> A significant endorsement with you, make a comment? >> Am just saying when you're talking about the visibility of the SAP platform this is something the customers thought about right. Its going to get to all levels of the organization and really they're making critical business decisions off of the SAP HANA platform its got to be there. I mean and that's obviously our challenge to meet that for customers. >> Margaret, HANA Enterprise cloud is the engine and you guys are providing significant on it. How do you see this collaboration playing out for customers? What should they expect from the collaboration of Cisco and CenturyLink? >> Well what we want the customer to have is a seamless experience. We tell them upfront that we have this partnership and that we're going to work together but we really want to keep them focused on the value that they get from running their applications. Because, think about it this way, when you get in the car and you turn on the engine, you want to drive away right? You know the engine is there, you know that the engine, depending on how much horse power you've invested in, depending on what kind of make and model, you get different things from it. But you know it's going to always be there, it's always going to work. Then if you want to enhance the engine, shall we say you want to know that the right people have the skillset for those enhancements. When customers come into the HANA Enterprise Cloud, sometimes they start off with the migration. One of the things you're doing is you're kind of sunsetting all the old stuff and you're helping them move on to our HANA platforms whether is S4, whether it's Suite on HANA, whether it's our VI suite, you're helping the customer get started. But that's the start, because after that there's all this other wonderful stuff that we develop at SAP being that we're a software house, like IoT and our Leonardo that's being announced in Sapphire and we want customers to be ready to take advantage of that. We tell the customers, "You need to move away from all the "old stuff because it's not reliable any more, "we want to move you into a different level "of reliability so that you're ready "to scale up your organization. "And so that you can do more business." And in the end the customer says, "Okay, I need to know the cloud is there for me, "I don't want to have to be thinking about it everyday. "What I want to be thinking about is "how can I do new business, how can I open up offices "in other parts of the world, "how can I transact business globally?" They're not really thinking about, okay, I need more stuff. If they need to expand we call up our partners and we say, Okay the customer wants five more terabits or something, 10 more terabits of whatever, and they just want it to happen. They don't want to have really long projects, they just want it to be there for them, they want to know that they can scale out and scale up. >> One thing just to add, I think Richard mentioned, it just becomes critical that the redundancy is there. This is where the MetroDR capabilities which we bring to the table. That becomes very powerful and if you look at what we have done is, we have created 10 parts, in the US you have those in Santa Clara, Dallas, Chicago and the Dc Sterling area. Then Singapore and the London market. The MetroDr capabilities are available in all the three markets. Which is a very critical element that the customers know. >> This is, the recovery certainly is really a big deal because you can think about after effect, you've got to think about the upfront in the service. You cannot just say, "Oh I forgot that thing about DR." >> The thing is, you get into a lot more preventive maintenance because this is where there are dedicated teams which are doing nothing. Once the bill processes down you get them up and running and how do you ensure we are able to predict before anything? >> I think this news is significant, one the size of the players involved but two, it speaks to the transformation that's happening in the market place. Customers are moving to a new way to operate their business and at the end of the day you guys are making it easier to run some of the core software that can scale. But it comes down to, how do you migrate and scale without having any kind rip and replace or lift and shift. Lift and shift, I would have said is codeword for rip and replace, but customers are on an evolution journey, there is no silver bullet in the cloud in my opinion, some we've covered that with you. You're thoughts on this, do you guys see it the same way? Customers aren't just going to move tomorrow, they're going to want an evolutionary approach, but they're going to want to have a scale. >> It's a journey, oftentimes customers say to us, what's the safest thing to do first? What pieces of my environment can I take into the cloud and then gradually over time, whether it's a few months, whether it's six months increments. It depends on how the customer is running their business. Can I keep moving it in there so I can keep getting value and at some point his is all done, goes away and now I'm fully transformed into the cloud. We see some customers who can do really quick projects, they're very agile and they're very nimble and so we can migrate them in and get them going and running very quickly. We've got other customers who are more risk adverse. They want to proceed a little slowly. We can do all of the flavors, depending on what they want to do and so when we first talk to customers about the HANA enterprise cloud, we talk about the options. We talk about what they can do, we make recommendations from an SAP perspective as to what we think their speed could be and then we help them get into the cloud. Because they might get left behind if they don't make that move. >> The modernization trend is key, people want to be modern, the apps are being written differently, the more the relevance is more towards agile and speed. I think I like this announcement you've got the reliability that Cisco would move in packets around the data center rock solid, the software, core engine on Enterprise cloud and scale the manage service level that can give you the flexibility to run whatever you want. I think that's interesting, did I get that right? >> I think the other thing is, it's not like we've been working on this thing for a week, we've bene working together on this solution for years now that you've got to make it right. There's different stages along the way. >> What are some of those key stages that a customer should know about? >> We were just talking about HANA Enterprise Cloud, could you run HANA in the cloud now? No, that's faded completely, it's already done you certainly can't. Customers can make decisions now to say, "Hey am I going to start on prime, am I going to start "in the cloud?" And go though that whole kind of process of what's the best thing. We're providing that flexibility but this is something we've been working on for a while and I think, when you look at the other solutions out there of customers making the right evaluation, you want to go with a CenturyLink SAP and Cisco to say, "Hey, this is the right muscle, "the right process behind us." >> This is amazing, you guys are a great deal, again Frank, senior vice president Cisco and Gary who is the chief relationship officer and president of the Advanced Solution Group and Margaret. All the senior executives, the principals here congratulation on this news, we'll wait to see how it plays out. >> Margaret: Thank you for having us today. >> Special keep coverage of Sapphire 2017, I'm John Furrier. Back with more live coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

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