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

>> Be a relationship. It's not like you guys are johnny-come-lately on Amazon Web Services. Can you just quickly give some color on the relationship with AWS and what it means with respect to HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Absolutely, and I think that you are spot on here. I think the relationship between SAP and Amazon Web Services dates quite some years back, all the way to Amazon Web Services being a participant, especially with their teams, their architects, sitting side by side with SAP in Walldorf to conduct a lot of these validations, to conduct a lot of these certifications, that took place, so I think that level of collaboration is basically almost coming to (mumble). When you look at some of these offerings that come out there. I think also the way that you see (mumbles) otherwise that has been built specifically for those kind of HANA workloads. That clearly will happen only if these two companies are working extremely closely together but not just from a go-to-market perspective, but more importantly, from an engineering and from development perspective. >> Yeah. >> Sanjay: Having that voice within the HANA development organization ensures that we are actually representing the wants of the customer around consumption patterns that we know for a fact are going to take place on the (mumbles) as well. >> Congratulations on that Amazon relationship. It's always good to know it's not a-- Just to clarify, I want to see if you can just verify as a source, since I have you on the phone here, and you're senior vice president. Is it true, I've heard, I just want to confirm with you. I've heard that the Amazon relationship has always been there for four years, but a lot of the stuff that has come out of the announcement that you announced this week was already going on independently with customers and third parties. You guys are now formalizing that with official teams and joint development. Is that correct? >> Sanjay: So I think, like I mentioned, the engineering relationship between SAP and Amazon (mumbles) for quite some time now. I think we would not have made decisions. In fact, even before, the HANA Enterprise Cloud managed services (mumbles) universally offered, based on these certified workloads, based on these certified (mumbles), there was an option for customers to go and deploy some of their SAP systems, not just test and development but also product assistants directly in the Amazon Web Services Cloud. What the HAC, also in our managed (mumbles) offers, is it's now SAP putting some of these workloads directly in the AWS environment and helping the customers manage all of this from an end-to-end perspective. >> So that's the key, the difference, if I get this right, is before it wasn't fully end to end because you didn't have your piece there, but you were there anyway with the engineers, so is that, and am I getting that right? It seems like you've always been there with engineering, but now there's so much more formal relationships, and that should ease things up, is that correct? >> Sanjay: Yes, so I think the difference in the past, John, was it was pretty much up to the customer to manage the entire transition, whether it was around provisioning, whether it was around administration, whether it was around patching, whether it was around upgrades. All of that stuff was pretty much entirely done in the domain of the customer, and the customer was responsible for doing that themselves. With this offering, what SAP is doing is SAP is telling the customers, we are going to stand up these environments for you in AWS, and we are going to manage it end to end for you, and that includes the entire suite of managed services that goes around managing a HANA-based system, and obviously SAP as the native vendor of these products, have a very specific point of view on what constitutes or what makes a best-run HANA application. >> And just to close the loop on that, what you just said is what you call managed public cloud model. >> Sanjay: Correct. >> That's the offering. Okay, great, well thanks for clarifying that. I wanted to make sure I got that on the record. I think that's kind of what... I thought you said it the best. I'll just plagiarize what you just said and put that in my writeup on that. I'll source you on that, of course. >> Sanjay: Perfect. >> Final question. What's the vibe of the show? Every year I come out of Sapphire. This is our first year we haven't been there in seven years. Usually a theme pops up. You mentioned convergence. Is that the top level theme? And the second part of the question is, Hasso always a great motivating relevant speech, but he also kind of connects the dots, or puts the dots out there to be connected. He kind of teases next year in his vision. He always has his point of view, which a lot of people watch in the industry as kind of a bellwether for next year. >> Sanjay: Correct. >> So what's the theme this year, and what's the bellwether vibe that Hasso is telegraphing. >> Sanjay: I think there are at least a couple of things that stood out for me, and I think, by the way, it was one of the most brilliant or most inspiring keynotes that I heard personally from Hasso. I think the one thing that stood out for me is the amount of time or the amount of effort and the way that we actually build user interfaces. I think there is absolutely a radically different approach that I think we need to take. We need to be spending far far more time building out those user interfaces and making it a lot more intuitive and absolutely Sesame Street simple. I think that's where we need to focus on, number one. The other key item that he did touch upon was the topic of integration. I think the new reality is the one of multi-cloud solution, the hybrid reality. I think for all these things to come together in a sensible fashion, integration becomes more and more key. I think he even quoted something to the extent, saying almost 40% of our development folks are now working directly on some of these integration topics, which is, I think, a guesstimate due to the scale and the value that integration is going to play, especially when he talks about both SAP and non-SAP applications going forward. So I think these are kind of one or two items that stood out for me, and of course, the big announcement, specifically around SAP Leonardo and the tool set. Obviously the story around the Big Data and analytics. I think these were the key stand-outs, especially for me, as far as the keynote. >> Sanjay, thank you for spending the time this morning here on the West Coast but also early morning for you guys, or late morning for you guys in Orlando. Thanks for sharing the insight from on the ground in Orlando at SAP, Sapphire Now. Sanjay Kulkarni who is the global head of architecture and advisory for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. Congratulations on the Amazon announcement. That adds to your portfolio of Cloud, and congratulations on the CenturyLink-Cisco alliance as well, we covered that as well. Thanks so much for spending the time. This is TheCUBE coverage of Sapphire Now, day three, from Palo Alto and Orlando. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Stay with us. (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. >> Hi, welcome to theCube, I'm Lisa Martin, with my cohost George Gilbert, we are covering SAP Sapphire Now 2017. George, we've just watched the keynote, the very dynamic keynote with quite a few characters, I want to get your take on some of the things we heard in the keynote today, Bill McDermot kicked it off very lively, one of the first things that was interesting to me, and I'd love to get your opinion, that the journey to the club requires empathy and transparency. It's not often something that we hear from an CEO. What were your thoughts on his vision as to what SAP is doing around empathy and transparency. >> I guess I would take it in the soft skills that it might have been intended which was, empathy in that there's going to be changed management, not just because you're moving the operational capabilities from on-prem to the cloud, but because you're exposing new capabilities that will impact how people do their jobs. And transparency I think is part of the program of migration where you're going to break some things as you move them, and this is going to call out in the process of migration what few things you need to change. I think that's what he meant by transparency, because it's not a complete seamless lift and shift. >> Definitely. I think another thing that kind of jumped to mind is that, not only are these firsts changing, they talked about the digital core and the essential elements of that, but also the fact that they are listening to their customers, customers saying we want transparency, we want to see how things are going like you said, it's not a lift and shift, we need to get more understanding, but I think the undertone of we're listening to our customers was quite strong, when they talked about the new SAP Cloud Trust Center, that seemed to really bring it home in terms of what he was talking about, where not just customers of SAP, but that they're using Hana, can see what's happening within their cloud infrastructures, but also people who aren't using it yet, so really broadening transparency to foster new customers, and acquiring new customers going forward. >> Yes, I guess with the transparency, the footprint for enterprise applications is just growing and growing, and he talked about at one point, we're not just talking to the CIO, the CEO has to be involved, the head of sales, head of procurement, head of supply chain, and I think it is related to the idea of the digital core, and then the what they call the sort of win applications around them, which is the core where the traditional systems of record and the win, they're like the AI in machine learning and Internet of Things and Blockchain, these are strategic new capabilities that enable applications, not just about efficiency, but about opening up new business models, new product and service lines, things like that. >> And they talked about, you mentioned, they talked about openness as the game changer with the nucleus of a digital enterprise being that digital core. You talked about machine learning, AI, blockchain, give us a little bit of an insight as to this expansion of Leonardo, they talked a lot about Leonardo, what were some of the things that really stuck out in your mind as the new capabilities, and who's their audience here. >> Okay, great questions, because their audience is not the typical, their typical buyer was the CFO, because it cost so much, so he had to be involved. IT, the CIO, because he had to sort of standardize the infrastructure on which it ran. And then between the two of them, they were essentially putting in a platform for business process efficiency, and that's what they called the core, and then Leonardo is now the win that surrounds that And that has, they see that having transformational capabilities, and that impacts then not just the departments that were looking for efficiency, but looking for transformation, so that's why they have to get involved, the head of sales, the head of procurement, supply chain, things like that. It's a different sell, just to offer an example, the best description I ever heard for trying to sell enterprise software is like trying to get a bill through both houses of congress, and congress just got a lot bigger. >> So from a target audience perspective, we know that they work with small medium sized businesses, Enterprise, we had Google on stage, they're partnering with Apple, with Facebook, etc, looking at Leonardo, from a target audience perspective, are they talking to mostly the large enterprise north of 1500 employees? >> Those customers come first, because they always have the more sophisticated, greater number of more sophisticated skillsets in place, and as these systems mature from the early adopters, they work the kinks out they're able to generalize things better, and then it's more easily absorbed into the main stream. McDermot said something interesting, which was you're either an early adopter or an also ran. I think he's trying to motivate people to get started, but the adoption curve doesn't really change just because we're doing more advanced technologies. >> One of the things that interested me, is if you look at a small to medium business, and they mentioned a number of businesses, Mod Pizza for example, during the intro, and there's a great video about them on their website, but if you look at an SMB or SMBE about, as a competitor, they're much smaller, typically, much more agile, much more nimble, that was one of the things I was sort of expecting to hear in some sense in the keynote about the small enterprises really becoming the disruptors because they can react and move faster than a larger legacy incumbent. What were your thoughts there? >> In Tech we look at the smaller to mid sized companies as being more nimble, but that's changed in the last few years, where the big incumbents, the rich just get richer, partly because, partly because they have these data assets that they can keep turning into newer and newer products. That may change in the next few years, but right now, the more data you have the more your advantage. And the capital intensity is for the most part so low that they can use all their profits just to buy the little guys who look promising. That's in tech, outside tech, I think the answer to your question will be, how easy can SAP make it to absorb and install and implement and run their system. In the past it was so flexible that you really needed extremely sophisticated implementation advice to get it up and running. If they've taken that out and simplified it, and made it like just, you know, configure these buttons, then that would make a difference. I'm not sure we have seen the answer to that yet. >> Okay, playing on the incumbency theme if you will. Google, Diane Green was on stage, and, at Google Cloud Nexus just a couple of months ago here in San Francisco, they announced a partnership with SAP to deliver Hanna on Google Cloud platform, and today they talked about kind of the expansion of that, they had a customer, a consulting agency that was their proof in the pudding. And one of the things Bill McDermot did say was we are now partnering with Apple with Facebook with Google, so they're talking about some of these incumbents, looking at Google as an incumbent, but also as a competitor of Microsoft Azure, of AWS who SAP also works with, what was your take on the conversation that Diane Green had in announcing this expansion and hey here's a consultancy that's leveraging SAP Han into Google Cloud. >> Well Diane Green had to talk about both, because just running SAP on the Google Cloud platform, without sentient systems integrated to help, a customer who might want to buy it in, implement it, and then integrate it with their existing systems, they probably can't do that on their own, because SAP is still complex enterprise software, even if some of the operational capabilities are offloaded to a cloud vendor, so she needed both SAP and an implementation partner to say hey we're serious, but I guess I would add that when you're evaluating SAP there's more than just the core app, the core app is sort of the center of the universe for a customer who is looking to take their systems of record into the cloud, but there's an ecosystem on each cloud that surrounds that that makes it easy to build applications that leverage, that ecosystem's richest on Amazon, it's not far behind on Azure, and Google is still booting that up. >> So what advantage does this SAP partnership with Google give to Google, but also what advantage of any does it give to SAP? >> Okay, great question, so on the advantage to Google, it puts them as a peer, or more closer as a peer to Azure and Amazon, and then to SAP they can say we're cloud agnostic, I believe their infrastructure technology is both made up of Cloud Foundry which is cross cloud technology coming from Pivotal, and then Open Stack as a sort of infrastructure technology that's coming from a whole bunch of the legacy IT vendors who didn't want to be beholden to Amazon. >> What are the other things today, if we look at future trends, and that's kind of what I was expecting to hear, and we heard about a lot of them, big data block chain, we heard about IOT, industrial IOT, IOE, Deep Learning, they talked a lot about how Leonardo was going to facilitate machine learning, artificial intelligence, really help deliver automation, but one of the things that I was wondering if we were going to hear about was mobile. So a few months ago, I look at my notes here, they announced, I believe it was at Mobile World Congress, this partnership with Apple, so SAP opened their cloud platform to iOS developers with the goal of really establishing a bigger presence in mobile apps to power iPhones, etc, with Hana. Curious about did you expect to hear things about mobile today, or was that not part of the plan. >> If I had expected to hear more it would have been from a partner like IBM. Because with Apple they were essentially creating a toolkit for people to be able to build user interfaces on an iOS phone, and I think they've done Android as well, but in other words, the developer is left to their imaginations to fill in the functional capabilities of whatever app, they just have a frame work that makes building an Apple UI accessible. What IBM did with Apple was actually more significant, which was, hey we have all these industry solution groups, and we all these bright ideas functionality in the cloud, but we dont' have an accessible way to deliver it. SO what IBM teamed up to do with Apple, wasn't just give me, tell Apple give me an iOS UI development kit, it was let's collaborate on building some real apps that pilots need, that delivery folks or field servers folks need. So, I guess, I wasn't blown away by what they did with Apple. >> Okay, maybe that's a to be continued. One of the other themes that we heard today from Brad Luker, was software needs to become a strategy and that openness in that respect is an absolute game changer, allowing machine learning integration, social data integration for customer profiling, and really helping these user of SAP understand customer behaviors. He also said that every company today regardless of size needs to drive innovation by connecting all these business processes when software becomes strategy. What was your take on that from a thematic perspective, as well as a real world implication perspective for SAP customers from the small enterprises to the large. >> You know, I would have through that that would be the whole focus, you know the famous Mark Andersen SA from several years ago, Software's Eating the World. It's now really kind of data is eating software, it's data programs the machine learning algorithms that increasingly make up software. But he was a little bit, he talked at a high level about it, the only example I recall was Hybris, which is their commerce front end, where they're going to link marketing sales service, support, customer experience, and they're going to open this up through micro services, so that other developers can easily leverage these capabilities. That to me was end to end processes integrated on a SAP platform, but I would have liked to have seen a lot more examples of that. >> So you talked about Hybris, and on the Leonardo front, the expansion of that, they really talked about this expansion of Leonardo giving companies the ability to reinvent, that word has been used a lot by a lot of companies including Dell, years ago reinvent, reimagine, that could be used to mean a lot of things, but they talked about that as a facilitator of intelligently connecting lots of things, people, processes, systems, etc, what's your take on Leonardo as an accelerator of innovation as they positioned it to be. >> You know, that was sort of to re-emphasize they called the digital core, which is their legacy, not in a bad way, that's their asset that they can leverage to move in any direction. The traditional apps. And Leonardo was the win capability, how to leapfrog your competition. And they used this wonderful example of a win farm, where they could then look at a particular instance of a winmill and find where the stresses were and a capability I haven't seen yet, they were actually able to put a virtual sensor on that errant winmill and see where the stresses were coming from. But that capability isn't completely unique, there's GE and Predicts, and there's Parametric Technology with their Thingworks, and IBM has their Genius of Things, they're not alone in going after this notion of the digital twin and integrating it within the entire business process life cycle, their value add should be to make it easy to create that life cycle for the digital twin as designed as built as deployed as serviced as operated, to make that possible without tons of programing and to link it in with core business processes like field service, but again, it seemed a little bit more like a scenario than a finished app. >> Okay maybe you're saying for them to be differentiated it needs to be more of a me too, it needs to be much more simpler, maybe this is just the precipice they're on, and just didn't context it that way. >> It felt like a hey this is where we're moving to, as opposed to this is where we already are, and they have a lot of assets to bring to bear to get to that point, it just, they weren't really concrete in saying okay here's the functionality we have today, here's what we're going to add over the next 12 to 18 months, so it felt more like a this is where we're going. >> That's a good point that you bring that up from a road map perspective, and perhaps that will appear in some of the break ads which I would anticipate because they talked about that in the transparency and the empathy part of the keynote when Bill McDermot was first on stage about we're listening to our customers, we need to show you these roadmaps, so they did mention in text having impressed as well that it's for three particular products that they have these three year road maps, and obviously they'll be adding more over time. But if you look at SAP, 45 year old company, their roots in on-prem ERP, looking at their evolution and even kind of getting to the topic we were just on, the virtual reality and understanding sensors, is this a natural progression of an ERP company to transition to completely the cloud, help keep their customers there, establish this nucleus of the digital core, and then expand upon things to bring in machine learning, advanced analytics, predictive modeling. Is that a natural expansion? >> You know it's funny the way you asked that, because I think the answer is yes. But it happened in this wave where first it's completely custom, and you have the excentures, PWCs and the specialized sort of system integrators, the small ones that have boutique capabilities in big data and machine learning. They start building those sorts of apps first for big companies, or for internet center companies who really need to be at the bleeding edge, then comes the IBMs of the world where they have these semi-repeatable capabilities, custom development in the industry solutions groups and in their global business services, and so they're there composing a bunch of semi-finished piece parts, and then when it gets to SAP, it should be pretty much almost packaged and SAP goes in and configures it for the customers, in other words they flip a bunch of switches that make choices, so you go from completely custom to configured and almost fully packaged, and that's a natural progression over time, and every time we encounter newer technology that starts on the back, goes again to the fully custom solution, so I guess I do expect SAP to follow this pattern, their sweet spot, their business model is the repeatable stuff. >> When they talked about running core businesses in the cloud to get the benefits of scale, elasticity, availability, I think this was actually Byrne that was saying that they need to be using intelligent apps to automate as much as possible the hyper connectivity as they were talking about is really going to enable that, and he did predict that 80 percent of business processes will be running through SAP or 80 percent of them running will be fully autonomous in the near future. That's a bold number. >> Yeah, you know and that's the number behind the anxiety that everyone has about so what happens to my job, especially when we have conversational bots, we don't need host on our shows, I mean it's a bit of an exaggeration. There are a lot of people who worry that jobs will get completely automated, and then there are other people who say look, it's not every task I do that can be automated, it's some tasks, and there will be a machine that augments me, and changes the nature of my work, but doesn't replace me. One example is Gary Kasparov, who was beaten by IBMs Deep Blue chess playing program, I forget how long ago, maybe 12 or something like that. The best chess players in the world now, are not the computers, they're the ones who pair with a grandmaster with a computer playing against another grand master with a computer, because there's an intuition as to where to look that is not completely replacing human judgment. It's more like a compliment of judgment and then raw calculating horsepower. >> Interesting accompaniment. Well George, thanks for sharing your insights on the keynote, from SAP Sapphire Now. For George Gilbert, I'm Lisa Martin, stick around, we've got more coverage from SAP Sapphire now 2017. (upbeat electronic music)

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

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

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE special coverage of Sapphire Now we're here in Palo Alto. Sapphire now SAPs premier conference in Orlando. We are in Palo Alto, we have folks on the ground in Orlando. Special three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Taking you through all the action from our new studio in Palo Alto, 4,500 square feet. Our chance to cover events when we can't get there in person we certainly can cover it from here. And that's what we're going to be doing for the next three days; we're going to have stories on the ground, no story is too small. We're going to chase 'em all down. We have people calling in, we have folks on the ground that'll be Skyping in, calling in, whatever it takes to get the story out to you, we're going to do it and, certainly, expert coverage from inside the studio here. We got George Gilbert from Wikibon and a variety of folks who did not make it to Orlando will be coming into Palo Alto to sit down and talk with us. I'm John Furrier, my co-host is Jeff Frick. Jeff, we'll do whatever it takes. We'll cover from our studio, we'll go to Orlando virtually we got the Twitter hashtag, Sapphirenow, we're on that. We have folks on the ground, a lot of great news coming out of Sapphire. >> What do ya think? I mean, you were just as Dell EMC World last week and the story was all about, kind of, hybrid cloud and customer choice and it sounds like that's a recurring theme here at SAP, where they've got a lot of cloud options based on what their customer wants to do. >> I mean, if you, I mean this sounds really bad to say for someone who follows the tech industry but I just think this digital transformation thing is just over-played. But it's the, it's the Groundhog's Day moment. The movie just keeps replaying itself. Digital transformation, digital transformation, and, again, just like every other commerce, like Dell EMC World and every other one, digitally transforming your business is the theme. Little bit played, I would say business transformation is, I would say, the next chapter of what's happening and what you see from these shows. Specifically, at Dell EMC World, US ServiceNow, OpenStack, all the different events, Red Hat's been the one we been going to this past couple weeks is the business impact of the technology and SAP highlights that with their results and their keynotes in the news letter drops today, which is, look it, they have been doing SAP for all the top companies powering with SAP. As in Oracle. But now the customers want to go beyond the legacy SAP. And this has been a challenge for SAP over the past five years. They've had all the right messaging, digital dashboards, real time for business, all there. But the problem was they were missing a big piece of it. That is a cloud native and really aligning with the explosive growth of cloud computing, cloud native. Which is the new application developer. This new class of developer is emerging and that's different than the in-house SAP guys, by the way, which is still a massive market. >> Sure. >> That's the big trend. And of course, machine learning, AI, the kinds of design tooling that you'd expect to see, they're calling that Leonardo. >> I think it really shows the power of the consumer and the impact that the big public clouds have had on the marketplace, right? With Google, and with Amazon, especially Microsoft, as well, coming into play. And I think it's, what's interesting on the SAP tact is they have their own cloud. But now they've, you know, are very aggressively following up on an earlier announcement at Google Cloud Platform Show. With more announcements at this show and then they continue to strengthen their relationship with Amazon. So, it's a pretty interesting place, if you're an SAP customer, really having options around where, what cloud and what cloud deployment is really no longer an argument. You've got a lot of options at SAP, very different than Oracle, which is still pretty much exclusively Oracle on the Oracle cloud. Very different kind of a tact. >> Yeah and just reading the hard news from from hitting the ground today down in Orlando is the key points, I'll just summarize it real quick. Expanded SAP Leonardo, Digital Innovation System, SAP Google Expand the Strategic Partnership, SAP Cloud Platform accelerates adoption and proves choice advances consumption for customers. That, essentially, is it. And there's a lot of other subtext going on on Enterprise Cloud, a lot of other massive pockets. But in terms of top-level news, it's Leonardo, okay? Leonardo Da Vinci, dead, creative genius. Okay? But that is all about providing the tools for business to be successful in a digital world. But to me, the big story, Jeff, is the transformation of what used to be called HANA Cloud Platform to SAP Cloud Platform. This is their platform as a service bet around winning the new developers, the cloud native. Last year at Sapphire, we actually had theCUBE on the ground they announced a deal with Apple computer around iOS and developers. That, now, has chip as a general availability so you're seeing SAP bringing two worlds together. The Cloud Native World, which they never played in much to the SAP Eco System, which is flush with cash. There's a ton of money to be made in that world. The install base is massive, now you have Cloud-Computing Hybrid Cloud with the HANA Cloud Platform, I mean the SAP Cloud Platform to bring that in. Again, I still can't even get it right. >> And so, let's just break it down as simply as you can, John. Why do they change the name? And what exactly do they have today? >> Well, here's the first of all problem. I'm so used to saying HANA because they have been branding HANA on >> They been bangin' HANA for the decade, or forever. >> It's just like, in my brain. I just can't get it out. SAP HANA, so anytime, and they actually called it HANA Cloud Platform before. >> Right, right. >> But HANA is such a massive set of capabilities that they really wanted to break out the platform as a service, which is the Cloud Native play, where all the action is for developers. From HANA, a viable product that they have that everyone's using. So, they have two clouds that we can say. SAP Cloud Platform, that's in Cloud Native, and then, HANA Enterprise Cloud. One's a delivery mechanism and one's a developer environment; it's the way I like to think about it. I'm a HANA customer, I'm going to need Enterprise Cloud to take my HANA solution and extend it up with self-service or provisioning, some partnership with AWS Google and the different clouds, getting my legacy HANA Enterprise software to be cloud enabled. That's HANA Enterprise Cloud. SAP Cloud Platforms for folks who don't, who like DevOps, the Cloud Native world that we cover deeply. >> Okay, and then, how do you look at the kind of Google partnership, Google Cloud Platform versus AWS partnership. SAP's goin' dual-track, is it just simply to have choice based on what their customers, are they fundamentally different relationships? How do you read that? >> This is where I think SAP's got genius going on. But if they might screw it up because they can't get out of their own way. >> Jeff: Can't use genius anymore, we've had enough geniuses. >> So, so, this could be a brilliant strike of move for SAP. I think it's a brilliant move in the way they're playing it out. But, again, like I said, SAP, they might not be able to get out of their own way. That's going to be their issue. But from a functionality standpoint, this multi-cloud opportunity; they've been with Amazon for many many years. They announced a partnership with Google which is just kind of toe in the water. That's tryin' to advance pretty quickly. Not a lot of meat on the bone there. And Azure relationships. So, SAP wants to put their cloud platform, that platform as a service, in all the different major clouds so that their legacy can work on pram and in whichever cloud the customer chooses. >> Yeah, I think there is, >> I think, that is a multi-cloud strategy that is viable for SAP. Unlike, say, Oracle, which isn't multi-cloud, it's Oracle Cloud. >> Right, right, right. >> So, you know the SAP Oracle, you know, head-to-head thing has been kind of, like, taking completely different paths. Someone will be right. >> Right. But I think there's more meat on the bone with the Google thing than, maybe, maybe we know of, or are aware of, or whatever. I mean, Burnt did come and get in the keynote with Diane Greene at Google Cloud Platform. And, you know, I think it's relatively significant. What'll be interesting to see how it shapes out and, again, what are the customer choices that are going to drive them to Amazon or to SB Cloud or to the Google cloud. I guess at the end of the day it's about choice and I know that was a big theme at Dell EMC World. Is that everyone has to cater to the choice of the customer or else it's just too easy for them to flip a lot of these other clouds. >> I mean, when I say, "not ready for primetime," I mean, Google's got a lot of work to do. SAP as a company is not as far down the road with Google as they are with Amazon and Azure, just to make my point clear. >> Okay. >> But the do have our announcing additional certifications of the coinnovation between SAP and Google. Between SAP Cloud Platform and Google Cloud Platform. IOT, machine learning, they certified SAP NetWeaver in a variety of S4 HANA, business warehousing; essentially more market place to accelerate the digital transformation. And, again, this is all about SAP co-locating in Google. >> Right, right. >> If a customer wants to take advantage of TensorFlow and all the goodness of, say, Google. That's a good move for SAP and, again, I think this is a brilliant strategy for SAP if they don't screw it up. >> Right, right. And potentially, that's the bridge to, like you said, it's been a little bit of Groundhog Day with cloud, cloud, cloud. But what's really the theme of 2017 is AI machine learning and it's an interesting bridge with Google Cloud, to their TensorFlow as another way to bring AI machine learning into the application learning into the application. >> So, Jeff, we've been covering a lot of events. One comment, I will say, is that SAP always has great messaging. >> I got to say, because we've been covering out eighth year covering Sapphire Now. We've only missed, like, two years over that time span. It's a lot like Oracle on the sense that it's a very business oriented event, but they have good pulse. Bill McDermott, great communicator, great customer-focused person. Always has his hand on the pulse. They have great messaging. And they tend to pick the right waves. And they've had some false starts with cloud, they've bought, had some acquisitions, things been cobbled together, but they've never wavered from their mission. And the mission has always been powering the speed of business, great software solutions. The issue is, they're moving off of SAP to new cloud solutions, so SAP is taking a proactive strike to say, look here, we can play in the cloud, therefore this multi-cloud game is critical for the growth of SAP, in my opinion. >> How much of the SAP in cloud will be new greenfield opportunities, or people want the flexibility, and a lot of the attributes of cloud versus, they're not migrating old R3 instances into the cloud. I mean, this is, I would assume, mainly new greenfield opportunities. >> Well, I think it's both. I mean, I think you have greenfield developers basically that are being hired by their customers to build apps, top line driven apps, and also, you know, some consolidation apps. But mainly, you know, their customers are hiring developers. Hey, we need a mobile app for our business, so you need to have data, you need to have some domain expertise. But at the end of the day, the system of records probably stored in some SAP system somewhere. So what they're trying to do is decouple the dependency between that developer, but still use SAP, but and offer an extension of SAP. It really is an opportunity, in my mind, for that to happen, and also partners. Look at Accenture, Capgemini, all these different partners. They are poised to create some great value and make some cash along the way. Remember the minicomputer boom. People who lined their pockets with cash were the integrators. The large global system integrators. So I think that, and the channel partners are going to have a great opportunity to take advantage of preexisting legacy accounts and to grow them further. >> Well, they certainly have a giant ecosystem. There's no doubt about it. It's one of the startup challenges that, new company starters to build that ecosystem. I mean, they have a giant ecosystem. So, what are you looking for this week besides the obvious announcement? And kind of tells that you want to see to let you know that SAP continues to be on track and move with the shifting tides of the market trends? >> Well do me, I'm looking at the multi-cloud story. It's a good story. Not sure how baked it is, but from a story standpoint, I really like it. I think that whoever can really crack the code on multi-cloud in a viable way is going to be a winner. So to me, I'm going to be looking heavily at the multi-cloud stuff coming out of Orlando. I'm interested to see how the developer traction pans out. I'm really interested in following up on the Apple relationship and see how that pans out. And then ultimately, how the rest of SAP can transform as a business. Because SAP tends to have a lot of buzzwords, a lot of word salad, not a lot of, you know, breaking it down and orchestrating. So to me, SAP, where I'm critical of them is, they kind of can't get out of their own way, Jeff. So, sometimes they kind of get caught in that old world thinking when the world is moving very very fast. Look at Amazon Web Services, you look at what Google's doing, you look at where Vmware is changing. Vmware started Pat Gelsinger. He was in the dumps in 2016, now he's flying high. He went from almost being fired, stock had a 52 week low, to them soaring. They have a market cap that's greater than HPE. So these old incumbent like SAP, they have to transform their culture, get relevant, and get real. And if they can't show the proof points with customer wins and partners, and multi-cloud, then they're going to be on shaky ground. So that's what I'm looking for. >> Jeff: All right, so should be a good week. I'm looking forward to it. >> Okay, we are here in the Palo Alto studio, our new 4,500 square foot operation. We can do coverage here, and then have on the ground coverage of which we will be doing all week Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday for our SAP Sapphire Now. We've got great guests coming in, great editorial coverage. I want to thank our sponsors, SAP, for, you know, allowing us to do this and continuing theCUBE tradition at Sapphire Now. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick. More coming after this short break.

>> 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.

>> 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)

>> Voiceover: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's The Cube, covering Sapphire Now, headlining sponsored by SAP HANA Cloud, the leader in platform as a service, with support from Consolink, the cloud internet company. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burse. >> Welcome back everyone, we are here live in Orlando, Florida for Sapphire Now, SiliconeANGLE Media's exclusive coverage of Sapphire. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burse. This is our flagship program, we go out to the events, and extract the citizen noise, you're watching The Cube. I want to do a shout-out to our sponsors. Without their help, we would not be here. SAP HANA Cloud Platform, Consolink at CONSOL Cloud, hot start up in Silicone Valley, and also we have Cap Gemini, we have EMC. Thanks so much for your support. Our next guest is Gaby Corin, who's the EVP of the Americas for Panaya, accompanied about a year ago by Infosys, now a part of Infosys. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you so much. >> Congratulations on the acquisition over a yeah ago, but you guys are to a part of the big machinery of Infosys, which is tier one systems integrated part of SAP's global channel, as they call it, but essentially, you're out serving customers all over the world. >> Gaby: That is correct, yes. >> At Infosys, what's your role in the Infosys organization, and what does your company do? >> Okay, so, I'll start with the company. Panaya was founded ten years ago. Our quest is to help customers to perform all their changes in their ERP environment. We basically analyze the environment, create that mapping, that baseline that helps them understand exactly what they're dealing with, then we support them in scoping out the changes, and then, we work with them throughout the journey of executing on all the testing cycles associated with all the changes. We serve about two thousand customers, and we are a hundred percent cloud-based solution. My role as EVP for the Americas is to support all customers in the region, and we're working very closely with Infosys into bringing Panaya as part of their offering to accelerate the processes, to bring innovation, and to bring much more efficiency to all the SAP projects and activities that they perform with our customers. >> We had the global partner person on earlier, and that was the big point, innovation's now at the center, not just delivery, which Infosys has been great at, but also other things, innovation, time is very important. >> Exactly. >> Your solution speeds things up, so share with us what it is, is it a SAS space? Is it code analyzers? Is it for QA? Is it for testing? What specifically do you guys solve? What problem do you solve? >> Great question. First of all, we are a SAS-based solution, so we do everything in the cloud. This helps, as you said, perform all the tasks faster and more efficiently. The pain that we're coming to address is the fact that change is constant in the ERP. The ERP is never an island, never an isolated solution. It's always in changes, the core of a lot of the businesses that we meet here, so change is their reality, they need to change all the time. They are highly customized, so every change that come from the vendor or from the business requires a lot of preparation and very fast execution, and this is where Panaya plays. We simulate the change virtually in the cloud, and we tell customers in advance what is going to happen to their environment all the way to the code line level what exactly is going to break, how to fix it, what to test, and we support them, again, throughout all the testing cycles from the unit test or the technical test all the way to user-acceptance test, UATs, that is a big pain to organization because of the collaboration. >> It's faster is the point. So, you guys speed up the process. >> Absolutely, we speed up the process, we reduce costs, we bring customers faster to market by about fifty percent, and we allow them to do their projects at the budget that they establish or lower. >> Give me an example of someone who has the problem, and what their environment looks like. Because everyone's trying to get to the cloud, and your solution is tailor-made perfectly for the cloud because it's very dev-ops-like. It makes things go faster, it's part of that whole agile iteration speed game, which we love, but the people trying to get there that are figuring it out, what's their environment, people who have the problem? What's their environment look like? Paint the picture. >> Virtually any SAP customer needs Panaya. >> John: That's a good plug. It's complicated. >> Yes. Their environment can have one instance, or multiple instances of SAP ECCs. They all have the need for testing because they perform testing all the way. They are trying to bring some of the applications to the cloud, but not necessarily. Most of our customers still are heavily on-premise based, so what we do is that we do all the analysis in the cloud, and this is how we help them do things much faster. >> So I got to ask you the Infosys question, because I'm a big fan of Vishal Sikka. For many years, I've watched his work at SAP, certainly. He was very, very early on and very right on a lot of technical decisions around how things played out. I watched him during the SOA days, going back to the web services days, which is the late 90's, early 2000s, he had the right call and vision on web services, and then service-oriented architectures. >> Yes. >> He brought a lot of great mojo to SAP and has always been very open-source driven. >> Right. >> John: And he's just a cool guy, so what's it like working there? I mean, is he always on top of the employees? Do you talk to him? What's it like inside the company at Infosys, and specifically Vishal, what's he up to? >> First of all, he's such a visionary. You listen to him and his vision. His vision is people and software. And he wants to make a difference when it comes to supporting customers, being an SI, being at a company that creates and makes a difference. He's also very personal, so he's very approachable. He loves ideas as innovation, and he believes that the innovations come from within, so he's a huge supporter of Panaya and bringing Panaya to every single Infosys customer and opportunity, but he has that vision that you don't replace a thing, you don't replace stuff. You take something, and you bring, but you learn to collaborate, and you understand that the environments needs to be flexible, and the only way to bring that flexibility is to take the existing environment and continue to bring innovation, even if it's in small steps, you bring that innovation to the table. And this is what makes it so unique to work for a guy like him. >> The traditional systems integrator relationship, there's always been tension, a lot of tension between customers and systems integrators. >> Gaby: Yes. >> Customers say they want something. Systems integrators have the expertise to do it. Customers want it fast, systems integrators sometimes use their experience to inflate billings, but the customer increasingly is in charge in almost all global markets. The question is are you helping your customers stay more in control of Infosys engagements? And if the answer is yes, how does that improve the value proposition of Infosys? >> Okay, that's a great question. One of the reasons that Panaya remains an independent and contained organization within Infosys is, besides commitment to support that, we sell direct a lot to our customers, and we support, we remain objective, whoever the customer chooses to work with, whether it's to do it in house or to use system integrators. And we have more and more projects that there are three, four, or five system integrators that are involved, and each one does a piece of the solution, and Panaya gives that control because of their analysis, because of the support on the planning stage. We paint the right picture of where you are today, where do you want to go, and in the journey of doing that. This is one of the claims of victory of Panaya is that we bring that control back to the hands of the customers exactly as they want to, because they want to understand what are they dealing with, what are the pricing, and SIs on the other hand, also understand that prices cannot continue to be cut forever and ever. But if you don't bring that innovation, that people plus software, it will be impossible to continue to compete in this market. >> They get more net contract value on the sales as they deliver value. >> Gaby: Exactly, to the customers. >> So if they're helping their customers drive more cash and revenue-- >> Well, I would presume that it actually starts with the contracting process for a lot of these efforts is itself very, very expensive and often leads to not a lot of value, and so I presume that in response to what you just mentioned, John, that you're generating artifacts to make it easy for the customer, the SAP customer, to envision where they need to go, and those artifacts then help the SAP customer manage the integrator and the company doing it, which then dramatically reduces the contracting process. >> Gaby: Exactly. >> Because it's a lot clearer, which means I can focus more on the management of the partner-- >> You release resources, correct. >> As a set of capabilities because because it always changes along the way. >> That is correct. >> As I change, I can envision that using some of the technologies you're bringing to bear. >> That is correct, we create these assets that can be reused time and again, and then we free up resources so they can focus on innovation and additional activities. That is exactly our value proposition, you got it absolutely right. >> So, are you a consultant management system in the SAP world? >> We don't claim to be, no, we bring solutions. We're not in the consulting business at all. >> Peter: No, managing the consulting business. >> Oh, absolutely, we help to manage that process. >> Helping the customer manage those consultants. >> That is correct, that is correct. Yes, you're absolutely right. >> My final question for you, thanks for coming on The Cube, by the way, I know it's short notice. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> Great to have the insight. What's the biggest change in the ecosystem are you seeing today? Because you're close to the code, so you're close to all the action at Panaya and certainly Infosys is massive and global. What is the biggest change that's happening in the ecosystem, with SI's and generally across the board? >> That's a great question. One thing that we're seeing is much more competition. The customer is much more educated, exactly as you, Peter, said. The customers are much more educated, they know what they want, and they're coming in with much more control and knowledge, so we're seeing this. Customers are looking for much more long-term activities. This is why HANA is becoming such a strong, we're seeing this also here in this show how everybody's talking HANA, because it's not something that you do for the next year. It's something that is going to be with these customers for a long term. They are looking for long-term type of engagements. >> They don't have to buy a lot of HANA. They can actually put their toe in the water, if you will. The old days it was you buy SAP, and you hired the SI's, project management, delivery over a long period of time. They don't have to do that today. They can still have a long view with HANA, right? I mean, are you seeing that, too? >> Yes, and what we're seeing is, a move on this regard, we're seeing a move from best of suite into best of breed. We want on each area the best solution possible. >> Without ballooning integration and training costs. >> Correct, correct, and we fit perfectly into that story. >> Well, thanks so much. Real quick question for you. You guys have a big end-user event like Sapphire. >> Gaby: Yes. >> Didn't you just have one in San Francisco recently? Or do you have one coming up? What's going on with the events for Infosys? >> We participated in Confluence, which is a very large event of Infosys, just a couple of weeks ago. Very, very well-attended, and we-- >> John: Is that a global conference in San Francisco or is it in other areas? >> It's a global event in which the largest, the biggest customers of Infosys attend, once a year, they get together. It's all about thought leadership and sharing ideas, design thinking, which Vishal is leading very strongly. That was the main theme of the event, so we had the chance to meet a lot of our customers and prospects. Now, of course, Sapphire. >> Thank you so much for coming on, Gaby. Great to have you on The Cube, and welcome to the Cube alumni now that you're on The Cube. We are live here in Orlando for SAP Sapphire Now. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burse with the Cube. You're watching SiliconANGLE' The Cube. (futuristic music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCube, covering Sapphire Now. Headline sponsored by SAP HANA Cloud, the leader in platform-as-a-service, with support from Consul, Inc, the Cloud internet company. Now here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. >> Everyone, we are live in Orlando, Florida for a special presentation of theCube at SAP Sapphire Now's theCube SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from noise. I'm John Furrier, with my co-host Peter Burris Want to give a shout out to our sponsors. Without them, we would not be here. SAP HANA Cloud Platform Console Inc, Capgemini and EMC, thanks for your support, really excited to be here. Wall-to-wall coverage, three days. Over forty videos going to be hitting YouTube: SiliconANGLE.com/youtube. Our next guest is Dan Lahl, VP of SAP HANA Cloud Platform Product Marketing, welcome to theCube, thanks for having us. >> Thank you, John. You got all that out without a stumble. That was fantastic. >> I memorize it. >> That's great. >> Without our sponsors, we wouldn't be here, thank you very much. Thanks to you, and it's a been great support from you and your team. Really appreciate it, welcome to theCube. >> Love being here. You guys have something very unique in how you bring a play-by-play but from an analyst's perspective, very, very unique. >> Someone called me Pat Summerall, and Peter, John Madden yesterday, which was a great compliment because our lives are ESPN of tech. >> And I like it because it means I'm the better looking one. >> Exactly. >> NFL Gameday, but the game is on. >> Peter: Who's a guy? >> John: Boom! (laughs) >> Boom the Cloud is here! >> It's the whiteboard. But all seriously, great conversation. One of the things that's emerging out of the whole HANA Cloud Platform Ecosystem play is that it's really buzzing, and it's not like sizzle, but it's steak on the grill as well. So, just a lot of meat on the bone and the thing that we're seeing is that SAP has been putting themselves out there with tech. And not trying to do the land grab, not saying, hey, we're SAP and this is all a marketing program to get more SAP share for our other stuff. There's clear separation between SAP stuff, whether it's, whatever the customers are buying, and then an open way for developers; both SAP developers and, now, mainstream developers, iOS and Apple so, huge shift. And the Ecosystem's super excited, so I got to ask you, how do you guys separate out the market? Explain to the folks out there how this all fits in because the HANA Cloud platform is more open, it's really non-SAP, in a way. And there's other clouds out there, and let's face it, you guys weren't getting the buzz. A little bit late to the party, and you've got the product in good position right now. But you got Amazon out there, as your Microsoft was here, you know, doing relationship with you, your partnering with Apple, IBM was on, Cisco, all the big guys are here working with you. Separate out what it means. >> So let me back up, let me back up and give you all the HANA buzzwords, we've been very confusing to the market on how we brand it to different HANA products. There's the HANA database, data managing platform, we came out with that in 2011; very similar to Oracle from SQL Interface standpoint, very different from a technology standpoint. All in memory, and everybody knows that by now. Then, we have another initiative called S/4HANA. That's taking all of the applications, putting them onto the HANA data management platform. So that's the app stack. So business suite is now S/4HANA. So data management was HANA, S/4HANA, app stack. Then we have something called the HANA Enterprise Cloud, and that's just basically a managed service. You want to take your landscape, give it to our data center, let us manage for you. >> For SAP stuff? >> SAP stuff. Yeah, not any of the red stuff or anybody else's apps but >> But some of the partner extensions? >> But some of the partner extensions, yes. And that has to be certified, but basically it's a managed service. So you want to give your data center over to SAP? Guarantee that it will run, we'll upgrade all of the apps and enhancement packs and that kind of thing. So that's HANA Enterprise Cloud. And then finally, HANA Cloud Platform is something different altogether. It really is our offer, open platform as a service. So, any of the applications that SAP is shipping today, whether that be business suite, S/4HANA, Success Factors, Ariba, Concur, Cloud for Customer, you name it, can be extended or integrated using HANA Cloud Platform. Okay, so HANA data management, HEC, the managed service, S/4HANA, the new app stack, HCP, really the extension platform for that SAP Ecosystem. Okay? Now I say that, it's an open platform. It's Java-based, can you believe it? It's not ABAP-based, it's Java-based. Node.js, all open systems. We announced at the show that we're shipping Cloud Foundry with Node.js runtimes scripting languages like Ruby and Python and PHP and Go. Databases like Mongo and Postgres and Redis, it's open systems, baby, right? >> All the tools that they are offering. >> Exactly, they can do that. Yeah. So, any programmer under 30, we can now approach and have a conversation with. They don't have to learn a German programming language, right? Now, whether it's good or bad, it doesn't make any difference, it's open systems, right? And so that's kind of the framework of what we announced. >> What's that mean to developers? Let's take that forward, okay, open cloud platform, okay, great, under 30, or, just open source is so good now all the Q&A, all the questions are on Stack Overflow and all these Node.js and technology out to be used, so that's what people want. Okay, what's the impact to me? I'm the developer. What does it mean? What's in it for me? Do I have access to all the SAP stuff? I'm used to dealing with all these different tools to put systems together. >> That's the beauty, John, is all of those tools that you use, as an open systems developer, you can now, through HANA Cloud Platform, get to the back end systems that we didn't expose before, expect through an ABAP stack. Right, you don't have to learn BAPIs, you don't have to learn ABAP. You can use your Java capabilities, using Eclipse if you want, if you want to do it on your desktop device, or use a web IDE that's Java-based, right? >> But you're exposing these through API? >> Exactly, exactly, through either APIs or through integration services, through a direct connect back to the back ends. And we not only expose data, but also processes as well, so you can take advantage of a process. One of the things we announced this week was the API Business Hub. So now, we're going to deliver a catalog of APIs, where we'll publish into and an open system developer can say Oh, what's with that management accounting services? That hooks back into S/4HANA, I just need to call the API and take advantage of those management accounting services. Very cool. >> So on the Apple relationship, which is an iOS-based thing, the developer can then go to the Enterprise customer, so this is the Ecosystem now, okay I'm a developer. I have a whitespace, I see some unique thing, a problem that my customer has, that I can solve, or I'm an entrepreneur and say Hey, you know, I have a unique idea, I want to solve that problem. I code it but I might rely on SAP data, say an ERP, I could tap that-- >> You can now tap it. >> John: And integrate it in seamlessly? >> Yes, and show it natively on an iOS device. That's what we're delivering through the ACP software development kit SDK. So you're an Apple developer today. Well, you could develop the next SnapChat or some consumer-to-consumer app. But interesting, the bulk of Apple devices or the bulk of devices in the Enterprise, are Apple devices. They're not Android devices. Apple's done some work on that, upwards of 75% are actually Apple devices. So now, you're a developer, you want to get access to all of those different applications that SAP has, delivered in beautiful 1990s master detail today. >> Let's face it, I mean, we had this comment on theCube which we concur with, the user experience of Enterprise software is dated, and old, and people are bringing their phones to work. >> That's really kind of you to say dated and old, okay? I would have said old and crappy, okay? >> No one wakes up and says, hey I can't wait to download my Enterprise app and use it on the weekend. It's like root canal, don't love it, but you need it. >> Part number 000743xp, okay so now they can get into all of those processes without having to know the back end process. Through the SDK, we're going to expose all of those. >> Share some data on some of the onboard. I know you had a lot of early adopters and now the program's ramping up. We've talked over the past year and you guys are tweaking the product. You want to make sure the product was solid, that was key. Might have been delayed a little bit, but the timing of the Apple announcement, perfect. But I can imagine that the developers are excited because certainly in the Ecosystem out there, in Silicon Valley and beyond, there's a softening, it's kind of a bubble bursting, if you will, on the consumer stuff, so there might not be a couple more unicorns. The few unicorns that come along at every cycle of innovation. But the Enterprise is hot, so the buzz on the street is the Enterprise is hot, that's where you make money. As everyone works for a revenue model, you got to break even, so, there's a big focus on that in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. So, is there an uptake that you can share or any stats on the kinds of new onboarding that you guys are doing. >> Yeah, so just this week, we also announced that IBM is taking all of their MobileFirsts for iOS applications. They're going to participate in the SDK and they're going to move all of their applications onto the HANA cloud platform. They had a beautiful UI that they built for a hundred little mobile apps that were enterprise ready, but not enterprise connected. So now they're going to connect all those hundred little apps like Find&Fix, and Parts Manager and that kind of thing. >> I can see the slogan now. Enterprise: Ready to Connect. >> Exactly. >> Connecting. >> It's pretty decent validation of some of the things we're talking about here. >> Exactly, and the HCP play in it, for SAP is that's the gearbox to get them back to all of the SAP apps. Whether they be On Premise business suite, On Premise S/4HANA, Workforce Management, with Success Factors and Fieldglass. It's the gearbox to get them back to all of those. >> So let me ask the question, you're in a private market so you've got your eye on the prize in the market, you're forward-facing, but also you've got to work with the product teams and deal with that. Do you see a window of opportunity right now? Because the timing of having the product ready with HANA Cloud Platform plus the Apple relationship and the IBM stuff, which is more validation, a window of opportunity, the wind is at your back. This window, you've got a short window to kind of go out and win. Are you worried about that? Are you guys investing heavily now, do you see now a time to throttle it up and pedal to medal, straight and narrow, 90 miles an hour? >> You know, I actually see it as the wave is forming. Okay, I don't think our customer base knows that much about HANA Cloud Platform, it really has its coming out party at TechWave, last October. It's now exposed to the business group. We had the techie outage, now its the business outing. I see the wave starting to form, okay? And we've got to catch the wave and we got to ride the crap out of it. And there's a lot of stuff on the product side we have to deliver. There's a lot more that we have to do for integrating into our existing systems. We have to provide more direct, not direct connections, we've already got that piece, but more integration with the processes. We're not all the way there yet. So we have to push our product, our product management and engineering teams to do that. And that's not always easy at a big company like SAP that has all these different divisions building processes. And then the other hard part is, you got to make sure our sales reps are introducing us into every single customer account as a gearbox, as the agility platform. So that's starting to happen. So I wouldn't even say we're on the wave yet. We're starting to catch the wave. >> So let me build on that. I have two questions. I don't want to say they're quick. But here's the first one, here's what our CIO clients are telling us. One of the advantages of everything you said, platform, a lot of entry points, means that their business can pick their own road map for how they go to S/4HANA, as opposed to having single one-way, and that's the only way in, that'll extend the adoption cycle. Do you see that being a positive thing ultimately for not only SAP, in getting this message, and getting this product out, but also all the partners and the Ecosystem to drive this whole thing forward? >> Let me answer the customer part of that first. The way we have set up S/4 and HCP, is S/4 is the core that you really don't want to touch that much, you don't want to customize that much, you don't want to extend, you do that in HCP. Why would you want to do that? Well, as we deliver new enhancement packs, and we're delivering every couple of quarters, on the S/4 platform. Every time you do a customization inside the app, when you have to upgrade, you have to do regression tests, you got to check to customizations against the new rev. It becomes, in technical terms, a hairball. It becomes a huge hairball. Take that off the plate, just do it on HANA Cloud Platform. And so that's the customer angle to it, the partner angle to it is very simple, and it's a win-win for partners and for us. They can, and for customers as well, they can build a little app on the platform, snap it into S/4, Success Factor, and make it look like an app that's part of our SAS application, okay? The customer doesn't have to provision anything. The customer takes a tile and puts it on their Success Factor application. We win, because they're consuming it on HCP, so we're monetizing that too. So the partner has an easy path, the customer gets something easy, we help monetize on that. >> It's a great story and a lot of folks are looking forward, so for example, some of our clients are telling us, We are looking at the S/4platform, the S/4HANA platform, we came to it through analytics. So here's an interesting question Dan, you've got a lot of background in database. So the old way of thinking about building a database application is you didn't want to write an application required more than 80, 90, 100 disk I/Os. >> Yeah. Now we're talking about in-memory databases, calmative organization, provide any number of different straight-forward, common interfaces from a few standpoints back to the application. We're talkin' about what used to be or the equivalent of tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of I/Os. What does that mean to the types of applications that we're going to be able to build in the Ecosystem over the course of the next few years. >> So you're right in that all data's immediately available in-memory ready to go. But here's the cool thing that I think you were getting at. You can build a structure one time, you build a table structure one time. On top of that, you just build views, logical views. And then your queries or your application looks at the logical view. Now logical views aren't somethin' new. It was just horrible to do it on a disk-based databse. >> Yep, very digital. >> You have to do tons of optimizations. In a memory database, it doesn't matter. It's all there. You just look at the logical view. So we're going to see people stacking up more and more and more logical views. Specifically in the analytics case, we see that all the time. From a partner standpoint, they're going to build their table structure, and then mix and match different application types using logical views. And you know, in HANA, we provide calc views and attribute views. So even better ways to do that. >> But the bottom line is the way you get to that ability to take a tile and drop it into a system and add that functionality, is because that underlying platform can support that view in an almost unlimited way. >> Exactly, whether the data is in HANA in the Cloud, or whether the data is still on premise through a direct connection back in the existing HANA system on premise. >> Of course unstructured data complicates the database equation, but also they have to coexist with the schemas and the structured databases out there. Has that thrown a curve ball at you guys at all? Or not a problem at all with HANA? >> So you know we've got an answer for that with Vora. I don't know if you've talked to any of the Vora folks, but you know what Vora brings to the party is it brings in-memory capabilities. It's an in-memory indexer for dup data. So instead of pointing your sequel query or building a MapReduce or using Hive or one of those technologies-- >> Or data lakes-- >> Or whatever, you just point it at Vora, and it's already indexed in memory. So our plan and our hope is that soon Vora will be on the HANA Cloud Platform. So that's just another piece of technology-- >> Peter: Way of generating a view. >> It's another service that we provide for generating a view on top of the dup data. >> Yeah, that's key. So talk about the Ecosystem innovation. Because one of the things I loved in McDermott's opening keynote, and I love the term, business model innovation. 'Cause that just really speaks to a whole new level of innovation. Usually it's tech innovation. >> Yeah. >> You get destructive enablers, platforms. At the end of the day, the application of the tools and platforms, however they're developed, by whomever, impact something. That's the business. That's the revenue. These new processes that are emerging. IoT is a great example. It's kind of an unknown process. It's hard to automate that workflow because it's evolving in real time. What innovations can you point to that you see, and that SAP sees as key mile markers, if you will, that shows that these things are being innovated on the business model side with the Ecosystem? >> Yeah, I'll give you two examples, one that's kind of just a speed up. And then I'll give you one that's a business model. So Hamburg Port Authority is the Port Authority for Hamburg, the second largest port in Europe. For them to keep up with the competition, they're going to have to double and triple in the next 15 years, the amount of goods going through their port. They have nowhere to build out. They cannot make their port bigger. It's surrounded by a city. There's nowhere for them to go. So they're using HANA Cloud Platform to basically create a grid. They're creating a utility or a cell network grid of all the containers that are sensorized, all of the trucks that have telematics information in the trucks. And they're also bringing in traffic information so that when the container comes in, they can bring the exact truck in that needs to get it in the right path into the port. If you think about that, that's a cellular network. And that's what they built using HANA Cloud Platform. So it's a semi-change in business model for the technology-- >> So minutes matter to them. >> Seconds matter to them, literally. The faster they can match up the container with the truck that's going to move that container, the better off they are. >> They got to clear the inventory. Sounds like a business problem. >> Exactly, exactly right? And think about it, they're probably going to sensorize the ships as well. They're going to stage those guys coming in over time. >> John: What's the other example? >> The other example is really interesting. This small company in Germany that builds forklifts, There can be nothing more pedantic than a forklift. It picks up a pallet, it moves the pallet, it puts it down. So here's what this company's done. It's called Still Forklifts. They are using HANA Cloud Platform to match up their order system, which is an SAP with the forklifts that are sensorized on HANA Cloud Platform so that the order system will send the order to get picked by the forklift. And the forklift and the order system have the maps of where everything is in the warehouse. >> The client's order system. >> The client's order system. And they've also now, they haven't done it yet, but they're working on a forklift to forklift integration so that if this guy's over in this part of the warehouse he has to pick something up over here. This forklift is over here. They meet in the middle. Trade some product, get it out to the docking station. >> So the forklift is an IoT device to the order system. And it opens up the possibility of greater automation within the warehouse floor. >> And they've changed their business model. They're no longer selling forklifts. They're selling pounds of goods moved within the warehouse. From in the warehouse to shipped. And they're billing on a monthly basis based on pounds of goods shipped. They're not selling forklifts anymore. That is pretty cool. >> So that's a complete shift. >> That's a business model shift. >> It's an outcome shift. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> They're selling the outcome. >> Exactly, exactly. And they had to think differently about their business. They had to think, we are not a forklift operator. We're a goods mover operator. >> Or to your business model, we were a forklift operator. Now we're a goods mover, an in-warehouse goods mover. >> Exactly, exactly. >> That's a great example and also a huge innovation. Because now, as the keynotes were saying, people are afraid to go out of business. And so the opportunity for the Ecosystem is, put one of those guys at check. They'll get the check. If they don't move, you take their territory. >> Exactly. >> So it's a nice cycle, SAP wins on both sides. >> On both sides, yeah, very cool. >> All right Dan, I got to ask you the question. Plans for this year, you got the Apple. You got the Cloud Platform. You have all this goodness goin' on. What's the plans for the year. Give us a taste of some of the things that you want to achieve this year, out in the market. And what KPIs are you looking at-- >> Yeah, what are we going to be talking about this time next year? >> I think we're going to be talking about what did you guys do in the area of Cloud Foundry. Have you guys really delivered on your Cloud Foundry promise of going opensource and moving toward portability? So next year, if we're fortunate enough to speak again, That's what I want you to ask me. Where are you guys on delivering Cloud Foundry? Pushing opensource, open development for developers even further as we talked at the outset of the interview. And then secondly, where are we on the API business hub? What is SAP doing to expose the thousands of business services that we have to our customers? To be able to use the HANA Cloud Platform with a catalog of business services that we're exposing to help them extend or modify or build that new application. >> And new onboarding numbers, having numbers showing both. >> That's right. Now what that means from a revenue standpoint, it means, you know we got to double or triple our business next year. We're not talkin' a 10%, 15% growth. We're talking an order of magnitude growth for our part of the business. >> And so you'll be investing more in marketing, training, tools. >> All of the above, all of the above. >> Hey, companies want to get into the enterprise, and the existing enterprise suppliers want to stay in the enterprise. >> Exactly, exactly. >> John: So it's a good time to be an arms dealer. >> Exactly, and we'll supply it with the HANA Cloud Platform. >> John: Dan, thanks so much for sharing your insight here on theCube. Really appreciate it, and great to meet your team. >> As well. >> And everyone here has been fantastic. We are live, here in Orlando. The theme is live, here at SAP this year. And of course we got the live coverage from theCube. This is theCube, I'm John Furrier, with Peter Burris. We'll be right back. You're watchin' theCube. (soft electronic music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Orlando Florida it's TheCUBE covering SAPPHIRE NOW. Headlines sponsored by SAP-100 cloud the leader in platform as a service with support from Consulate the cloud internet company. Now here are your hosts John Furrier and Peter Mars. >> Peter: Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Orlando Florida for SAP SAPPHIRE NOW SiliconANGLE Medias flexure program TheCUBE where we go out to events and extract the signal for the noise. I'm John Furrier the host and my co-host Peter Burris head of research in SiliconANGLE Media general manager of Wikibon Research. Want to give a shout-out to our sponsors without them we would not be here SAP100 Cloud platform, Consul Inc, Capgemini, EMC thanks for your support and we got 4 over 40 videos go to siliconANGLE at youtube.com/siliconangle for all the videos. Our next guest is Bronwyn Hastings who is the senior vice-president of Global Strategic Service Partners global channels all the top in integrations. Welcome to TheCUBE. >> Bronwyn: Thank you, thanks for having me here today. >> So it's great to have the boss come on we've had a lot of the folks from your group come in certainly a lot of your partners. We've had Capgemini, we've had Accenture, we've had a bunch of folks come through EY, I think Deloitte and anyway Infosys came on too Deloitte was really the only one and PwC were the only ones I didn't see here. Now we'll get to them later but the message is clear. They have to focus on innovation. >> Bronwyn: Yes. >> Otherwise they are going to get put out of business 'cause right behind them warming up in the sidelines in the ecosystem is their replacement potentially. This is an interesting dynamic you got going on here you growing your future in the ecosystem putting the system integrators I wouldn't say on notice but like hey get busy. Great system model being and they are responding what's your thoughts on some of the feedback you've heard? >> Thank you. This is a really interesting question because I think there are two things happening one is that customers are asking for the innovation and asking us and the partners what's the way forward? They are hearing all this talk about digital they want to know how did this become more relevant to their customers in a quick and more dynamic way. And they are asking both of us that question. The first thing that we do with our partners in this instance is we look at where are the innovation areas one that make them different? How do they get chosen to actually add value to their customers? And these partnerships that you've mentioned actually do it in different ways some of them represent themselves or talk to the customer through business transformations so they talk about what are you trying to achieve? Where is your future? You know the normal business conversation to find out how that innovation can happen and what do they need to be relevant to the customer? The other partners have a look at it and say how do I be part of this world that's changing but then bring quick value to the customer? How do I accelerate that value in quicker chance? And therefore the customer gets what they need in quicker time frames and then others say I'm going to look at this innovation and what's going to really set me apart as a specialist and that's where I'm going to go. So these partners right now are looking at where is their place in this and how do they transform themselves to actually bring value to the customer. And luckily for us we have a lot of those innovation areas that they can make those choices so they can choose >> John: They pick their swim lanes? >> Bronwyn: Swim lanes, focus areas. >> Differentiation. >> Differentiation all of that to be part of the new conversation as well. >> Peter: But what are the duties of the platform strategy that you guys are putting forward? And the ease with which using things like the Apple partnership that you have of creating new great software is you've a lot of this partners buy competition and buying these different alternatives are going to be forced to really focus on the value and their distinction that they need to provide to customers. It's going to be very interesting over the next few years to see these companies that have historically for you know long-term lock-in like relationships have to themselves become real nimble and become really catalyst to thought leaders for renovation of the marketplace because so much of the enabling technology is going to make it more or easier and more likely of bringing success. Do you agree with that? >> I find your comments very interesting actually so where I agree totally is that but I'd a piece. We look at it as though people have competition here actually a number of these companies already have practices or developments or innovations using some of the technology components. We announced Apple, there is a Microsoft announcement all of these areas that you would not normally see all of a sudden we've made these announcements and now that we're with these partners same partners that we've worked with for a long time come to us and say well actually we've got an area that develops an iOS for Apple already because our customers needed us to do that. Then we come to another area and they say but you brought out a new user experience through Fiori so we've got those development tools. And now if you bring out something like your 100 Cloud platform which allows us to build extensibility and these three things together start to actually build even stronger innovation so it's actually had a magnifying effect >> John: Exactly. >> Even for us you know we. >> John: Because you've already had those practices that were not being tapped into so to speak. >> Bronwyn: Not tapped into not brought in and integrated in the same way. But now because we're doing co-development we are doing co-innovation or integration processes actually it strengthens their capability to use the innovation and make it something even more. For me you can hear my passion in this one >> John: I guess. >> For me the excitement in this is that people really now see ways of innovating further and customers see that as valuable because they're getting what they want out of these innovations as well. >> John: Well that you mentioned the co-innovation I want to talk about that. That seems to be an SAP playbook even going back to the seven years that you started covering SAPPHIRE there has always been geeky developer focus which is a good thing we like that. But now simplicity is the theme once you have results but co-development's been a big part of it we were talking with EY for instance and they have a co-development on a lab being put down in I think Atlanta area. They have Accenture's got a zillion data scientists so you start to see this they are romping up they are not just about delivery any more. >> Bronwyn: No. No. >> The old way was delivery back in the contract. >> Yeah. >> Where is the value in your mind for these partners? Is it the co-innovation? Is it the data science? All the above? Is there one thing that pops out at you that you see rising to the top in the terms of trending? >> I would say there are two or three things well to one is we've got a large install base and all of the move that we've got to the newer generations are the S4100 environments. These partners actually have strengths of their own which they have been known for. E&Y has their strength that they're known for in the market with or without us they have got a strength. What these things are allowing them to do is to take some of that shift into the newer technologies and their strength and then build extensible innovation. And what I mean by that is they can say okay I'm strong in finance so I'm going to choose a finance topic on the 100 club platform environment and I'm going to build my differentiation on that. >> John: Their domain expertise map right into it >> Their demand expertise right into it squarely into it really create a compelling thing for them creates the value for the customer and it really establishes this innovation so that would be one point. You come back to the data scientists then you take it a step further you've got your differentiation. Now where else can you excel in? Where else can you bring the things that would make fun ends completely different? Like the digital boardroom that you're seeing that is being created while it's through predictable analytics it's through data scientists type of things so they add in these other services now that still play to some of their core strengths. I'm finding that it's actually creating the next platform for their own differentiation and value and it can incorporate these insights into it. >> John: Yes as you're saying it brings the swim lanes concept the differentiation so I got to thaw up on that and because Peter brought the question earlier today about when you brought up the question around partners working together. >> Peter: Yeah. >> So this comes back down to a lot of (mumbles) >> Peter: By the way for anybody who is wondering thunder and rain opportunity is raining everywhere. >> John: The cloud is raining opportunities the thunder the clouds are moving over us it's an (mumbles) >> Peter: The cloud is here >> (mumbles) Okay so back to this point. I differentiate it here once it has been the greatest has been the greater but also on these bigger projects you might have to work with the other guy. >> Bronwyn: That's correct. >> So how is that playing out 'cause they have to share obviously data might be shared but how is that playing out for them where do you see that trend going obviously probably more of that not less of it. >> Bronwyn: Yeah so what I'm finding is people are also choosing the type of work they want to do and then leveraging the ecosystem for the other types of work they want to do so people rather say you know I choose to do transformational type of things but if I am taking the lead on something I'm going to be able to partner with other partners in this ecosystem that complement me. I actually think it is complementing or if there is a specialist area they can bring someone else in so I actually think the complementary nature of things are getting stronger in some areas. Of course they still stand alone business that they do as well. Second thing I'd say is and I'll add this in because it's not only about the partnerships it's about how do we work with the partnerships and you would have heard some of our announcements around SAP S4 value assurance programs. And what that means is the customers are saying we want skin in the game from SAP too the partners are saying actually this is valuable to us too that you've got your stamp of approval on what's going on so we've created these service offerings that are module arised that partners can include and it's anything from just check my scope is right or the journey that we're going on and our transformation the mapping is correct through to more custom services and then it also including that in their offering as complementary so that customers feel comfortable with where they're going as well so that's all coming together as well. >> Peter: I want to clear out something around here because we are research's very strong sponsors we talk about the three Cs of digital transformation. Context. What are you going to do? >> Bronwyn: Yep. >> Community, who are you going to do it with? >> Bronwyn: With. Yep. >> Capabilities. How are you going to get the capabilities so that you do what you are going to do with who you are going to do it with better than everybody else every time? Does that resonate? >> Bronwyn: Absolutely! Absolutely! For me it's a content context all of those sorts of things. The customers are asking and you would have heard it around here. I want to be here how do I get there what's the time frame and who's capable of doing it actually? The partner community is really well enabled but they also know that this is a journey of new technology areas, shifts in the market. >> Peter: New processes. >> New processes so trying to simplify digital processes to really get the true value of digital so they want people to say we are in. And these are the ways that these things happen and you can solidify it together as well. >> John: And the keywords are that they are enabled. >> Enabled. >> That's there because the platform has to be enabling. >> Enabling. >> Otherwise it doesn't work. And then the tools and the tooling has to kind of got to be there. Is there a process out there and this is what we talked about Peter brought this up yesterday it was a really great observation. In old days look backwards known processes unknown technologies and then they evolve and you automate those processes you have known and now you have unknown processes developing with known technology. >> Yes. >> What are some of those new unknowns is IoT a good example? Or if you ask what other process is there? >> Peter: (mumbles) just unlimited things that we could be doing. >> Things that are like not fully like known that's going to happen but like you can't say that (mumbles) is a clear process for every customer it might be different. >> Bronwyn: I actually think the way that I would answer that and sort of look at that topic is as the transformation to digital is happening I'm almost seeing that all the customers are testing the processes. It's not like everything's a stable process any more they are saying what processes 'cause if you just replicate what was there before you're not getting any gain. You could have the most beautiful fore intent and all these processes remain the same and nothing's actually changed except the user experience. Or you can change all the processes but the user experience doesn't change so these two things are coming together and the process has to be re-looked at. >> Peter: But the customer is becoming part of that process story. >> Process. Absolutely. >> And that's the thing that's most unknown. >> Absolutely. >> And so how customers go about catalyzing those processes through those beautiful user experiences is really what we want to do when we think about engaging customers in a security way. >> Correct. And that's the way really the services piece comes back into play. It's really testing what do you still need or can we make this a much more streamlined simpler process that gives you all the benefits the cost benefits, the user experience which one of those do we want to do? I can say this is where the services that the partners really bring knowledge experience as well into the same equation. >> John: Bronwyn Hastings SVP at Global Services and the third part is final point I'll give you the final word on our wrap up here day three of SAPPHIRE. Take a minute to explain to the folks out there what's going on for SAP with respect to all these system integrators what's your plans, what's the focus, what's the dynamics. >> I think the three areas that we focus on within is digital transformation and the ability for us to bring digital to the customer. Why I take that approach first is this is a transformation time that the market's changing and the customers need that guidance into that process so one is digital transformation. And depending on all of that is that we are asking for the innovation that we've spoken a lot about here is innovating to the future not creating what's gone by not replicating but innovating the new digital world with us and part of that is simplification for the customers. Our work with the system integrators right now is focus on the customer, bring value and it's innovate together that's what we do. >> John: Well, thanks so much for your time and welcome to being a CUBE alumni. >> Thank you. >> Here on SiliconANGLE Media as a CUBE. We are live in Atlanta for day three three days of wall to wall coverage. Thanks for watching that you are watching theCUBE.