(upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey welcome back already, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios today having a Cube conversation. You know nobody can really travel, conference seasons are all kind of on hold, or going to digital, so there's a lot of interesting stuff going on. But thankfully we've got the capability to invite some of our community in. We're really interested in hearing from some of the leaders that we have in the community about what's going on in their world and you know, what they're telling their people. And what can we learn. So we're excited to have a good friend of mine who went to business school together, God it seems like it was over 20 years ago. He's Ben Nelson, the chairman and CEO of the Minerva Project. Ben great to see you and welcome. >> Thanks so much, great to be here. >> Yeah. So, you have always been kind of a trailblazer, I mean way back in the day I think that you've only had like two jobs in all this time, you know. (laughing) You know kind of changing the world of digital photography. >> Yeah three or four, three or four. >> Three or four. >> Yeah. (laughing) >> And after a really long run, you made this move to start something new in education. >> Yeah. >> Education's a big hairy monster. There's a lot of angles. And you started the Minerva Project, and I can't believe I looked before we got on today that that was nine years ago. So tell us about the Minerva Project, how you got started, kind of what's the mission, and then we'll get into it. >> Yeah so Minerva exists and it sounds somewhat lofty for an organization, but we do exist to serve this mission which is to nurture critical wisdom for the sake of the world. We think a wiser world is a better world. We think that really wisdom is the core goal of education and we decided that higher education is the area that is both most in need of transformation and also one that we're most capable of influencing. And so we set about actually creating our own university demonstrating an example of what a university can do. And then, helping tool other institutions to follow in those footsteps. >> Yeah it's a really interesting take. There's often times we're told if a time traveler came here from 1776, right, and walked around and would look at the way we drive, look at the way we communicate, look at the way we transact business. All these things would be so new and novel inventive. If you walked them over to Stanford or Harvard he'd feel right at home, you know. >> Yeah. >> So the education is still kind of locked in to this way that it's always been. So for you to kind of take a new approach, I mean I guess it did take actually starting your own school to be able to execute and leverage some of these new methods and tools, versus trying to move what is a pretty, you know, kind of hard to move institutional base. >> Yeah absolutely. And it's also you know, because we have to remember that universities as an institution started before the printing press. So if you go and talk to pretty much any university president, and ask him or her what is the mission of a university, generically, forget you know your university or what have you. They'll say, "Well generically universities exist "to create and disseminate knowledge." That's why they've been founded 1000 years ago and that's why they exist today. And you know, creation of knowledge I think there's a good argument to be made that the research mission of a university is important for the advancement of society and that it needs to be supported. Certainly directly in that regard. So much of you know the innovation that we benefit from today came from university labs and research. That's an important factor. But the dissemination of knowledge is a bit of an odd thing. I guess before the printing press, sure, yeah, I mean kind of hard to disseminate knowledge except for if you gather a whole bunch of people in a room and talk at them. Maybe they scribble notes very quickly. Well that's a decent way of disseminating knowledge because they can you know, one mouth and many pieces of paper and then they can read it later or study it. I guess that makes sense it's somewhat efficient. But after the printing press and certainly after the internet, the concept of a university needing to disseminate knowledge as it's core mission seems kind of crazy. It can't be that that's what universities are for. But effectively they're still structured in that way. And I don't think any university president when actually challenged in that way would argue the point. They would say, "Oh yes of course, "well what we really need to do is teach people "how to use knowledge or evaluate knowledge "or make sure that we communicate effectively "or understand how that knowledge can interact "with other pieces of knowledge and you know, "create new ways of thinking, et cetera." But that isn't the dissemination of knowledge. And that isn't the way that universities are actually structured. >> But it's funny that you say that. Even before you get to whether they should be still trying to disseminate knowledge, they're not even using the new tools now that they had the printing press that come along. (laughing) To disseminate knowledge. You know it's really interesting as we're going through this time right now with the coronavirus and a lot of things that were kind of traditional are moving in to digital and this new tool called Zoom which never fails to amaze me how many people are having their first Zoom call ever, right. >> Right, right. >> Ever, right I mean how long ago was Skype, how long ago was WebX. These tools have been around for a really interesting time, a long time. But now, you know, kind of a critical mass of technology that anybody can flip their laptop up, or their phone and go. You know you guys just in terms of a pure kind of tools play you know took advantage of the things that are available here in 2020 and 2019. So I wonder if you can share with the folks that don't have experience kind of using remote learning and remote access, you know what are some of the lessons you learned what are some of the best practice. What should people kind of think about what's capable and the things you can do with digital tools that you can't do when you're trying to get everybody in a classroom together at the same time. >> Right, so I think first and foremost, there's kind of the nuts and bolts. The basics. Right. So one of the things that you know, education environments have always been able to get away with is when you've got everyone in a room and you know, you're kind of cutting them off from the rest of life, you sometimes don't realize that you're talking into thin air, right. That maybe speaking students are not listening, they're not absorbing what you're saying. But you know they have to show up, at least in K 12, and higher ed they don't bother showing up and so the 15 people who do wind up showing up from the 100 person lecture I guess you do you say, "Oh at least they're listening." But the reality is that when you're online, you're competing with everything. You're competing with the next tab, you're competing with just not showing up. It's so much easier to just, you know, open up some game or something, some YouTube video. And so you've got to make this engaging. And making it engaging isn't about being entertaining. And that's actually one of the major problems of assessing who is a good professor and who isn't. You know people look at student reviews, right. They say, "Oh, you know such and such "was such a great professor." But when you actually track student reviews of professors to learning outcomes, there's a slight negative correlation. Right which means that the better the students believe the professor is actually that is an indicator that they've learned a little bit less. >> Right. >> That's really bizarre, intuitively. But when you actually think about it deeply, you realize that entertaining students isn't the job of a professor. It's actually teaching them. It's actually getting them to think through the material. And learning is hard, it's not easy. So you have to bring some of those techniques of engagement into online. And you can do that but it requires a lot of interactivity. So that's aspect number one. But really the much bigger idea isn't that you just do what you do offline and then put it online, right. Technology isn't at it's best when it mimics what you do without it, right. Technology didn't build an exact replica of the horse. >> Right, right. >> And said you know, ride that. Right. It doesn't make any sense, right. Instead, what technology should do is things you cannot do offline. One of the things that worked 300, 400 years ago is that you could study a subject matter in full. One professor, one teacher could teach you pretty much everything that people needed to know in a given field. In fact, the fields themselves were collapsed, right. Science, mathematics, you know, ethics were all put under this idea called philosophy. Philosophy was everything. Right. And so there's really we didn't have much to learn. But today, because we have so much information and so many tools to be able to process through that information, what happens is that education gets atomized. And you know you go through a college education you're you know, being taught by 25, 30 some different professors. But one professor really has no idea what you've learned previously. Even when they're in a 101, 102 sequence. How many times have we been in kind of the 102 class where in the first month all the professor did was repeat what happened in the 101 class because they didn't feel comfortable that you actually learned it. Or if the professor before them taught it the way they wanted it taught. >> Right, right. >> And that's because education is done offline with no data. If you actually have education in a data rich environment you can actually design cross cutting curriculum. You can shift the professor's role from disseminating knowledge to actually having students or mentoring students and guiding them in how to apply that knowledge. And so, once you have institutional views of curricula, you can use technology to deliver an institution wide education. Not by teaching you a way of thinking or a set of content, but giving you a set of tools that broadly any professor can agree on, and then apply them to whatever context professors want to present. And that creates a much more holistic education, and it's one that only can be done using technology. >> Ben that was a mouthful. You got into all kinds of good stuff there. (laughing) So let's break some of it down. That was fascinating. I mean I think you know the asynchronous versus synchronous opportunity if you will, to as you said kind of atomize education to the creation of content right the distribution of content and more importantly the consumption of content. Because why should I have to change my day if the person I want to hear is only available next Tuesday at noon pacific, right. It makes no sense anymore. And the long tail opportunities for this content that lives out there forever is pretty interesting. But it's a very interesting you know, kind of point of view if you assume that all the knowledge is already out there and now your job as an educator is to help train people to critically think about what's out there. How do I incorporate that, what are the things I should be thinking about when I'm integrating that into my decision. It's a very different way. And as you said, everything is an alt tab away. Literally the whole world is an alt tab away from that webinar. (laughing) Very good stuff. >> Exactly right. >> And the other piece I want to get your take on is really kind of lifetime learning. And I didn't know that you guys were you know kind of applying some of your principles oh my goodness where you actually measure effectiveness of teaching. And measure how long people hang out in the class. And measure whether it's good or not. But you're applying this really now in helping companies do digital transformation. And I think, you know, coming at that approach from a shift in thinking is really a different approach. I was just looking at an Andy Jassy keynote from a couple years ago yesterday, and he talked about the A number one thing in digital transformation is a buy in at senior leadership and a top down priority. So you know, what do you see in some of your engagements, how are you applying some of this principles to help people think about change differently? >> Yeah you know I think recessions are a very telling time for corporate learning. Right. And if you notice, what is the first budget that gets cut when economic times get tough it's the you know employee learning and development. Right. Those budgets just get decimated. Right off the bat. And that's primarily because employees don't see much value out of it, and employers don't really measure the impact of those things. No one's saying, "Oh my God, 'this is such an incredible program. "My employees were able to do x before this program, 'and then they were able to do one point five x afterward." You know, if people had that kind of training program in the traditional system, then they would be multi-billion dollar behemoths in the space. And there really are not. And that's because again, most of education is done in content land. And it's usually very expensive, and the results are not very good. Instead, if you actually think about learning tools as opposed to information, and then applying those tools in your core business, all of a sudden you can actually see transformation. And so when we do executive education programs as an example, you know we ask our learner how much of what you've learned can you apply to your job tomorrow? Right. And we see an overwhelming majority of our students are saying something like more than 80 to 90% of what they learned they can apply immediately. >> Wow, that's impressive. >> That's useful. >> Right. And why do you think is it just kind of institutional stuck in the mud? Is it the wrong incentive structure? I mean why you're talking about very simple stuff right. >> Yeah. >> Why don't you actually measure outcomes and adjust accordingly, you know. Use a data centric methodology to improve things over time, you know. Use digital tools in way that they can get you more than you can do in a physical space. I mean is it just inertia? I mean I really think this is a watershed moment because now everybody is forced into using these tools. Right. And there's a lot of, you know kind of psychology around habits and habit forming. >> Right, exactly. >> And if you do something for a certain amount of time every single day you know it becomes a habit. And if these stay in place orders which in my mind I think we are going to be doing it for a while, kind of change people's behavior and the way they use technology to interact with other folks. You know it could be a real, you know, kind of turning point in everyone's opening eyes that digital is different than physical. It's not exactly the same. There are some things in physical that are just better, but, you know there's a whole realm of things in digital that you cannot do when you're bound by time, location, and space. >> Exactly right. That's right. And I think the reason that it's so difficult to shift the system is because the training of people in the system, and I'm speaking specifically about higher education, really has nothing to do with education. Think about how a university professor becomes a university professor. How do they show up in a classroom? They get a bachelor's degree, where they don't learn anything about how to teach or how the mind works. They get a PhD, in which they learn nothing about how to teach or how the mind works. They do a post-doctoral research fellowship where they research in their field, right. Then they become an associate professor or an assistant professor and non-tenure, right. And in order to get tenure they've got seven years in order to make it on a publishing track, because how they teach is irrelevant. And they don't get any formal training on how to teach or how the brain works, right. Then they become you know, a junior tenured professor. A full tenured professor, right. And then maybe they become an administrator. Right. And so if you think about it, all they know is their field. And I've had conversations with academics which are to me befuddling, in the sense that you know they'll say, "Oh, you know, "everyone should learn how to think "like a historian. "Oh no everybody should learn to think "like an economist. "Everyone should learn to think "like a physicist." And you kind of unpack it, you say, "Well why?" And it's, "Oh well because we deploy pools "that nobody else deploys and it's so great." Right. And so it's OK give me an example. I had this conversation with a university president who was a historian. And that president said, "Look, you know, "what we do is we look at you know, "primary source materials hundreds of years ago "and learn to interpret what they say to us "and ascertain truth from that. "That's an incredibly important skill." I said, "OK, so what you're saying is you "examine evidence and evaluate that evidence "to see what it can actually tell you. "Isn't that what every single scientist, "social scientist, no matter what field they're in does? "Isn't that what a physicist does? "Isn't that what an economist does? "Isn't that what a psychologist does? "Right, isn't that what an English professor does?" Right actually thinking about I remember I took a mini module when I was an undergraduate with Rebecca Bushnell who is a literature professor, eventually became the dean of the college of arts and science at the University of Pennsylvania. And, we basically looked at a text written 400 years before, and tried to figure out what parts of the text were written by the author, what were transcription errors, and what was censored. That's looking at evidence. >> Right, right. >> This was an English professor. It's the exact same process. But because people know about it in their field and they think the only way to get to it is through their field, as opposed to teaching the tool, it can't get out of their own way. >> Yeah. >> And that's why I think education is so stuck right now. >> Yeah. That's crazy. And you know we're all victims of kind of the context in which we look through everything, and the lens in which we apply to everything that we see which is you know one of my things that there isn't really a kind of a truth it's what is your interpretation. And that's really you know, what is in your head. But I want to close it out. And Ben I really appreciate your time today. It's been a great conversation. And really kind of take it back to your mission which is around critical thinking. You know there's a lot of conversation lately, you know, this kind of rush to STEM as the thing. And there's certainly a lot of great job opportunities coming out of school if you're a data scientist and you can write in R. But what I think is a more interesting conversation is to get out of your own way. You know is the critical thinking as you know the AI and RPA and all these other things kind of take over more of these tasks and really this higher order need for people to think through complex problems. >> Right. >> I mean like we're going through today. Thank God people who are qualified and can see ahead and saw an exponential curve potential just really causing serious damage when we're still to head into this thing to take aggressive action. Dr. Sarah Cody here locally here you know, telling the San Jose Sharks you can't play. You know that is not an easy decision. But thankfully they did and they had the data. But really just your kind of thoughts on why you prioritize on critical thinking and you know can what you see with your students when they get out into the real world applying critical thinking not necessarily equations. >> Yeah look I think there's no better demonstration of how important critical thinking is than when you look at the kinds of advances that STEM is trying to make. Right. What happens any time we get a demonstration of the power of artificial intelligence, right. You remember a few years ago when Microsoft released it's AI engine. Right. Smartest engineers working on it, and all of a sudden it you know spat back misogynist racist types of perspectives. Why? The training set was garbage. It wasn't that the technology was bad, actually it was amazing technology. But the people who were writing it couldn't think. They didn't know how to think two steps ahead and say, "Wait a second, if we train "the information, kind of the random comments "we see on the internet, you know, "who bothers to write anonymomys comments?" Trolls, right. And so if we train it on a troll data set, it'll become an artificial intelligent troll. Right. It doesn't take a lot of critical thinking to actually realize that, but it takes some. >> Right. >> Right. And when you focus merely on those technical skills what you wind up doing is wasting it. Right. And so if you ground people in critical thinking, and we see this with our graduate. You know we graduated our very first class in May. And we had what as far as I can tell is the best graduate school placement of any graduating class in the country. As far as the quality of offers they got. We had a 94% placement rate in jobs in graduate positions. Which I think is tied with the very best ivy league institutions. And the kinds of jobs that the students are getting and six months into them the kinds of reviews that their employers are giving us looks nothing like a recent undergraduate. These are oftentimes types of jobs that are unavailable to recent undergraduates. And you know we had one student recently actually just told me, fresh in my mind, even though he was the youngest person in his company, when the CEO of his company has a strategic question he comes to him. And when he's in a meeting, full of PhDs, everybody looks to him to run the meeting and set the agenda. He's six months out of undergrad, right. And you know I can give you story after story after story about each and every one of these graduate. And it's not because they were born with it. They actually had a wise education. >> Yeah. Ben well that's a great story. And we'll leave it there. Congratulations again to you and the team at Minerva and what you've built and your first graduating class. Great accomplishment and really great to catch up, it's been too long. And when this is all over we'll have to get together and have an adult beverage. >> That would be wonderful. >> All right Ben thanks a lot. >> Thanks so much Jeff. >> All right. You've been watching theCUBE. Great check in with Ben Nelson. Thanks for watching. Everybody stay safe and we'll see you next time. (upbeat electronic music)

>>Fly from San Francisco. It's the cube covering RSA conference, 2020 San Francisco brought to you by Silicon angle media >>and welcome back. You're ready Jeffrey here with the cube. We are a day four here at the RSA conference in Moscone Thursday. We've been going all day Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. It's a huge conference over 40,000 people, you know, kind of the first big us conference after the mobile world Congress thing with a coronavirus. So we were all kind of curious to see how it would work out. There was some companies that pulled out but you know Rohit and the team stayed the course, they got the support they needed from the city and it's turned out to be quite a show. So I'm sure there's a lot of people all over the industry kind of watching this as an indicator of how do you execute a conference and these kinds of crazy times. So we're excited for our next guest. He's Andy Smith, the senior vice president of marketing for Centrify. >>Andy, great to see you. Good to be here, Jeff. Doing great. So you said you've been coming to this show for a while, you're a seasoned veteran of the industry. First off kind of general impressions of this show versus versus other kinds of RSAs you've been doing in the past. It's super interesting to watch. It ebbs and flows of the security industry, right? I mean I've been 15 years over the past 25 I've been at this show and you've seen it be big and then shrink down, you know, to one hall and then the two halls again. I mean what's interesting the last couple of years is it's, it's big again, like security is hot. We know budgets are going up, a breach, cultures out there. And so, you know, the IC, the RSA show is a reflection of what's happening with the industry when you look at the size and number of attendees. >>Right. The other kind of theme this year was the human centric, uh, boat. And we had row head guy on just a little bit earlier in his keynote. I thought it was really interesting. It was not about security per se. It was not about threats and detection. It was really about stories and narratives and peoples and kind of taking that back as an industry. I wonder, you know, kinda your impression as this kind of human centric theme as we're surrounded by tech tech and more tech. It is, if you think about human centric, it's a, it's a big piece of your, your security strategy, right? I mean, uh, what, there was just this morning, uh, one of the sharks got fished, right? Lost $400,000. One of the, yeah. And so, uh, you know, educating people about looking out for fishing attacks, right? Uh, uh, looking at insiders who are one of our biggest threats and you know, they're, they're a huge piece of this is not technology at all. >>Right? I thought Wendy's keynote was great too from Cisco. Talking about everything we do on computers is about clicking. And yet we tell people, you know, click the download the patch, but don't click on anything else. And really, you know, kind of taken an approach that people need to be part of the solution. They're not these horrible people that keep clicking on the wrong things, but you really need to integrate them into your strategy. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's about educating your workforce. It's about educating consumers, right? Whether you're talking B to C security or whether you're talking to me to be that human element and educating to be diligent right to you, you got to know a little bit about how to look for something that might be suspicious and know what is, what you should be clicking on, what you shouldn't. There's, there's not a lot of technology that can solve that for you. >>It's getting out and, and, and making sure people are educated. And unfortunately, the bad guys have been working hard on their grammar and, uh, and doing all the AI on the background. So, you know, it's not, a lot of things today are not easily identifiable like they used to. They've gotten, that's no longer really kind of a baseline, a hope not to click that thing. They've gotten way better. Right? So rather than these attacks that are spray and pray, they're going after, you know, just going after anybody. They can, they're targeted now. Right? So spear fishing, right. And uh, and so specific individuals. And that's why one of the things that, that is a little bit coming up at this show and something that we talk about is identity centric security. So that you've got a tie, that kind of human element to your security. >>You know, there's network centric, but getting identity centric and tying that human element to your security aspect, making sure the security, the identity technologies and the security technologies are working together. That is brings that human element into your own security strategy. And when you, when you talk about identity, how should people be thinking about identity? Because clearly we see the kind of the rise in multi-factor now, right? We have to do, we have to go to the, our phones all the time with the code. Now we're hearing people, you know, can spoof identity, they can Smoove faces. I guess identity is not a face, but you know, some of these indicators of identity. So when you help people think about identity, what are some of the factors they should think about? What are the things they don't but they should be thinking about? Yeah, yeah. >>I mean some of the things that we talked a lot about is multifactor authentication. So although yes, right, real sophisticated people can have ways of getting around that, but most attackers and hackers are lazy, right? They're going to go for somebody who's got no multi-factor in place, like even doing the basics is way better than doing nothing. I mean, the statistics bear out that you do a little something right? And then you can always step it up and get more sophisticated where you've got tokens that you have to put your finger on, right? And you know, you can get smart cards and all those kinds of things. You can get much more sophisticated, but multi-factor in general works. I mean, you're just going to take it a far bit above. But what's interesting about identity, because we always think of humans, right? But when we talk identity, where this market is going is identity is machines. >>You have to give a machine an identity, you have to give a service account, an identity, you have to give a microservice identity. And these more and more, this is just completely automated world. This isn't humans logging into things anymore. This is microservices talking to each other. Each of those needs an identity needs an authorization cause they have accounts that can be hacked also. Right? So the you need protect those just as much as needed to protect those human accounts. It's funny cause we, we cover a lot of RPA shows, right? And the whole talk of, of of people that do RPA, right, is that they're, they're, they treat them as people, right? They treat them as kind of like your little assistance, your own little bot to do little tasks that you assigned them to do. So treating them with kind of an identity protocol. >>Then that gives all the authorizations and you kind of leverage all that back end is the way to integrate them into the workforce. Absolutely. It's all about access controls, authentication, authorization. Those are the controls that have been there forever. You're supplying these two new types of identities and you know, the, we're in the privileged access management space, so it used to always be a windows admin or a Unix Linux admin logging into a physical box, right? And so it was about protecting those accounts. But more and more it's about giving a machine and identity and a microservice and identity and how are those things talking to each other? We're protecting, that's all completely automated with dev ops. You think about if I have a, as I moved to the cloud, I want to be able to scale out dynamically, right? Uh, horizontally, vertically. So all of a sudden new servers, virtual servers or containers just popping up automatically. >>You have to be able to control the access to all those automatically, dynamically on the spot, and then they shrink back down. You need to get rid of all that, right? So the automation that's come into our space, although the same, I'm still trying to do authentication, authorization, same type of privilege access controls we've been doing for 30 years, but how they're applied in this new world is much different right now. What about then you layer you layer on top of that zero trust, so I definitely want to identify, but I have zero trust and I'm presuming at some point in time you might end up either being a bad guy or some bad guy's going to come in via your credential. How does the zero trust piece fit on top of the identity kind of management? It's really why we're talking about identity centric security now is because you can't, you, you have to assume somebody on your network. >>You can't trust all those perimeter controls that are there. The reality is they're going to get in and so that identity centric security starts at that access layer and not not trusting just because you got onto the network that, Oh, sure, here you go. You can, you can do whatever you want. That's where zero trust comes in. I don't, every time I want to get access to a piece of data or a system, et cetera, I need to do that F indication that authorization apply, that multi-factor. Those are all identity centric controls that result in this, this journey towards the zero trust world. It's, it's funny, uh, I've sat down with Mike and Caesar, uh, for scout and you know, he talks about when they do the little sniff on all the little devices that are plugged into the networks and it's usually multiples back of what people think are on the network, especially remote location. >>People are plugging stuff in. But then too, you know, like you said in the machine, identify, you know, what should a logic cam do and how should it act. And as soon as it starts acting and asking for things in accounts payable, maybe that's not necessarily what a lot to take camera wants do or should be doing. Yeah. Yeah. And so first there's like knowing what that device is giving you an identity so he know what it is, know what it should be doing. It has a role, it has specific access and authorization rights that are granted to it. So the logic camera, if I know what that camera is, you have an identity. I know what it's supposed to be doing. I should be able to restrict the access it has to just what it needs to do. Right. Rather than it's got root account to do whatever or some God account to create, you know, like those are the kinds of controls we have in place. >>And it's just logical identity management controls that have been there forever. But you're a, once you can identify those devices connected, you can, you can give them those, you know, limited. There's talk about least privilege, right? That's again, a 30 year old control, but giving at least privilege on just what it should do and nothing more. And do you see in the future just more and more kind of multifactor, uh, validation points that we'll have to get added to the, to the process as we move from single factor to factor, however many factors is going to take? For sure. Yeah. I mean, so the multi-factor, cause there's one thing are you authenticate yourself at the front door, right? So that's what most authentication is, but there's this concept of continuous authentication. You're the trust in that, uh, that initial authentication degrades as your session goes on. >>Right? So the longer I've had a session open, you know, is that still that same person or that same service that is clicking away at the keyboard there? There's cool stuff, wrong continuous authentication where there they can tell it's still the same person based on the cadence. They click on the keyboard, other biometric methods, the swiping I do on my phone and stuff like that. So there's ways to have continuous concepts now called continuous authentication. Right? And so I absolutely see that those behavior based, uh, types of, uh, of authentication. You're going out through a user's entire session. So I want to shift gears a little bit. One of the things that amazes me about this show, and I don't know when it was small, but it's been big ever since I've been coming. It's right, there's so many vendors here, there's so many companies in this and there's so many kinds of stories that a lot of really enthusiastic people work in booths that are screaming at you to come over and tell you all the great things they do. >>From a marketing point of view, you're, you're the SVP marketing. How do you, you know, kind of package your messaging, how do you kind of break through the clutter? What advice do you give to, to buyers, um, to help them kind of navigate what is a, a very large, loud and complex system? Yeah, it's a, it's a complex battle, right? So you have to be able to, because there are so many different technologies here, uh, in, in the security arena, uh, we're all fighting for the same share of wallet in a sense. Right? And so first you have to identify yourself with something people recognize a market that people recognize like identity, privilege, access management, endpoint security, you know, et cetera. But then you have to differentiate yourself within that market, right? So you've got to add something to the market space I'm in to that gives a little twist. >>So for us, it's identity centric, privilege access management and that, you know, we suppose that against Balt centric or you know, something else that we've tried to put the other bets. So you try to, in your message, you got to categorize what's the space I'm in and how do I differentiate? And in something as short and brand-able as possible. And then you got to have this kind of ongoing solutions, partnership relationship with, with your clients, right? Because this is not something you're going to be switching things out that frequently and, and, and, and the landscape and the threats evolve and change so rapidly. I think we've had a number of people come on to publish this report or that report, his report, he's come out every six months and there's actually the online version so he can keep up with what happened today or what happens tomorrow. >>So not an easy, uh, not an easy kind of marketing challenge to stay relevant, stay connected and state stay really in people's mind. Well, and you know, there's, there's awareness aspects to it and it is really just what really helps is you just create as many happy customers as you can. Right? I mean, you're amazed at the how connected this industry actually is. I mean, the attendees that are coming to this conference, they know each other. They've been coming here from here. It's just like we have. Right, right. And a word of mouth between people who have used your technology, they share that with something else. I mean the security industry as big as it is, it's, it's super interconnected. One person goes from one company to the other and so tons of business just comes from word of mouth, referral, etc. So the happier you can keep your customers, the more uh, you know, mind share. >>You can get up there. Okay. Last question before I let you go. We just like to say we just had row hit on one of the topics was they just got bought by a symphony. I think it's symphony, a private equity firm. Um, we met the other night at a, at a cocktail party put on by Tom Thoma Bravo and you were at Centrify before they came in. And after, you know, I think some people are kind of confused, you know, what is private equity, how does it impact the company? So wonder if you can kind of share, you know, how that transition has come along and you know, kind of give us an update on what's going on at Centrify and where you guys are going next. Yeah, so we were acquired about a year and a half ago now, uh, by private equity and you know, they basically, they take later stage companies and uh, help them get, uh, profitable, uh, they increased value and then they look for going, taking that company IPO or selling it off, et cetera. >>Right? But it's really about looking for opportunities, uh, in existing market with larger companies, the venture capitalists will go after smaller, much larger risks. These are bigger dollar amounts, right? Larger companies. But then they, they look about how to optimize. They're very sophisticated on how to run a B to B business. Tama Bravo happens to have a huge investment in security and it comes like eight or 10 companies there the other night. Yeah. So they, they realize that this is a hot space right now. So they've, if they can take a company and create value that they realize that there's more stuff popping up. There's probably money being invested in. And one of the things that, but not all private equities created equal. Yes, they are about all about kind of optimizing, increasing value. But what we really found with Tom or Bravo is they're interested in investing in that company, looking at other folds and acquisitions, et cetera. >>And that's a part of a strategy for me as a, as a manager and an I'm part of the executive team. When you're backed, they don't have the money to go after acquisitions. Uh, like that they, you know, they make these smaller investments. We're talking about Bravo actually does have the capital to look at other things that can be immediately accretive and add to your value. And that's a, a real part of our strategy now that didn't exist before we were owned by PE. I think they spun out a whole nother, another company out of what your technology say. Correct. Exactly. So one of the unique things about our particular acquisition is Centrify was both a privileged access management. And a identity as a service. And I Daz a company and they looked at what we were doing and they said, geez, you're really selling to two different markets and it's two different sales cycles and two different business models. >>We could actually create more value if we split these up and each of you focused on your individual markets. And so that there's a, there's an MQ and a market segment and a wave for IDASS and there's an MQ and a wave, you know, et cetera for Pam. But there's not anything that does both. And that's what Centrify was. So they actually, we, we completely divested of our IDASS capabilities spun off in an entirely separate company called adaptive. And so over the last year, that's was a lot of the work that was going on. It was, was splitting this company, uh, uh, into two. But it really provided us a much more focused to go after the market that we were going after. Well, they wouldn't come in if they didn't see some opportunity to, uh, to pull some more value out that wasn't really being unlocked. Absolutely. Right. Andy, we'll thank for taking a few minutes and uh, and great to catch up and best you for the rest of the show. Awesome. Thanks a lot, Jay. He's Andy. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube where? At the RSA show in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> Live from Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE! Covering DevNet Create 2019, brought to you by Cisco. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Cisco DevNet Create 2019, Lisa Martin with John Furrier, we've been here all day, talking about lots of very inspiring, educational, collaborative folks, and we're pleased to welcome to theCUBE Anne Gentle, developer experience manager for Cisco DevNet, Anne, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE today. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> So this event, everything's like, rockstar start this morning with Susie, Mandy, and the team with the keynotes, standing room only, I know when I was walking out. >> I loved it, yes. >> Yes, there's a lot of bodies in here, it's pretty toasty. >> Yeah. >> The momentum that you guys have created, pun intended. >> Oh, yes. >> No, I can't take credit for that, is really, you can feel it, there's a tremendous amount of collaboration, this is your second create? >> Second create, yeah, so I've been with DevNet itself for about year and a half, and started at Cisco about three years ago this month, but I feel like developer experience is one of my first loves, when I really started to understand how to advocate for the developer experience. So DevNet just does a great job of not only advocating within Cisco, but outside of Cisco as well, so we make sure that their voice is heard, if there's some oddity with an API, which, you know, I'm really into API design, API style, we can kind of look at that first, and kind of look at it sideways and then talk to the teams, okay is there a better way to think about this from a developer standpoint. >> It's great, I love the API love there, it's going around a lot here. DevNet create a cloud native vibe that's kind of integrating and cross-pollinating into DevNet, Cisco proper. You're no stranger to cloud computing early days, and ecosystems that have formed naturally and grown, some morph, some go different directions, so you're involved in OpenStack, we know that, we've talked before about OpenStack, just some great successes as restarts, restarts with OpenStack ultimately settled in what it did, the CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, is kind of the cloud native OpenStack model. >> Yeah, yeah. >> You've seen the communities grow, and the market's maturing. >> Definitely, definitely. >> So what's your take on this, because it creates kind of a, the creator builder side of it, we hear builder from Amazon. >> Yeah, I feel like we're able to bring together the standards, one of the interesting things about OpenStack was okay, can we do open standards, that's an interesting idea, right? And so, I think that's partially what we're able to do here, which is share, open up about our experiences, you know, I just went to a talk recently where the SendGrid former advocate is now working more on the SDK side, and he's like, yeah the travel is brutal, and so I just kind of graduated into maintaining seven SDKs. So, that's kind of wandering from where you were originally talking, but it's like, we can share with each other not only our hardships, but also our wins as well, so. >> API marketplaces is not a new concept, Apache was acquired-- >> Yes. >> By a big company, we know that name, Google. But now it's not just application programming interface marketplaces, with containers and server space, and microservices. >> Right. >> The role of APIs growing up on a whole other level is happening. >> Exactly. >> This is where you hear Cisco, and frankly I'm blown away by this, at the Cisco Live, that all the portfolio (mumbles) has APIs. >> True, yes, exactly. >> This is just a whole changeover, so, APIs, I just feel a whole other 2.0 or 3.0 level is coming. >> Absolutely. >> What's your take on this, because-- >> So, yeah, in OpenStack we documented like, two APIs to start, and then suddenly we had 15 APIs to document, right, so, learn quick, get in there and do the work, and I think that that's what's magical about APIs, is, we're learning from our designs in the beginning, we're bringing our users along with us, and then, okay, what's next? So, James Higginbotham, I saw one of his talks today, he's really big in the API education community, and really looking towards what's next, so he's talking about different architectures, and event-driven things that are going to happen, and so even talking about, well what's after APIs, and I think that's where we're going to start to be enabled, even as end users, so, sure, I can consume APIs, I'm pretty good at that now, but what are companies building on top of it, right? So like GitHub is going even further where you can have GitHub actions, and this is what James is talking about, where it's like, well the API enabled it, but then there's these event-driven things that go past that. So I think that's what we're starting to get into, is like, APIs blew up, right? And we're beyond just the create read. >> So, user experience, developer experience, back to what you do, and what Mandy was talking about. You can always make it easier, right? And so, as tools change, there's more tools, there's more workloads, there's more tools, there's more this, more APIs, so there's more of everything coming. >> Yeah. >> It's a tsunami to the developer, what are some of the trends that you see to either abstract away complexities, and, or, standardize or reduce the toolchains? >> Love where you're going with this, so, the thing is, I really feel like in the last, even, since 2010 or so, people are starting to understand that REST APIs are really just HTTP protocol, we can all understand it, there's very simple verbs to memorize. So I'm actually starting to see that the documentation is a huge part of this, like a huge part of the developer experience, because if, for one, there are APIs that are designed enough that you can memorize the entire API, that blows me away when people have memorized an API, but at the same time, if you look at it from like, they come to your documentation every day, they're reading the exact information they can give, they're looking at your examples, of course they're going to start to just have it at their fingertips with muscle memory, so I think that's, you know, we're starting to see more with OpenAPI, which is originally called Swagger, so now the tools are Swagger, and OpenAPI is the specification, and there's just, we can get more done with our documentation if we're able to use tools like that, that start to become industry-wide, with really good tools around them, and so one of the things that I'm really excited about, what we do at DevNet, is that we can, so, we have a documentation tool system, that lets us not only publish the reference information from the OpenAPI, like very boring, JSON, blah blah blah, machines can read it, but then you can publish it in these beautiful ways that are easy to read, easy to follow, and we can also give people tutorials, code examples, like everything's integrated into the docs and the site, and we do it all from GitHub, so I don't know if you guys know that's how we do our site from the back side, it's about 1000 or 2000 GitHub repos, is how we build that documentation. >> Everything's going to GitHub, the network configurations are going to GitHub, it's programmable, it's got to be in GitHub. >> Yes, it's true, and everything's Git-based right? >> So, back to the API question, because I think I'm connecting some dots from some of the conversations we had, we heard from some of the community members, there's a lot of integration touchpoints. Oh, a call center app on their collaboration talks to another database, which talks to another database, so these disparate systems can be connected through APIs, which has been around for a while, whether it's an old school SOAP interface, to, you know, HTTP and REST APIs, to full form, cooler stuff now. But it's also more of a business model opportunity, because the point is, if your API is your connection point-- >> Yes. >> There's potential business deals that could go on, but if you don't have good documentation, it's like not having a good business model. >> Right, and the best documentation really understands a user's task, and so that's why API design is so important, because if you need to make sure that your API looks like someone's daily work, get the wording right, get the actual task right, make sure that whatever workflow you've built into your API can be shown through in any tutorial I can write, right? So yeah, it's really important. >> What's the best practice, where should I go? I want to learn about APIs, so then I'm going to have a couple beers, hockey's over, it's coming back, Sharks are going to the next round, Bruins are going to the next round, I want to dig into APIs tonight. Where do I go, what are some best practices, what should I do? >> Yeah, alright, so we have DevNet learning labs, and I'm telling you because I see the web stats, like, the most popular ones are GitHub, REST API and Python, so you're in good company. Lots of people sitting on their couches, and a lot of them are like 20 minutes at a time, and if you want to do like an entire set that we've kind of curated for you all together, you should go to developer.cisco.com/startnow, and that's basically everything from your one-on-ones, all the way up to, like, really deep dive into products, what they're meant to do, the best use cases. >> Okay, I got to ask you, and I'll put you on the spot, pick your favorite child. Gold standard, what's the best APIs that you like, do you think are the cleanest, tightest? >> Oh, best APIs I like, >> Best documented? >> So in the technical writing world, the gold standard that everyone talks about is the Stripe documentation, so that's in financial tech, and it's very clean, we actually can do something like it with a three column layout-- >> Stripe (mumbles) payment gateway-- >> Stripe is, yeah, the API, and so apparently, from a documentation standpoint, they're just, people just go gaga for their docs, and really try to emulate them, so yeah. And as far as an API I use, so I have a son with type one diabetes, I don't know if I've shared this before, but he has a continuous glucose monitor that's on his arm, and the neat thing is, we can use a REST API to get the data every five minutes on how his blood sugar is doing. So when you're monitoring this, to me that's my favorite right now, because I have it on my watch, I have it on my phone, I know he's safe at school, I know he's safe if he goes anywhere. So it's like, there's so many use cases of APIs, you know? >> He's got the policy-based program, yeah. >> He does, yes, yes. >> Based upon where's he's at, okay, drink some orange juice now, or, you know-- >> Yes, get some juice. >> Get some juice, so, really convenient real-time. >> Yes, definitely, and he, you know, he can see it at school too, and just kind of, not let his friends know too much, but kind of keep an eye on it, you know? >> Automation. >> Yeah, exactly, exactly. >> Sounds like great cloud native, cool. You have a Meraki hub in your house? >> I don't have one at home. >> Okay. >> Yeah, I need to set one up, so yeah, we're terrible net nannies and we monitor everything, so I think I need Meraki at home. (laughing) >> It's a status symbol now-- >> It is now! >> We're hearing in the community. Here in the community of DevNet, you got to have a Meraki hub in your, switch in your house. >> It's true, it's true. >> So if you look back at last year's Create versus, I know we're just through almost day one, what are some of the things that really excite you about where this community of now, what did they say this morning, 585,000 strong? Where this is going, the potential that's just waiting to be unlocked? >> So I'm super excited for our Creator awards, we actually just started that last year, and so it's really neat to see, someone who won a Creator award last year, then give a talk about the kind of things he did in the coming year. And so I think that's what's most exciting about looking a year ahead for the next Create, is like, not only what do the people on stage do, but what do the people sitting next to me in the talks do? Where are they being inspired? What kind of things are they going to invent based on seeing Susie's talk about Wi-Fi 6? I was like, someone invent the thing so that when I go to a hotel, and my kids' devices take all the Wi-Fi first, and then I don't have any, someone do that, you know what I mean, yeah? >> Parental rights. >> So like, because you're on vacation and like, everybody has two devices, well, with a family of four-- [John] - They're streaming Netflix, Amazon Prime-- >> Yeah, yeah! >> Hey, where's my video? >> Like, somebody fix this, right? >> Maybe we'll hear that next year. >> That's what I'm saying, someone invent it, please. >> And thank you so much for joining John and me on theCUBE this afternoon, and bringing your wisdom and your energy and enthusiasm, we appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> For John Furrier, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from Cisco DevNet Create 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018 Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we are in Orlando at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018. This is an enormous event, 16 football fields. American football fields is the size of this space. Incredible, we're welcoming back to theCUBE, one of our distinguished alumni. >> Thank you. >> Uddhav Gupta you are the global vice-president and GM of the SAP App Center, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Yes, thank you so much, thank you for having me. And isn't this a lovely event? >> It's amazing. >> It is. >> So much energy and excitement yesterday during Bill McDermott's keynote. He talked about SAP, 46 years old now, has 398,000 customers and is responsible for 77% you said of the world's transactions. >> Yes, yes. >> Unreal. >> And you know the best part about this is we got 77% of the transactions, and if you walk around and ask people about SAP, they don't even know SAP, right? It's funny, I'm from the Bay Area and the first time people started taking SAP and acknowledging the brand of SAP was when they start to see SAP Center. Because that's home. >> The shark tank. >> To the Sharks. >> Yup. >> And they're like, oh, that was the first time. And then the second time we put a building out. We bought SuccessFactors and we got a SuccessFactors building by the airport and then, "Oh yeah we know SAP from the building next to the airport." But now people are starting to becoming really serious of associating themselves with the brand because now they started understanding what a crucial role SAP plays in their lives, right? If SAP doesn't do what it does, the entire supply chain for many large enterprises stops, right? Which means, your beverages don't come, and your food doesn't come in, nothing, right? Your lines are stopped. >> Yeah, we're with you. Your medicine doesn't come. >> Right. >> It is just. >> Yes. >> Well you guys have had Bill McDermott has talked about for a while about, we wanna become one of the world's top 10 most valuable brands but for invisible software you know you talk about, you want to be up there with the Apples and we can engage and touch with so many of these brands, and people probably don't know, a lot of people. >> Yes. >> That they are using SAP that's driving so many businesses, industries, and you guys have done a very good job of articulating your brand value through the voices of your customers who are transforming industries, they're saving lives, and also your partner ecosystem. So talk to us about the partner ecosystem and how they're really enabling partners like NetApp. What you're doing with the App Center to really enable SAP's growth and transformation through your partner ecosystem. >> Absolutely, so one of the good things is, if you look at the different transformations that the software industry has gone and cloud is one big one, right? And right now, with the cloud that one day we've regarded is the Cloud is a completely different dynamics of software. It's a very closed environment, the software itself so not everybody can actually basically just go ahead and deploy anything within the software itself, right? So that's created a huge economy of ecosystem for us where we've got partners that are building Sas Solutions, that extend our core business products. We got partners that are building content services that can actually be consumed within our business products. Similarly, SAP has made this transition from being more of a software applications company to actually being a platform company and now taking it into the cloud. So we've got a whole new generation of partners that we kind of started working with that provide technology services into the platform, right? And that's why we work with partners like NetApp. We work with partners like (mumbles). We works with partners, even SIs. They're starting to build a whole bunch of repeatable solutions, right? So in order to bring all these innovations that are happening around the SAP ecosystem, in the hands of our customers, like NetApp is a customer of SAP, too. How do we bring that easily into their hands so they can discover these products? They can try the products, they can buy these products. And then they can manage these products. And that's the whole idea of the App Center. >> And this has only been around for a year. In fact, you just celebrated your first birthday. >> Exactly. >> But a tremendous volume of apps that are already available. >> Yes, it's amazing. >> For try and buy. >> The ecosystem has really embraced us, they put their hands open, right? So within a year we've got 1100 partners that are on the App Center. We've got 1500 solutions that are on the App Center. And we are growing like crazy, right? We've got amazing endorsements from partners and donor. We've got amazing endorsement from customers. Some customers have come and done repeated purchases on the App Center within a month, right? The number of trials we're executing for partners is huge. On the whole, it's doing really well. >> So let's talk about the range of applications. I know when I think of App Center I think of App Center on my phone. >> Yes. >> And I can go and get something as silly as a flashlight or, in my case, as life-changing as my running app that keeps track of my fitness over the course of several years and I have great data to mine from that. What types of applications and industries, what industries do they serve in the App Center? >> So the App Center is really made for businesses. >> Right. >> So definitely we don't have Candy Crush there, right? (everyone laughs) >> Don't ask them. >> I don't know if that's a good thing. >> Oh, that's good, right, but you have a bunch of fun application for enterprises, right? Which allow them to get a better insight in how the company is operating. And then we have, to give you analogy to your fitness application that gives you a better idea of how your body works. We've got application that basically do the same thing for enterprises, right? So let me give you an example. We've got a major SI that actually has built an audit and compliance application for HR, right? So I can actually tell you, within your organizations what's your diversity ratio, what's your compliance ratio, how are people being paid, gender equality and gender pay, equal pay is a big topic that many CIOs are looking at. It kind of helps on those kinds of areas, right? Then we've got apps or solutions in there that basically deal with helping customers do better sales, right? We have apps in there that basically help provide you tools that can better monitor your platforms, right? Tools that help you migrate. All these things are available on the App Center. >> I'm curious from a differentiation standpoint, SAP has been very vocal about wanting, challenging the old legacy CRM. >> Yes. >> And wanting to be number one. Against their, you know, the (mumbles) competitors. How does the App Center and how you've enabled it so quickly and with such diversity of apps, how does this differentiate SAP? >> Absolutely, so we've owned the back office for a very long time now, right? So now it's time for us to basically get in front of the end users and get into the daily work that they do. It's very important for us to also own different offers. That's a whole big initiative, you heard with C4, right? To enable that, we've got cloud platform, right? And that's the other biggest piece of the puzzle, right? Now when you add these two things up, you don't basically, when you look at customers, the biggest thing for them is time to value, right? The whole concept of the bill versus buy is kind of starting to fade and the customer like, "Here's my problem, is there a solution out of the box "that can actually solve my problem?" If he gets a 100%, great, if he gets 90%, okay. If he gets 80%, I'll take it and then I'll improvise on it. And that's exactly what the App Center does. It gives you an out of the box solution from our ecosystem. So you can get started with it, and then you can collaborate with the ecosystem, to either improvise on it or take a step back and say, "Okay, now we've plugged the hole, now let's find "a more detailed solution to actually build "a more scalable outcome out of it." >> So let's talk about licensing flexibility from apps and App Center. One how do customers pay for. >> Yes. >> Their apps in the App Center? And then two, what are the licensing options for both partners and customers, for those individual apps? >> So the beauty of the apps and then the way we started up is the transaction is directly happening between the partners and the customers. So the partners can actually price their applications the way they wanted, right? So some partners that are basically doing content services are doing it by based on utilization, right? So you actually use this many number of API calls, that's how it's priced. Some of the others are doing SAS applications and they are pricing it by users. So the partners have complete flexibility of pricing and packaging the way they want. Also because we're actually using the App Center to sell to enterprises, it's very unlikely that somebody's gonna go ahead and say, "Oh, he has a gold, bronze, and silver package, "I'm just gonna pick one of them." On the App Center you can actually go ahead and custom package or create custom packages with tailored customs and conditions that are specific to that customer. And the customer can then buy it, right? So we've kind of thought of this from an enterprise standpoint. And that's the beauty, right? When you work with partners like NetApp, that is important for them, right? NetApp is a partner that basically goes ahead and works with some of the largest businesses, right? It's important for them to have the flexibility to go ahead and do the business with them digitally. >> So I'm curious. At every event we talk about digital transformation, right? It's table stakes these days. But at SAPPHIRE 2018 there's been a lot of discussion around the intelligent enterprise. >> Yes. >> I'm curious how this one year old App Center that SAP has built and that you're managing, how are you using the data that you're getting about the types of apps that are being developed and consumed, how are you utilizing that data to transform SAP? >> Absolutely, if you think of the intelligent enterprise, we're doing everything that we can from the platform side. But what's the point of being intelligent if you don't apply your intelligence somewhere, right? And that's exactly. >> You're like my mother. >> (laughs) And that's what we're trying to do with their apps, right? So while the platform is intelligent. It can do a lot of stuff. The apps are the one that will help you derive the value from the platform. And that's where the App Center is super important and the apps that are on the App Center support the product. That's the role within the apps in the place for the intelligent enterprise. >> So Bill McDermott also talked about trust and the trust is the new currency. When you put forth something like the SAP App Center, you're kind of co-signing that, you know what, these apps, these are partners, and this is a partner exchange. Can you talk to the value to the enterprise of wanting to something like a App Center to purchase applications? >> Oh, trust is a big thing, right? These days, I mean, you. Enterprises come to SAP because they know SAP is such a trusted brand. So when we did the App Center we also made sure that every app that goes on the App Center is actually totally validated by an integration and certification center team, right? So you don't find anything on the App Center that has not gone through a vetting process. The second thing you don't know show that on the app center you find apps that are relevant to your SAP landscape and that's not a Shopify, right? You're not going and selling something that has no relevance to the enterprise. The third thing that we've done, and very important for customers is we've actually built workflows that allows them to still have the same comfort of procuring a software but only doing it digitally. So, for example, a customer may say, "Look, not every user "in my company is allowed to buy apps." But if a user is interested in buying an app, he should be able to request purchase, and then somebody who's entitled in the company to go through contracts and negotiate on behalf of the company can actually negotiate it, and then the purchase happens. So we will employ trust at every level of the App Center. >> Security is such a hot topic these days, right? I mean, there's been so many public breaches of corporate data, there's just one again the other day with, I think it was MyDNA or MyHeritage. >> Yes. >> And that kind of opportunity for people to submit a cheek sample and get their DNA is so popular. That's a lot of personal information. So the security woven into the fabric of that is all key. >> Absolutely. >> So you mentioned the number of partners and the number of apps. I think you said thousand partners. >> A thousand partners and 1500 apps. >> 1500 apps in the first year. >> In the first year. >> What are you excited about for the next year? What do you think we're gonna be talking about next SAPPHIRE? >> I think the growth in the number of apps and partners that are gonna come over, it's gonna be a hockey stick event we're completely looking forward to that. But what's gonna be interesting is, as these apps come by, and you've pointed it out, security is one topic, but GDPR compliance is another big one. So one of the things that we've been working with a lot of these partners is to basically become more and more GDPR compliant. Because some of these apps are dealing with HR data. Some of these apps are gonna start dealing with customer data and they have to be GDPR compliant. So that's what we're working on with them and we'll see more and more of those kind of things happen. But the second big thing that we're looking forward is going beyond the apps, right? We call it the App Center, we could call it Solution Center, we could call it anything. But the idea is you gonna have apps, but you're also gonna have vendors like NetApp being able to digitally sell the products to our end customers, right? Somebody bought HANA, they need a HANA appliance, with an adapt storage, that's possible on the App Center. Or some other tools, somebody's existing NetApp customer managing really large SAP landscapes. And they can buy tools that will basically help them manage the NetApp landscape, right? Or SAP landscape running a NetApp gear. So those are kinds of things that I'm looking forward to actually coming into the App Center. The third thing is sensors. People are building IoT Scenarios and we are having tons of partners basically certify sensors against our IoT technology. How about we bring those into the App Center, right? So it's gonna be a huge and beautiful portfolio of solutions. >> Practical question before we let you go is. Simple concept 'cause my mind is working and I come from a traditional SAP shop. So I'm thinking, what interesting things have you seen customers do with SRM and the App Center. I mean, it seems like, App Center, another supplier for SRM should be some integrations? Am I making an assumption? What are some of, as we look at, or even App Center and someone that has SAP core products, what are some of the integration for them? >> Oh, you hit the nail, right? What some of the customers are coming back to us and asking is, can you actually do an App Center specifically for my enterprise, right? Where I as a user can basically go, curate a whole bunch of apps that I've kind of looked at the terms and conditions or have met certain standards, etcetera. And accept the terms of conditions for those products right? Accept those products, negotiate the price, or whatever they do. And then make that open to all of my users of their ecosystem, right? So that way, anybody in that scenario can actually go purchase an app and start using it in production. >> And then I have all of my work full from SRM to approve the purchase of the app. >> Exactly, so it kind of ties in very neatly into that. >> So your 18th SAPPHIRE. >> Yes. >> What are some of the key takeaways that you're gonna go back to the Bay Area with? >> You know, the beauty is every SAPPHIRE keeps growing bigger and bigger and the questions every three, four year we've done a new transformation, right? Last year when I come to this conference, people were still kind of unaware and not really ready to embrace the cloud in an enterprise base. This year, I didn't hear one customer say, "Should we go to the cloud?" Everybody like, "We are on the cloud, how can you help us?" How can SAP and customers and partners like NetApp actually help us get there? And that's a refreshing feel, right? Because now we can talk to them about all the grand plans that we have for them. Prior we were basically still selling them on the concept. Now we're actually walking them and talking to them about how they embrace the cool stuff that we're doing. >> Awesome. >> So it's refreshing. >> It is cool stuff. >> It is. >> Uddhav, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> Talking with Keith and me about what you guys are doing with the App Center and happy first birthday again. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Thank you for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, it's The Cube! Covering DevNet Create 2018, brought to you by Cisco. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to The Cube's special coverage of Cisco DevNet Create here in Mountain View, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. We're at the Computer History Museum. I'm here with Lauren Cooney, who's co-hosted with me for the past two days' wall-to-wall coverage. We've been kind of getting down in the community with Cisco's DevNet Create, which is an extension to their main DevNet developer program, which is mostly network-centric, classic Cisco developers, guys configuring networks, the power players in the enterprise and all around the world as we know it. But now that the cloud native's taken off we're here exploring that DevOps equation. Our next guest is Rowell Dionicio, who's a network engineer at Stanford, welcome to The Cube, thanks for coming on! >> Thanks for having me. >> Love Stanford, very progressive, always having state of the art facilities, I mean, hell, the campus just gets better every year. It's like a cathedral of new buildings- >> Rowell: It's always under construction. >> Always under construction, football team's been decent for the last decade, which is good as a season ticket holder, but the network drives it all, the great facilities there. So now see you're here as a Cisco practitioner. Networks have been running the show for many, many years, now comes cloud, Stanford's got a lot of stuff going on on campus, obviously academic computing, business computing, is there a lot of cloud going on there? And is there a lot of DevOps happening? Give us a quick take on- >> There's a lot of cloud. I come from the infrastructure side, so this is my first time here at DevNet Create. I wanted to get a feel for what's coming. What do I need to learn in order to make that next step to help bring a better network, help students connect, help staff connect. >> Yeah, the network guys have all the power, always have been, but what's interesting is Susie Wee at Cisco, she's leading the team around DevNet Create, we talked at their last show in Barcelona about on top of that she was introducing, which I love, network ops. Which is essentially what DevOps is, but making the network truly programmable, at a level where it's a service. That's the nirvana scenario, that's the dream scenario. >> It is, yeah, and we actually have a lot of that already in place, but obviously there's still a lot of areas that we can improve, especially in maybe the wireless space, and that's why I'm here. What can I do on the wireless side to help drive that? Is there something that we can do better, more efficiently? >> I mean, we always do this ad hoc, unscientific surveys. We interviewed the guy who runs the stadium for the San Francisco Giants, the guy who runs the stadium for the Sharks, Levi Stadium. The number one complaint is wireless. And it's like in the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. >> It's a tough one to crack. I hear those complaints, I get 'em, and I try to fix them as quickly as I can. But it's one of those things where you can't see it, and I think wireless is just such a robust technology that it'll work even in the worst scenarios. >> That enables a lot of IOT, but also the consumer side with the students and the faculty. Is the strategy at Stanford just to blanket coverage of campus, you guys just throw the RF all over the place? >> We don't, we don't just put it everywhere and anywhere. We actually think about it and it's not just in terms of coverage, it's also capacity and how people want to use it. And so we try to design around those requirements, and also if we're bring in IOTs, how do those devices work with wireless? Am I going to deploy something that those devices actually work well with it? I don't know, and so we have to do a lot of testing, ask a lot of questions. What's the use case? Where do they want it? Is it even possible? >> The analytics are interesting, right? You look at the patterns, and they're humans, they're connecting, so you can see where the crowds are, probably, I imagine you look at the concentration? >> We're not even at that point yet. We're actually just looking at it. That's why I'm here, to see how can I do this on our network: is it possible, how do we deploy this and make it work with other schools on the campus? To see whether or not it's a great use-case for us. >> 'Cause the schools have their own kind of kingdom kind of thing, or how does it?- >> A little bit, yeah. >> So there's some job there maybe, yeah? Well, let me ask a question, as you're creatively looking at the solution, if you could have the magic wand, what are some of the things that you want to do, if you kind of think about some of the dream scenarios, the futuristic kind of view? >> Yeah, if it was just as easy as putting it up, and making it work, that would be fantastic. But we have to work with physics, radio frequency, so it's not that easy, not yet. >> So what are you thinking about when there has to be a lot of compatibility that you're looking at in terms of the different campuses, what will work with what, how can we make it more streamlined, mesh-like, etc., is that something you're considering? >> It's a lot of planning that's involved. So not so much mesh, we don't do too much of that, but a lot of it has to go around with the requirements of the building, for one. A lot of the buildings on campus are considered historic, so we can't really place access points the way we want them to be installed. So we have to work around that challenge. And then it's getting it to the areas where people want wireless, which is also another challenge. And then budget and infrastructure. Then people start throwing devices and then that we don't even know about, so they'll want IOT everything, whatever you can put wireless on, they want that. >> How are you mapping for security purposes? What are you doing for that? I mean that has to be something that you're looking at. >> We definitely have a network that's secure, which uses certificate-based authentication. We have our regular Stanford network, but we really secure the infrastructure side and allow students, staff, teachers to really try to innovate around that. So we don't put a lot of restrictions on the network. We do protect anything coming from the outside coming in, but going out to the internet, if they want to develop something, there's a lot of great stuff that comes out of Stanford, and we don't want to inhibit any of that process. >> As a Cisco kind of champion, you guys can look at Cisco, and honestly, certainly the network enables a lot. What are you learning here, what do you hope to walk out of here with, what sessions have you played around with, what did you gravitate to? >> I gravitated toward some of the beginner sessions, which would have to be with how to program using Python. I looked at some location-based stuff. Maybe there's location-based services that we want to roll out to the campus. That's a big topic amongst the industry right now. And then efficiency as well, how can I deploy faster if it's just me working on a certain project? Those kind of things, and even reporting, how can I get statistics, how do I know how many devices are on a section of the campus or an AP? Those kind of things, something that will be easier for me and maybe my co-workers as well to get the information we need and then be able to deliver the services and the infrastructure faster as well. >> How's the tooling for you guys over there? Obviously with DevNet Create you can almost see the dots connecting. Apps could be developed, either custom apps, and they're different, you can't really have an off-the-shelf app. You could have general purpose EDU apps for maybe networks, but you guys are a pretty unique environment there. Are there apps now that you use or are they coming? >> It's very unique. It's a big campus, so there are apps that just don't fit right out of the box, so there's a lot of custom apps. Some of the stuff I'm not part of, but I do use them and they are custom. It's very tailored to what exactly we need, what information are we trying to get, and they build tools around that. >> What the Stanford network like? Stanford as a school, top shelf, everything's great. They have a smokin' network? I mean, what's the bandwidth, give us some numbers! What's the upstream? We know from a live-streaming standpoint, we've been there- >> We have a good upstream, I'll tell you that. And there's multiple, for redundancy, so at least 10 gigs for some parts of the campus. And we do get a lot of devices on wireless. I think the last number I've seen was around 40,000 unique devices on wireless. So it's getting larger. >> Rogue devices, I mean obviously, we were talking before Cameron, just joking, there's a lot of power there, a lot of network, I can see kids bitcoin mining in their dorm rooms. I mean it's what I would probably try to do. >> I don't monitor, we don't monitor what they actually do on the network. We just deliver the pipes. >> You realize there's thousands of people rejoicing now over what you just said. (laughs) >> I'm sure there's entrepreneurs out there. >> I'm not on the security team, so maybe the security team does something, but as far as I know on the wireless, we just try to deliver connectivity. I don't want to do anything that inhibits somebody from doing a project that they're trying to do. 'Cause they always develop a lot of great applications, a lot of great products, I don't want to be that guy that says no you can't do that. >> But you got to also make sure, you don't want to restrict the creativity, because Stanford does have a lot of students who go out and start companies, Snapchat, you name it, they're all there. >> We'll see a lot of rogues, and I do go and get the bad ones, but there are some people who are trying to build a network to create a use-case around this application that they're building, and that I won't block because I know what they're doing. I tell them how you should go and approach it, so that way there's no security issues. If there's a potential security issue, I say, hey, you need to talk to the security team and get them on board. >> So you guys are lackadaisical, but you're actually encouraging them, but there's an honor system it sounds like, if they kind of come clean you guys give them some barriers to bounce around on? >> Yeah, we have the fences in place. I won't talk too much on the security side, because I'm not the guy who does the security. >> But you're not locking people down, it's not like a hard-core, chop your hands off- >> It's not like we're filtering a lot of content or anything. But if you're doing something bad, you'll be found. >> What else can you tell us about what's going on at Stanford that you think is well-positioned vis-a-vis the theme here, which is take the network, move up the stack, these things like kubernetes, this is bringing kind of a new concept. You guys are already progressive in the way you posture to the audience out there. >> A lot of the people on campus have the freedom, I would say enough freedom, to go out and try these kubernetes or maybe like Node-RED. And those are the kind of things I want to see if I could leverage those technologies as well, on our side. I think the campus is adopting the cloud, so a lot of people are moving to the cloud. I think there was some push-back there, but I think people are starting to see the full benefits of using it. >> Are there some bug bounties out there all, any incentives for students? >> Oh I don't know, maybe for the other guys. >> Rowell, thanks for coming by, I appreciate it. And good luck on your journey, appreciate it. Thanks for coming on The Cube. Okay, Stanford here, talking about network, It's hot, I've been there, I can tell you the bandwidth's strong at Standford, a great university. It's The Cube, bringing you all the action here in Silicon Valley in Mountain View, at Computer History Museum for Cisco's DevNet Create 2018. We'll be right back with more after this short break.

(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)