>> Voiceover: Live From Orlando Florida, It's The Cube Covering Sapphire Now, headlines sponsored by SAP HONA Cloud the leader in platforms service. With support from Consol Inc. the Cloud internet company. Now here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Bouris. >> OK, welcome back everyone. We are here, live in Orlando for day 3 coverage of SAP SAPPHIRENOW. This is the Cube, Silicon Angle's flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise, I'm John Furrier with my co-host Peter Bouris. Want to give a shout-out to our sponsors who allow us to get down here and bring in our crew. SAP HONA Cloud platform, Console Inc., Capgemini and EMC, thanks so much for supporting us. Our next guest is David Ludlow who's the Group Vice President of Solution Management at SAP Success Factors. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thanks, great to be here. >> First time on the Cube, he will now Cube Alumni >> Yes >> Success, not your big show here. You got the big show, for you guys in Vegas. SuccessConnect on the 29 August get the plug out there for folks who want to sign up for it. >> Thank you. >> And if you're interested in HR. But certainly a big part of system of record HR has known processes, but now with mobile and this Apple relationship, I think you might see some spawns, all kinds of opportunities around service management, role of the employee, role of the mentor and the bosses, how people are engaging What is that dynamic? What is the digital transformation for you guys? >> So I think with HR systems you're going to have to take a step back and say that with HR Solutions Technology they touch nearly, if not everybody in the organization in some manner. Though, I, every HR has to maintain information about employees, and there's been a big push over the past few years to enable employees enable managers to access that information more closely. However, because of that, HR systems have typically much higher thresholds of usability, engagement and such, for the employees that use them. >> John: Like how, give an example. >> So, I'll give you a direct example, in that when employees come to work on Monday morning they typically take a step backwards in the business systems they use over the consumer systems they used over the weekend. So, the new threshold for businesses >> John: Threshold for the users? >> Yes, exactly >> OK, got it. >> When was the last time you went to work and actually used systems like the >> I can't wait to download th >> correct >> exactly Well that's also another dynamic I want to get your thoughts on, and this came out, certainly over the last, few years most recently in Silicon Valley the lawsuit about discrimination and women and tech about managing employees, has always been a kind of older model and no-one loves to do performance reviews but yet now there's more data around, there's social graph and interest graph and so you're seeing new data things happening, where you can actually look at someone's performance outside of the manual process. >> Absolutely. >> Can you share some of this trend and how important this might be? >> So, we're fundamentally looking at the performance management performance review process, I mean I don't think you can pick up an HR Journal today without seeing some kind of headline about Kill Your Performance Reviews, and performance reviews are a thing of the past, but the bottom line is, it's important for company's to know, who their top performers are. So it's, we still want to know who they are, it's just the process to get there that's been kind of, broken. So, to go back to that concept of engagement, if I can do continuous performance, performance management more continuously, if I can facilitate week to week discussions between managers and employees, have those check ins, have those tracking of achievements and activities, I can get to the end result much more effectively, without that dreaded year-end process, that really everybody hates, about having to scramble >> Can they mail in the data too, so cutting and pasting from the other guy. >> Exactly, exactly I've done them myself, and you send those frantic mails to everybody that says okay, what does that person do so I can put it in the performance review. You know that's the kind of idea about the engagement and leveraging some technology to do a better outreach, I would say to employees, make it more continuous. You know, think of the social network type software and solutions that we see. We go there because we want to. And I think >> Well the data is gold right? I mean you look at it, you can actually see who doesn't show up to meetings. >> Absolutely >> I mean it's like this data, that's real data. >> And I think you can even take that to the next level with some of these things and one of the announcements we did make here at SAPPHIRE was some work were doing in diversity and inclusion, which is a huge topic in HR right now. And actually looking at data within the organization, and not just promotions, terminations, that kind of thing, but it is there subtle unconscious bias in the way the job descriptions are written, in the way that job requisitions for recruiting are written, and these kind of things. So actually to take a step back, use all that data, use that machine intelligence to kind of look at the whole thing, the thing from an entire perspective, say where are these sources of potential bias, and how we... >> [John} That's a big deal actually. That is probably one of the things I hear the most of which is not just the gender issue, but it's also to keep the top performers you have to enable opportunities for them, and match them up properly at the right time. >> Exactly >> Huge challenge >> Exactly. And it is to a company's interests to take a more active role n diversity inclusion and there's studies that show this in that if you have a much wider view from multiple ethnicities, gender, whatever, might be, it's good for the company. Your company, your customers are multi-ethnic, multi-gender, and you bring in the different points of view of multiple people to set a much better strategy. Set a much better engagement, I mean. People today, millennials, they want to work for a multi-diverse cultural company. >> Peter: Well historically HR systems have been programs that comply with the letter of the law. >> David: That's true >> In the past 10-15 years we've talked about moving from just HR which has a narrow view on compensation and employer view, and compliance with those laws, to trying to think more about talent management and I know that's where SuccessFactor was kind of born, >> Correct >> was in the idea that we want to review people but also put in place programs which allow us to develop them better, so we can have a broader quality of individual, including some of the diversity issues. But the SAP ecosystem is starting to, is at least, implicitly, if not explicitly, making a promise to customers that through that ecosystem you will do a, you will have a better insight, do a better job of managing the assets within your business that create value for your marketplaces. Whatever they are. >> Yep >> Cash, physical assets, but increasingly employees, and partnerships. So is SuccessFactors being identified with and SAP as a leader of that charge to find ways or to demonstrate how SAP is going to be able to evolve to do a better job of helping customers overall drive the quality and returns on those crucial assets that generate market and customer value? >> Yes I think you said a couple of things, there were so many you tried to get a couple in, >> Yes I did >> Parfait of results >> Yes, it was. Yeah absolutely. We've seen that trend over the past 15-20 years of HR systems. You know what we say typically is going from system of record to system of engagement. But they have to do both as well. You still have to do employee record keeping, you still have the compliance angle of HR, especially in payroll, benefits and that kind of thing. So those systems need to be much more efficient and much more effective with what they do. Drive out the cost, do things more self service oriented, use machine intelligence to kind of drive complexity out there and let the software take decisions on its own. Then we use that as a kind of foundation to build on some of the more strategic HR things like performance and goals, compensation, recruiting, learning and whatever might be. But now we get into an era, I would say, in the future, of what is the ecosystem look like, because we are putting all this stuff in the Clouds, though, kind, their customers don't have all the on premise technology they used to have to be able to say, okay well we want to do this unique thing and we want somebody to come in and build this unique application, and I think that's where the HONA Cloud Platform comes in, and that's huge for us. I think that what I like to say is no one company can own a monopoly on innovation. And especially with the low barrier of entry today with regard to cloud technologies and cloud platforms including HONA cloud platform around the world, around at the world. Anybody with a good idea, anybody with something unique that they can bring in, build something very quickly, and connect it to an HR system that's huge. >> That's a great point, we just talked to the HONA Cloud Platform guys for service, and they got the developer ecosystem booming, and the Apple deal certainly is going to be a very intoxicating moment for many people who can see the value in some of these white spaces. Give you an example, I talked to a customer last year, big company, and they're on using workday. Big platform, they actually went public to doingwell, the competitor. So, guy says we love workday but this one employee wrote this bad-ass expense report app, that was just so awesome, and it didn't fit into workday, and so we shadow It'd it out in the cloud and so this is the opportunity we're seeing 1000 times over. 1000 flowers are blooming in this kind of use case where someone just gets very domain specific and builds a great app. That's the trend. >> Yep. >> How do you guys fit into that? Is that possible? And how would you address that growing trend, because that might be the case where these white spaces get filled by these amazing use cases. >> As I said, we can't own a monopoly in innovation. >> So can you support that? >> Absolutely. So if we can get technical for a minute, the SuccessFactor's APIs and services are linked into the HONA Cloud Platform. So we invite partners, as well as customers, to come in and build the unique applications on HONA Cloud Platform, that makes them natively integrated, using some of the services from SuccessFactors, and now customers have access to all of this innovation and ideas that are going on in the space around them. So they use us for the core and more strategic level of processes, information, but they have access to all of this other innovation out there. >> So you guys support a data model where if you have an app already in your portfolio that's comprehensive, certainly integrated in throughout your system, and some unique app comes in , fits right in, >> Absolutely, so they can bring it in just through native APIs or the partner can come in and build something new on HONA Cloud Platform. So both options are available. But it's ah, we don't see, us as a model. Look I spent 10 years in product management on the SAP side of things and I can't tell you the long list of requirements we had, it's like you have to do this and this, and this, and this and you'll never get to it, it's just not possible. >> It's your heart. To get it right as a suite, do your best to be comprehensive but you gota be always updating. There's going to be scenarios where people are going to do a really interesting tool or point solution >> yeah, that's it. >> This is great, and it's not a stand-alone venture, maybe. They might not get the zillion downloads, it's not consumer because they won't get the downloads for it on the itunes store so they have to fit in with the data, that's the key. >> Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean it does have to logically link to some of the stuff. It has to consume HR data, so I need employee data, I may need organizational structures, but that's really... >> My next question for you is kind of a high level global question. Take a step back, lean back and kind of dream a little bit. Help me dice out the future of work narrative. There's that bumper sticker everyone's talking about, the future at work in collaboration software. What's really going on? What is the real change that's most relevant around this notion of future of work and share your thoughts on that, spend a minute to dig into it. >> And we've actually done some research with an organisation called Oxford Economics, to do some surveys global surveys on this. I think the future work is it's all about digital. There's all of these digital technologies coming in, there's change and technology change happening faster and faster and faster. One of the surveys that we did, looked at we surveyed employees and said what is your number one concern at work? And the number one answer 40% out of all employees said obsolescence was their key fear. And I think that that speaks to this fast pace of change in that we have to keep employees learning, we have to continue to provide education programs, so that they feel upskilled, they have those opportunities. They know where the company's going and what they'll need, to be relevant to the company. And I think this ties in... >> But is that the number one issue? >> It's one of the big issues that we see. I would say from the employee perspective, what they're concerned about, from a company perspective, it is all about digital. It's how am I going to use mobile technology. How am I going to get around the security challenges with some of that. HR data is sensitive so we need to be careful. How am I going to use insight, analytics, machine learning. How am I going to build this ecosystem as well. There is a tremendous amount of digital technology coming into HR and I this is what a lot of companies are looking at. How are we going to leverage this stuff most effectively to make the employees, the managers, the executives lives easier and more informed. >> So, if you think about it then ultimately what we're talking about is a big part of your mission is to help companies make their employees more productive, by doing a better job of identifying the strongest ones, putting them in positions to continue success, identifying folks that have more potential and you could get more out of the overall any business is the community helping management and employees understand how that community is set up and ultimately how that whole thing can be better applied to serve customers. >> I don't think I could have said it better myself. So it is all of that engagement. It's all employees feeling what we call all in, I mean really committed to the cause and the objectives of the organization. And I think feeling included. So I think that's where the diversity inclusion comes in as well. You said it very well. I think it's all part of the community, and us as the community with a common goal, to advance the objectives.... >> So give me a number one priority for you guys. Big priority. >> Big priority >> Not number one, but a big part of the plan. >> Peter: Well every business is seeking to expose the appropriate elements of its employee communities, to its customer and marketing communities. And doing a better job of that is absolutely essential to increase not only overall productivity but employee satisfaction, or employee engagement, but also customer satisfaction. Because we could talk about computing and machine learning but at the end of the day, more often than not, somebody somewhere is asking a human being a question and that human being is either making that person happy or not. >> You're absolutely right, yeah. >> Peter: So that's incredibly important going forward in business automation is going to help, but automation is not going to solve everything. >> Look, you're right, I mean it's like technology is an enabler, it's not the strategy itself. So you need a strategy first. Technology will help you enable the implementation of that strategy. >> But I think that's a big question for the future of work, right John? >> Yeah, I totally agree. >> As we get more automation what are people going to do in SAP has to be able to support customers where they are in that continuum, also provide some strong leadership on it, and I think this is a mission for SuccessFactor and this is a question. SuccessFactor has to be a technology solution set that helps companies find those appropriate lines. >> Yeah, absolutely right. So that is one of the key focus areas of what we do, is enable organizations to find those employees, to develop those employees, to engage the employees, on an ongoing basis. And to your point about what is it we're looking at, I think the importance of information, the importance, and it's not just information, and I use the word intelligence. It's actually taking information and packaging it, discovering things through machine intelligence, artificial intelligence, whatever might be, and turning it around, and making, don't just throw data at somebody, make a recommendation for them. You know, think of learning,.. >> I think, I mean I agree with you on that. I think the analog aspect of HR has been codified with systems, and now we're looking at a pure end to end digital goal. >> Absolutely >> and that's different, that's outside in. That's not, okay here's what employees should be doing. Managers, here's how you talk o employees, now it's a complete, non-linear equation ... Hey the employees are driving it too. >> Exactly. I mean typically I've got a very linear process. I go from something happens, I have step a, step b, step c, step d. But what if we could bring in machine intelligence into some of this and say you know what, yeah, you go through d, but maybe you want to do e, f, and g as well. Based on the experiences of others, other people did this maybe you might want o do it as well. You know, think you have online buying and that kind of thing. I know what other people did, it knows what other people did, and it gives me those recommendations. >> David >> Well it's generating options for those people. >> Absolutely >> David, I wish we had more time to talk about this and hopefully maybe check out your event. This is a great topic, I think we can go all day long on what IT is going to be in, because if you have all the systems of record, why aren't you running IT, so it's a whole other conversation, that's a half hour segment just in itself. It's my vision. I see that being the case. I'm sure you're probably running IT too all that data on people and their Ids and everything, so, I do want to say, I'll give you a chance to give a plug for the event real quick, to end this segment. >> Yeah SuccessConnect Las Vegas 29 August through 31. Everything there is, everybody wanting to know about HR and SuccessFactor. How to make that move to the cloud, >> Theme, what's your theme? >> Our theme is Overall success is simply human. Okay, SucessFactor being successful on the Cube here. Top perfomer, David, thanks for joining us. Welcome to the Cube Alumni, I'm John Furrier, Peter Bouris. Be right back. You're watching the Cube.