from around the globe it's the cube with digital coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat welcome back this is the cubes coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 I'm Stu minimun and it's our seventh year doing the cube this year of course it is a digital event which means we are reaching all the community members where they are around the globe really excited to bring program first time guests and a first time to redhead summit Vachon Vora he's the chief technology officer of Vodafone idea joining me from Mumbai India bhishan nice to see you take so much for joining us it's a pleasure to be here as >> I'm looking forward to this interaction all right so as I said I've been at Red Hat show for many years the the telecommunications space you know service providers are some of the you know more interesting in the technology space you talk about scale you talk about change you talk about you know software eating the world all of those discussions are ones I've had for many years but you know I think many people know Vodafone may be a vote a fun idea escape for us you know the organisation and of course you've got the CTO at so you know what that means inside your organization sure so what a fun idea is a company that came came to acclaim as a result of a merger about 18 months ago so the number two and number three operators in India which was Vodafone an idea came together to create a telco serving over 300 million subscribers and we've been integrating the the networks over the last 18 months and consolidating and doing one of the largest integration in the world of two networks comprising over 200 thousand sites and carrying you know more than 50 billion MB of traffic per hour per day serving more than 40 million voltaic customers and we have been duplicating the network very very busy with her and we taken down so far almost a hundred thousand base stations which is equivalent to the size of a large operator in us so that's about the carnahan that is about the scale of the the operator that word of an idea is and what we've been busy with for the last day yeah well well Besant of course the reason we're doing this event online is because right now with the global pandemic the vast majority of the population they're at home so you know healthcare of course you know one of the major concerns I actually have done interviews with some of the power and energy companies critically important at this time but you know telecommunications you know what one of the top of the list you know in normal times for what people need but today it's the the only way that we can all connect it so tell us a little bit about do you know what the current situation you know the impact and importance this really highlights of your business yeah so just as the rest of the world India is also in a lockdown and India actually has one of the largest the largest lockdown in the world putting all 1.3 billion people in a lockdown yeah across the entire country so within that context the telecom network is crucial to make sure that the life goes on the essential services are delivered the industry continues to still operate as the best it can and all of that is made possible because of a stable and reliable network that we offer so a huge huge impact on the society always has been but in in this current context it is even more more critical and crucial so what we do is we make sure that we are the invisible layer you talked about health healthcare workers and emergency services well we are the invisible essential service that probably many people don't see but we are the ones who are really helping this country survive this this crisis and so far we have seen 25 30% increase in traffic in a single day in one week we experienced the same amount of traffic growth we would have experienced in the entire year so we we scalability is very very critical in our network and we've been able to keep up with that kind of a growth and continue to serve the communities and in this crucial juncture and all this dude large extent has been made possible because of a large-scale deployment of cloud technologies that we have done over the last 18 months which has really helped us scale up a large lot of our capabilities in the back yeah I'd love if you could explain a little bit more on that it you know challenging times you know I'm curious the amount of people that are using your services probably haven't changed but the demand and how much they're using it as change a lot so cloud obviously gives you scalability but you know are there concerns about what this does the profitability how you maintain things how much of this is a temporary change and how much will this be you know I know in the United States there's a lot of talk about how much work from home will become more of a standard than it had been before this pandemic so you know short term what's the impact on your business and what are you and other telecommunication companies thinking about what long-term impact this will have >> I think that's a very very interesting question I think even for me and my organization what we have been able to do working from home is amazing I never would have thought that it was possible to do as much as we've been able to do just staying young with most of the work for staying at home and that has really I think happened across industries across the entire country I think many organizations have now realized that work from home or work from anywhere which is the other term he's gonna become quite possible and prevalent going forward because people have realized that you can just get you can get just as much productivity out you can get so many things done working from home and it gives so much more personal flexibility to the individuals so I see when I look back at our organizational experience I see our productivity has been actually quite good actually better then haha where probably even in the office days so I think that is definitely one thing that is gonna come out as a global change across all industries I think the second thing that is gonna happen is data analytics I think there is going to be far more analysis of data to understand patterns and understand trends and how to take advantage of that I think of course the immediate application is in the healthcare and the spread of the pandemic but I think this will spur a lot of other analytics I think the third thing is going to do is the adoption of digital as the primary mode digital was already something that most companies are working on as is a top priority but I think going outward is gonna become very evident to people that it is actually essential just talking about my business I can tell you today you know all the stores all the shops every place that we used to check our cell or recharge vouchers are closed so the only place we are able to get any revenue from is our digital channel and on end only place where customers have been able to recharge their prepaid subscriptions etc has all been through digital I think digital we will also become a massive massive requirement so in that context I think telecom will be seen as a critical critical backbone I think to a large extent it has been seen by many in the past is more of an essential commodity but I think many organizations will realise that this is actually a value creator so I think it's a great exciting opportunity for us to take advantage of those new business opportunities that will come and at the same time be a very very important player in the digital economy that every nation around the world is gonna press you know for Sean said it really appreciates some really good commentary there you know we've been talking for years about customers going through their digital transformation it's really about the data and how they leverage that and if you're data-driven then you really have gone through that transformation and you kind of described what we call the new innovation cocktail you're leveraging cloud that there's data you put those all together as to how you drive your company and you can drive innovation oftentimes when we think about what results we're going to get from deploying cloud and using these types of new technologies we think we know what we're gonna get but the reality of how your company is dealing with things today of course you know proves what you were hoping that build for here help us understand you know what we're talking here is part of red hat summit this week you know what's red hats role in this piece and you know how did the reality of rolling this out and then how it has helped you in the current global situation impacted your business sure oh so I would say actually the three words that I used digital cloud and analytics to me they're actually inseparable cuz I do not believe that you can have a digital business that is not based on cloud or that is not good at data analytics I think if you want to really have a successful cloud offering it implies that automatically that you are a digital business and you're gonna do extensive modern data and analytics and build those capabilities I think those are three inseparable terms now speaking specifically about a red head I would say that red head has been a very very critical partner for us right from the beginning 18 months ago when the two companies too came together to create this network we knew that we had to do several things number one was actually to have a completely rationalized structure which was around extracting the synergies from the from the merger but beyond that we needed to build a telco of the future technology company of the future which will let us transform the business and create capabilities that will give us a step ahead a leapfrog ahead of our competition and cloud was a very very essential part of the journey and we knew we needed to build a cloud based on open systems because we did not want to get into a proprietary logins with anybody and we are a very large business we have suffered a sufficiently large scale to really be able to build a very large cloud so we started working with Red Hat about two years ago and it in the last two years we have deployed 80 plus cloud locations distributed cloud locations across the country and these all of these clouds our vision is to orchestrate them as a single cloud our vision is to build a cloud there is a universal cloud actually that is the word there is a word we use when we talk about cloud it's a universal cloud what does that mean that means that cloud will carry not only the traditional telco workloads but it will also carry IT workloads it will also carry lot of the enterprise offerings we have so - for the end-user for our enterprise clients and all of those capabilities out to be accommodated with a platform that is versatile that is scalable and that is gonna give me in enormous amount of flexibility and control as a organization so Red Hat has been a very important part of the journey and on the red head OpenStack cloud today I have a Daffy's working from any major supplier you can think of I have any enemies working from Nokia Ericsson Huawei ziti even some smaller players like Marvin here so we have demonstrated that this is possible we've been able to break the lock in that the traditional naps have had on their cloud offerings which were really more of a virtualized offerings rather than a cloud computer is a truly universal cloud on the back of the technology provided by a red well that's that's fantastic congratulations on that I love the the result of what you're calling Universal Cloud is the promise that we talked about for a number of years you know is that nitty gritty networking piece it was like you know network functions virtualization and if be sitting an open stack and everybody's like well OpenStack am I trying to build a cloud to compete against the public cloud providers it was like no what you said exactly there's services that you want to be able to deliver and it's not just about oh we're getting away from hardware appliances it's you know just like most people today they're used to whatever smart device they're doing I want to be able to turn on channels and access new things that's your now you know reducing that barrier to Vodafone idea to deliver that to your users have I captured that properly that is correct as a matter of fact I'll just give you one proof point my water phone app is the app that we we have for our consumers and that app is currently running on my telco clock what used to be called the telco cloud so on that platform we are running my packet or actually there are about 40 and FB is for virtualized traditional calculations running alongside with an IT application a digital application okay so one of the things I you know I would like to understand there that what you've deployed there over the last couple of years sounds like a significant shift so you know you're talking about apps you're talking more of a developer type of environment bring us inside a little organizationally you know what new skills have new people had to learn has there been new people added to the organization have there been in a restructures what what is this this this whole initiative to get to universal cloud meant for your organization sure so I look after both the network and IT pieces of the part of parts of the company and you know we traditionally were in the past legacy we have had a IT cloud and we have heard indigo cloud what we are now creating is a single universal cloud what either of the two workloads are gonna be facilitated so for that actually the two organization the two parts of the organization need to come together and start to really work as one now it is very important that the telco guys understand the scale and the 99-year the five nines required in a running a network but at the same time IT guys also understand very much what all of the the flexibility that the business requires and the responsiveness required for the for the enterprise so bringing those two talents together I think in infusing that to create a single organization is one of the biggest challenges I think any telco has we also face it that is one aspect of it the second aspect of it is that there just aren't too many cloud experts in the world and we have been struggling with that I think skill shortage is a clear challenge for us now we try to address it using variety of means we of course try to upscale rescale lot of the traditional network core engineers that we have had we also try to use talent available or from consultants and then we also try to use our vendors so one of the concepts we've been working with our vendors is a concept of a resident engineer so we try to actually get them to second some of their engineers to work with us and at the same time we've been now working with both IBM and redhead to create a program to really go out and create a community around us of developers who can really work with this cloud and therefore we will have enough of skills available to leverage all of the potential benefits there are then the platform but can only be unleashed if I have the right skills and right people you touched on a very important issue it is a challenge but we are working our way through it and so far we've been a bit we make good all right well if it's shot I can't let a CTO go without looking a little bit into the future so want to help understand we talked about some of the technologies talked about transformation of what's happening your business what's happening your organization and there's some big waves coming week you know cloud is still in early days 5g of course you know is expected to have massive impact on on everyone's environment for this so what is the winning formula for the the telecoms going forward well I think Phi G is an exciting world we are a 4G network today the Phi G spectrum hasn't been auctioned in India but what we are building today is what I call a 4G plus network which means the lot of the architectural principles of PI G we have already applied in my core networks today and in my transport network in that world I think IOT is gonna play a very very big role and if you want to do things like IOT and if you want to do things like blockchain now I think telco cloud has a huge role to play because we are the telcos are traditionally the only ones in a country anywhere in the world who have experiences experience in operating in very far front powerful places dealing with lot of the infrastructure challenges especially if you're in a developing country you know that you have to work with a poor power availability poor transport etc I do not see any of the big guys the the big cloud players really having those capabilities today I think telcos are gonna play a very big role in enabling that pi g io t work and it is going to be an exciting journey for telcos I think telcos will very soon be called tech companies that is one thing that I strongly believe in I think also many of the things that depend on blockchain will require the kind of cloud that telcos will create because a telco cloud is far more demanding than a traditional IT application in many ways for example latency or for example throughputs now all those things aren't very important in blockchain apple type of applications I think that's another exciting opportunity for telcos really is to get into that and of course there are discussions about smart cities smart government government and because of Kovach kharkova crisis I think many governments are gonna explore new ways of organizing Society's new ways of governing economic activities and the backbone for a lot of those things is gonna be our telecom networks and the cloud distributed clouds to the edge that we create so I think it'll create many many exciting business opportunities as a consequence of some of those technological innovation yeah Shanta I can't remember who said it as they said don't waste a crisis but Vasant Bora CTO of Vodafone idea pleasure talking with you thank you so much for joining us hope you enjoy the Red Hat event as it is distributed this year and definitely look to be able to meet you sometime at a future physical event back when we have those in the future Thank You Stu it's been a pleasure meeting you virtually and look forward to these all right lots more coverage from the cubes Red Hat summit at 20/20 activity I'm Stu minimun and thanks as always for watching [Music]

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin, on the ground, at SAPPHIRE NOW 2018 in the NetApp booth with Keith Townsend for the day. Keith and I are joined by Scott Feldman, the Global Head of SAP HANA and Leonardo Communities. Scott, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, great to be here. >> So, communities, plural. Why are... Tell us about the communities at SAP. Why is there specifically an SAP HANA community, before we get into Leonardo? >> Okay, well it's kinda fun because you saw one community and then they say, "Well, go do another community." So you do one, and it's like, okay do one. Do another one. So we have, at SAP, a global community that runs on the SAP.com platform. That's for everybody. That's for all customers, all partners, all analysts, everybody. That's normally called a SAP community. What we realized back in, around 2012 or 2013, is that we wanted to have a special place where our SAP HANA early adopter customers could go and join and network with each other on an online presence, right, and then have an opportunity to share their knowledge with each other and get more information from SAP. So we created a separate community on SAP HANA. It's actually a pretty easy URL, it's called SAPHANACommunity.com. It's pretty simple to remember. And now, we've doing this for about five, six years. >> So talk to us about what's unique about the HANA community outside of the technology. SAP Communities, in general's already pretty big, very active community. >> Correct. >> But what was the call out or what was the results of creating the HANA community? >> Great, and that's a great question. So what's really interesting about the SAP HANA community is that the topic and coverage of the content is specifically related to SAP HANA, data management, database tools and technologies, analytics, and other surrounding areas that are connected to that HANA platform as an anchor. So we have provided, over the past five years, almost 300, 300 webinars of content on SAP HANA technology. A lot of that content has come from SAP product managers, a lot of it's come from solution experts, partners as well, have provided content. And they're in the form of webinar frameworks as well as whitepapers and other content that's on there. Now, the people that join the community, which is all free by the way for the customers that join, are mainly our SAP customers. Now I'm proud to tell you, here and also SAPPHIRE 2018, we're here, we're over 6,100 or so members, globally, of the SAP HANA community. And what's really great about that is, you know, relative to some of the millions of numbers of people throughout for other communities, it seems like, you know, 6,000 plus is a small number. But you have to keep in mind that it's very targeted, right? So the people that are through the door, and our members of the community on the SAP HANA Jam, we have it on our SAP Jam site which is hosting the SAP cloud platform. These are people that really are interested in that topic. And they really wanna learn about SAP HANA and the technology surrounding SAP HANA. So they're very, very high-qualified, high-quality people. >> Very engaged, it sounds like. >> Absolutely. >> So, speaking of that, so this morning during Bill McDermott's keynote, he mentioned 23,000 HANA customers. >> Yes. >> You mentioned 6,000 actively engaging in your community. >> Yes. >> Collaboration was a big theme of this morning, talking about, this is not grandpa's CRM anymore, what SAP is doing to break that status quo. How influential are those customers engaging in the HANA community to its development and its evolution? >> That's a fantastic question. So what's happened is the community... Think of almost like a pyramid. So the community of the large, vast number of people who have joined the community for interest in topics have mostly consumed information, they are kinda the base line of the pyramid. Some of those customers have some great stories to tell. Okay, so what we did was we started a webinar series in 2013 called Spotlight. And I'll take credit for the name, actually, 'cause we call it the SAP HANA Spotlight. And essentially, what we're doing is, imagine the customer in a spotlight where they're sharing their journey. They're sharing their SAP HANA story and their journey. So we launched that a number of years ago and now we've done almost 80 separate HANA Spotlight webinars with customers that are sharing their stories. Well we even took it one step further beyond that. In 2013, some of the executives from our early adopting customers for SAP HANA, they came over to SAP and they said, "Gee, SAP, we're betting our career "and our company survival "on this new technology called SAP HANA," back in 2013. And they basically came to us and said, "I wanna have a council." So we wanna have a council of influence so that we have an opportunity to get together, share stories, share our journeys with each other, get to know who the other customers are that are also early adopters and are embarking on this journey with us together, and then, more importantly, to answer your question, feed that information back to SAP development so that we could, back at SAP, improve the product and come out with some additional features and functions and make it even better. Well that was 2013. Our very first meeting was up in Canada, in a suburb in Toronto, at one of our customer locations. We had 13 people in that meeting. Today, dial up six years, we're at over 750 members of an executive, so these are C-level VPS, senior IT, and chief architects that are in our community globally. We've done 24 meetings, I'm about to schedule the 25th meeting, and I've globalized that. And the customers, I thought they would've been tired of these kinds of meetings, they love it. They absolutely love it. So again, going back to that analogy, this is kind of the high peak point of the pyramid. We get the executives that are making these decisions and we talk about thought leadership. We don't talk about features and functionality. We do talk about road maps, we talk about investments that they need to make, and we anchor it again on the SAP HANA platform but we're bringing in other technologies and components like analytics or SAP Leonardo, right, or S/4 HANA, right. Now that it's announced, we'll bring in C/4 HANA. So we'll cover other topics as well, and of course the cloud platform. >> So you set it up, rinse and repeat, now we're at Leonardo. >> Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. >> What is, first off, what is Leonardo? Great name, I love the name. But what is it? >> So SAP Leonardo is a methodology. It's an opportunity for our customers to co-design, co-invent, and get engaged in the design thinking process to understand how data, and we talked about this today, how we can, how data and how knowledge can enable an intelligent enterprise. And it's a process. So what people need to understand, and customers work with at SAP and they could go to the SAP Leonardo booth areas at the conferences and see as many testers as they wish. But essentially it's a foundation. It's an understanding of, how do I take where I am today from my own understanding of how I operate my business, and where do I need to go, what is my next gem process? Where do I need to be in five years to be that thought leader and how do I get there? So how do I take data that I know and data that I don't know? We have, I just ran into one of our customers... We run a program out of our team as well called the SAP Innovation Awards. It started off as the HANA Innovation Awards and now we cover all technologies and all topics for customer innovation. So SAP Leonardo, cloud platform solutions, SAP HANA solutions, data management solutions, these are all innovative offerings. We just announced all the winners, we have a actually ceremony tomorrow night where all the winners have been announced and they're gonna be receiving their trophies. We've been doing this for many years. What's interesting about that is all the innovative projects that are coming from the customer programs, projects, innovations. What are they doing? How are they co-innovating? Are they co-innovating with SAP? Are they doing smart farming? We have one winner that's actually doing smart farming, micro-crop planting to understand soil composition. And humidity and moisture composition is different even if you go one meter away on this, one meter, which is nothing. >> You're right. >> For the Americans listening, it's three feet. (everyone laughs) And that's pretty close. And they can actually combine different crop plantings based on soil conditions and compositions and this is all being monitored in the SAP HANA cloud. So this is really phenomenal. >> Yeah, that would be. >> And we love these kinds of stories. And what we're doing now, as you can imagine. You're probably gonna ask me, how do you connect the dots? Well it was pretty easy to connect the dots. We have the customers that are presented these great programs. They've created these great values that they're providing to their industry, right? And they're great wins and successes. And we're leveraging those customers in the community as thought leaders. And we're also doing sessions like that. I'd like to get them on theCUBE. Have them talk about some of the things >> That would be great. >> that they're doing. >> We would have fun. We love customer stories. >> I love it. I think it would be phenomenal. >> So, let's talk bout the dynamics of running a community program that featured around a product. And HANA, very straightforward, is about the tech, a lot of it was speeds and fees transitioned into solutions. >> Right. >> When you start out with something as ambitious as Leonardo framework, are the dynamics different, like what are, what is the community like? >> A little bit 'cause SAP HANA is the foundation. And we saw this today at the keynotes today. And Bill's keynote was phenomenal and we saw that how he was positioning this and it's all about the intelligent enterprise and SAP HANA as a foundation, it's fantastic. And we've been doing this for a lot of years. But what do we do to build upon that? When we established the foundational community for SAP HANA, people started coming in and wanting to understand everything about the HANA community. We did a couple fundamental things. Number one, we connected with the SAP HANA Academy. And I'll give a shout out to my friends at the academy, I love them to death, and we've been partnering with them for five plus years. The SAP HANA Academy is a YouTube site of thousands of videos on how to do anything. It could be data management, it could be data hub, it could be Vora which is the connected to Hadoop. It could be SAP HANA. It could be analytics. And there's thousands, literally thousands of videos on how to just about do anything that you want connected to the community. So the people and the SAP HANA Academy team has presented content, webinars on our community broadcasting at least for the last... This year they did one, they do like two or three every year for the last number of years. What we did with SAP Leonardo was, Leonardo can be thought of as a combination of the technologies. So we have, as you know, with machine learning, IoT, blockchain, right, analytics and a whole bunch of other things, design thinking methodologies that are in Leonardo, so what we did is we took a lot of that and created a series of webinars and content. We just finished something called the SAP Digital Transformation Series featuring SAP Leonardo in conjunction with ASUG, the America User Group, that's our co-conference sponsor here and we love them to death. And what we did was do the 14-part webinar series. We had thousands of people come onto these calls and each call covered, for example, Mala, who's our president, she did what is the overview of Leonardo? How do we do this? We covered analytics with Mike Flannagan. Maricel covered design thinking. And then we went from there. Then we covered the solutions themselves. What is IoT, what is blockchain, what is machine learning? How do you understand what these things do and how they impact your organization? Then we took it one step further. We went into the industry solutions. So the partners are developing industry solutions. The industry accelerates, we talked a little bit earlier, there's a press release that just came out on that, on some of the.. >> The Partner Medallion Initiative. >> The Premiere Medallion Initiative, right. My friend Mike is running, from the Leonardo team. And that is certifying partners for the specific solutions that they're building around the industry, the deliverables that they have around the SAP Leonardo, we feature that as well. So all of that content was in this series and we continue to build upon that. What we really want, though, now is we wanna do what we did this time last year which was, we want the customer stories. So we've done, I've told you, we've done a lot of webinars in the community. So a lot of content going to the members of the community from the experts that understand that content. Next step, second half of the year, is we want those customer stories out there. So those 80 or so webinars that I mentioned that we did with our customer Spotlights, we want those Spotlights now. So we'll focus those... Anybody watching, give me those Spotlights. We want those stories. We want the customers to really articulate their story, their challenges, their successes, their wins, what are they doing to the SAP technology that-- >> You're preaching to the choir about customer marketing persons so that there's no better value-- >> Isn't it great? >> Brand validation, than the voice of the customer. Speaking of brand validation, I heard this morning that Bill McDermott announced that you guys are now 17 on the top 100 global most valuable brands. >> Absolutely. >> He wants to be in the top 10. >> And we're proud of that. I'm part of that team. >> Up four. You're doing this with a tremendous amount of partners is what you mentioned, partners. We're in the NetApp booth. >> Correct. >> Talk to us about what SAP and NetApp are doing in the community to enable this amazing amount of education that you're doing. >> So that's a great find. I mean, SAP wouldn't be where it is today, and I've been with SAP for (chuckles) I don't wanna say the number of years but people watch me and they know I've been at SAP a long time. It's like you can't say Scott Feldman without SAP. So it's been kind of anchored in for a long time. It's sort of the blood, the blue blood runs in the DNA you know. It was just kind of fun. But some of the partners that we've worked with in the communities have taken it to another step. NetApp is one of those. And I love working with NetApp. They're a strategic technology provider and a fantastic global partner with SAP. I know you just heard from RJ who did an interview, we work a lot with him and his team as well, Roland and the rest of the team. And what NetApp has done is they've made another strategic investment with us in the communities, for the HANA community and the Leonardo community such that they're a name-sponsored partner. And what's really nice about that is we have a special spot and if you go to the SAPHANACommunity.com site, or if you're already a member, or the other one is, you can guess, SAPLeonardoCommunity.com, very similar, right? If you go to either one of those sites, you'll find that there's a spot for partners that are specific to that community, that have taken the next step to add additional value. NetApp is there, there's a page. And what we've done is we've created a page with all the NetApp content on, what is NetApp's contribution on SAP HANA and Leonardo? Where is the value proposition? Why NetApp? What are they doing with SAP? Where are the links that we can go for all the content that NetApp has provided to us to post in that community? And not only that, NetApp is also an outstanding member, upstanding member of the SAP HANA CL Council Community 'cause they also run SAP. And, in addition to that, NetApp is a strategic partner that provides webinar content for SAP, for the community. So, about once a quarter, there'll be a webinar that is sponsored by NetApp and now I'm bugging them a little bit to get the customers in front of the webinar so we can have these little-- >> There must be some NetApp-SAP Customer Spotlights just waiting to come into the surface, right? >> Oh, absolutely. And we're doing them in small snippets so what's really great about that, it's kinda like this discussion that we're having, these small chunks. 'Cause I think the new wave of doing things, >> Snackable content. >> And I could certainly tell you're from the generation that's just maybe a little bit younger, is that they don't have time to sit down and watch a webinar for one hour. But they'll take it in 20-minute doses. They'll just like, "Man, give me "all the 20-minute webinars you want." It's like, I'll just give me a chunk and I'll take it and boom. I really want that. So that's been a lot of fun. So NetApp's been a fantastic strategic partner and we'll continue to partner with them moving forward. >> So I'm hearing a lot of collaboration, a lot of participation, energy just radiating, I think off from the main stage-- >> Oh I don't like the community, just do the watch, uncles love it. >> From the main stage to what you're talking about, what with what you guys are doing and I love to hear that the customers are being recognized for their innovation. Not just-- >> They are, yeah. >> Transforming their businesses, new revenue streams, new business models, but leveraging their partners like SAP, like NetApp, to become the intelligent enterprise and change industries. >> Absolutely, Lisa. And they're becoming the thought leaders of their own industry. So if you want to become a leader or a thought leader in your own specific industry, join the SAP HANA Community, make the investments in SAP Leonardo, work with SAP, work with NetApp, and like Bill says, let's get it done. >> Let's get it done. Scott, thanks so much for stopping by and chatting with Keith and me this morning. >> Thank you for your time, it's been my pleasure. >> And enjoy the rest of the event. >> I look forward to it. >> All right. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend on theCUBE from the NetApp booth at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Thanks for watching. (funky music)

>> Announcer: From San Jose, California, it's The Cube, covering Big Data Silicon Valley 2017. >> Welcome back everyone. We are at Big Data Silicon Valley, running in conjunction with Strata + Hadoop World in San Jose. I'm George Gilbert and I'm joined by Raymie Stata, and Raymie was most recently CEO and Founder of Altiscale. Hadoop is a service vendor. One of the few out there, not part of one of the public clouds. And in keeping with all of the great work they've done, they got snapped up by SAP. So, Rami, since we haven't seen you, I think on The Cube since then, why don't you catch us up with all that, the good work that's gone on between you and SAP since then. >> Sure, so the acquisition closed back in September, so it's been about six months. And it's been a very busy six months. You know, there's just a lot of blocking and tackling that needs to happen. So, you know, getting people on board. Getting new laptops, all that good stuff. But certainly a huge effort for us was to open up a data center in Europe. We've long had demand to have that European presence, both because I think there's a lot of interest over in Europe itself, but also large, multi-national companies based in the US, you know, it's important for them to have that European presence as well. So, it was a natural thing to do as part of SAP, so kind of first order of business was to expand over into Europe. So that was a big exercise. We've actually had some good traction on the sales side, right, so we're getting new customers, larger customers, more demanding customers, which has been a good challenge too. >> So let's pause for a minute on, sort of unpack for folks, what Altiscale offered, the core services. >> Sure. >> That were, you know, here in the US, and now you've extended to Europe. >> Right. So our core platform is kind of Hadoop, Hive, and Spark, you know, as a service in the cloud. And so we would offer HDFS and YARN for Hadoop. Spark and Hive kind of well-integrated. And we would offer that as a cloud service. So you would just, you know, get an account, login, you know, store stuff in HDFS, run your Spark programs, and the way we encourage people to think about it is, I think very often vendors have trained folks in the big data space to think about nodes. You know, how many nodes am I going to get? What kind of nodes am I going to get? And the way we really force people to think twice about Hadoop and what Hadoop as a service means is, you know, they don't, why are you asking that? You don't need to know about nodes. Just store stuff, run your jobs. We worry about nodes. And that, you know, once people kind of understood, you know, just how much complexity that takes out of their lives and how that just enables them to truly focus on using these technologies to get business value, rather that operating them. You know, there's that aha moment in the sales cycle, where people say yeah, that's what I want. I want Hadoop as a service. So that's been our value proposition from the beginning. And it's remained quite constant, and even coming into SAP that's not changing, you know, one bit. >> So, just to be clear then, it's like a lot of the operational responsibilities sort of, you took control over, so that when you say, like don't worry about nodes, it's customer pours x amount of data into storage, which in your case would be HDFS, and then compute is independent of that. They need, you spin up however many, or however much capacity they need, with Spark for instance, to process it, or Hive. Okay, so. >> And all on demand. >> Yeah so it sounds like it's, how close to like the Big Query or Athena services, Athena on AWS or Big Query on Google? Where you're not aware of any servers, either for storage or for compute? >> Yeah I think that's a very good comparable. It's very much like Athena and Big Query where you just store stuff in tables and you issue queries and you don't worry about how much compute, you know, and managing it. I think, by throwing, you know, Spark in the equation, and YARN more generally, right, we can handle a broader range of these cases. So, for example, you don't have to store data in tables, you can store them into HDFS files which is good for processing log data, for example. And with Spark, for example, you have access to a lot of machine learning algorithms that are a little bit harder to run in the context of, say, Athena. So I think it's the same model, in terms of, it's fully operated for you. But a broader platform in terms of its capabilities. >> Okay, so now let's talk about what SAP brought to the table and how that changed the use cases that were appropriate for Altiscale. You know, starting at the data layer. >> Yeah, so, I think the, certainly the, from the business perspective, SAP brings a large, very engaged customer base that, you know, is eager to embrace, kind of a data-driven mindset and culture and is looking for a partner to help them do that, right. And so that's been great to be in that environment. SAP has a number of additional technologies that we've been integrating into the Altiscale offering. So one of them is Vora, which is kind of an interactive sequel engine, it also has time series capabilities and graph capabilities and search capabilities. So it has a lot of additive capabilities, if you will, to what we have at Altiscale. And it also integrates very deeply into HANA itself. And so we now have that for a technology available as a service at Altiscale. >> Let me make sure, so that everyone understands, and so I understand too, is that so you can issue queries from HANA and they can, you know, beyond just simple sequel queries, they can handle the time series, and predictive analytics, and access data sort of seamlessly that's in Hadoop, or can it go the other way as well? >> It's both ways. So you can, you know, from HANA you can essentially federate out into Vora. And through that access data that's in a Hadoop cluster. But it's also the other way around. A lot of times there's an analyst who really lives in the big data world, right, they're in the Hadoop world, but they want to join in data that's sitting in a HANA database, you know. Might be dimensions in a warehouse or, you know, customer details even in a transactional system. And so, you know, that Hadoop-based analyst now has access to data that's out in those HANA databases. >> Do you have some Lighthouse accounts that are working with this already? >> Yes, we do. (laughter) >> Yes we do, okay. I guess that was the diplomatic way of saying yes. But no comment. Alright, so tell us more about SAPs big data stack today and how that might evolve. >> Yeah, of course now, especially that now we've got the Spark, Hadoop, Hive offering that we have. And then four sitting on top of that. There's an offering called Predictive Analytics, which is Spark-based predictive analytics. >> Is that something that came from you, or is that, >> That's an SAP thing, so this is what's been great about the acquisition is that SAP does have a lot of technologies that we can now integrate. And it brings new capabilities to our customer base. So those three are kind of pretty key. And then there's something called Data Services as well, which allows us to move data easily in and out of, you know, HANA and other data stores. >> Is it, is this ability to federate queries between Hadoop and HANA and then migration of the data between the stores, does that, has that changed the economics of how much data people, SAP customers, maintain and sort of what types of apps they can build on it now that they might, it's economically feasible to store a lot more data. >> Well, yes and no. I think the context of Altiscale, both before and after the acquisition is very often there's, what you might call a big data source, right. It could be your web logs, it could be some IOT generated log data, it could be social media streams. You know, this is data that's, you know, doesn't have a lot of structure coming in. It's fairly voluminous. It doesn't, very naturally, go into a sequel database, and that's kind of the sweet spot for the big data technologies like Hadoop and Spark. So, those datas come into your big data environment. You can transform it, you can do some data quality on it. And then you can eventually stage it out into something like HANA data mart, where it, you know, to make it available for reporting. But obviously there's stuff that you can do on the larger dataset in Hadoop as well. So, in a way, yes, you can now tame, if you will, those huge data sources that, you know, weren't practical to put into HANA databasing. >> If you were to prioritize, in the context of, sort of, the applications SAP focuses on, would you be, sort of, with the highest priority use case be IOT related stuff, where, you know, it was just prohibitive to put it in HANA since it's mostly in memory. But, you know, SAP is exposed to tons of that type of data, which would seem to most naturally have an afinity to Altiscale. >> Yeah, so, I mean, IOT is a big initiative. And is a great use case for big data. But, you know, financial-to-financial services industry, as another example, is fairly down the path using Hadoop technologies for many different use cases. And so, that's also an opportunity for us. >> So, let me pop back up, you know, before we have to wrap. With Altiscale as part of the SAP portfolio, have the two companies sort of gone to customers with a more, with more transformational options, that, you know, you'll sell together? >> Yeah, we have. In fact, Altiscale actually is no longer called Altiscale, right? We're part of a portfolio of products, you know, known as the SAP Cloud Platform. So, you know, under the cloud platform we're the big data services. The SAP Cloud Platform is all about business transformation. And business innovation. And so, we bring to that portfolio the ability to now bring the types of data sources that I've just discussed, you know, to bear on these transformative efforts. And so, you know, we fit into some momentum SAP already has, right, to help companies drive change. >> Okay. So, along those lines, which might be, I mean, we know the financial services has done a lot of work with, and I guess telcos as well, what are some of the other verticals that look like they're primed to fall, you know, with this type of transformational network? >> So you mentioned one, which I kind of call manufacturing, right, and there tends to be two kind of different use cases there. One of them I call kind of the shop floor thing. Where you're collecting a lot of sensor data, you know, out of a manufacturing facility with the goal of increasing yield. So you've got the shop floor. And then you've got the, I think, more commonly discussed measuring stuff out in the field. You've got a product, you know, out in the field. Bringing the telemetry back. Doing things like predictive meetings. So, I think manufacturing is a big sector ready to go for big data. And healthcare is another one. You know, people pulling together electronic medical records, you know trying to combine that with clinical outcomes, and I think the big focus there is to drive towards, kind of, outcome-based models, even on the payment side. And big data is really valuable to drive and assess, you know, kind of outcomes in an aggregate way. >> Okay. We're going to have to leave it on that note. But we will tune back in at I guess Sapphire or TechEd, whichever of the SAP shows is coming up next to get an update. >> Sapphire's next. Then TechEd. >> Okay. With that, this is George Gilbert, and Raymie Stata. We will be back in few moments with another segment. We're here at Big Data Silicon Valley. Running in conjunction with Strata + Hadoop World. Stay tuned, we'll be right back.

>> Narrator: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, this is theCUBE, covering Spark Summit East 2017. Brought to you by Databricks. Now, here are your hosts Dave Vellante and George Gilbert. >> Welcome back to Boston, everybody, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here in Boston, in snowy Boston. This is Spark Summit. Spark Summit does a East Coast version, they do a West Coast version, they've got one in Europe this year. theCUBE has been a partner with Databricks as the live broadcast partner. Our friend Bill Peterson is here. He's the head of partner marketing at MapR. Bill, good to see you again. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> So how's the show going for you? >> It's great. >> Give us the vibe. We're kind of windin' down day two. >> It is. The show's been great, we've got a lot of traffic coming by, a lot of deep technical questions which is-- >> Dave: Hardcore at the show-- >> It is, it is. I spend a lot of time there smiling and going, "Yeah, talk to him." (laughs) But it's great. We're getting those deep technical questions and it's great. We actually just got one on Lustre, which I had to think for a minute, oh, HPC. It was like way back in there. >> Dave: You know, Cray's on the floor. >> Oh, yeah that's true. But a lot of our customers as well. UnitedHealth Group, Wells Fargo, AMEX coming by. Which is great to see them and talk to them, but also they've got some deep technical questions for us. So it's moving the needle with existing customers but also new business, which is great. >> So I got to ask a basic question. What is MapR? MapR started in the early days of Hadoop distro, vendor, one of the big three. When somebody says to you what is MapR, what do you say? My answer today is MapR is an enterprise software company that delivers a converged data platform. That converged data platform consists of a file system, a NoSQL database, a Hadoop distribution, a Spark distribution, and a set of data management tools. And as a customer of MapR, you get all of those. You can turn 'em all on if you'd like. You can just turn on the file system, for example, if you wanted to just use the file system for storage. But the enterprise software piece of that is all the hardening we do behind the scenes on things like snapshots, mirroring, data governance, multi-tenancy, ease of use performance, all of that baked in to the solution, or the platform as we're calling it now. So as you're kind of alluding to, a year ago now we kind of got out of that business of saying okay, lead 100% with Hadoop and then while we have your attention, or if we don't, hey wait, we got all this other stuff in the basket we want to show you, we went the platform play and said we're going to include everything and it's all there and then the baseline underneath is the hardening of it, the file system, the database, and the streaming product, actually, which I didn't mention, which is kind of the core, and everything plays off of there. And that honestly has been really well-received. And it just, I feel, makes it so much easier because-- It happened here, we get the question, okay, how are you different from Cloudera or Hortonworks? And some of it here, given the nature of the attendees, is very technical, but there's been a couple of business users that I've talked to. And when I talk about us as an enterprise software company delivering a plethora of solutions versus just Hadoop, you can see the light going on sometimes in people's eyes. And I got it today, earlier, "I had no idea you had a file system," which, to me, just drives me insane because the file system is pretty cool, right? >> Well you guys are early on in investing in that file system and recovery capabilities and all the-- >> Two years in stealth writing it. >> Nasty, gnarly, hard stuff that was kind of poo-pooed early on. >> Yeah, yeah. MapR was never patient about waiting for the open source community to just figure it out and catch up. You always just said all right, we're going to solve this problem and go sell. >> And I'm glad you said that. I want to be clear. We're not giving up on open source or anything, right? Open source is still a big piece. 50% of our engineers' time is working on open source projects. That's still super important to us. And then back in November-ish last year we announced the MapR Ecosystem Packs, which is our effort to help our customers that are using open source components to stay current. 'Cause that's a pain in the butt. So this is a set of packages that have a whole bunch of components. We lead with Spark and Drill, and that was by customer request, that they were having a hard time keeping current with Spark and Drill. So the packs allow them to come up to current level within the converged data platform for all of their open source components. And that's something we're going to do at dot Level, so I think we're at 2.1 or 2 now. The dot levels will bring you up on everything and then the big ones, like the 3.0s, the 4.0s, will bring Spark and Drill current. And so we're going to kind of leapfrog those. So that's still a really important part of our business and we don't want to forget that part, but what we're trying here to do is, via the platform, is deliver all of that in one entity, right? >> So the converged data platform is relevant presumably because you've got the history of Hadoop, 'cause you got all these different components and you got to cobble 'em together and they're different interfaces and different environments, you're trying to unify that and you have unified that, right? >> Yeah, yeah. >> So what is your customer feedback with regard to the converged data platform? >> Yeah so it's a great question because for existing customers, it was like, ah, thank you. It was one of those, right, because we're listening. Actually, again, glad you said that. This week, in addition to Spark Summit we're doing our yearly customer advisory board so we've got, like a lot of vendors, we've got a 30 plus company customer advisory board that we bring in and we sit down with them for a couple of days and they give us feedback on what we should and shouldn't be doing and where, directional and all that, which is super important. And that's where a lot of this converged data platform came out of is the need for... There was just too much, it's kind of confusing. I'll give the example of streams, right? We came out with our streaming product last year and okay, I'm using Hadoop, I'm using your file system, I'm using NoSQL, now you're adding streams, this is great, but now, like MEP, the Ecosystem Packages, I have to keep everything current. You got to make it easier for me, you got to make my life easier for me. So for existing customers it's a stay current, I like this, the model, I can turn on and off what I want when I want. Great model for them, existing business. For new business it gets us out of that Hadoop-only mode, right? I kind of jokingly call us Hadoop plus plus plus plus. We keep adding solutions and add it to a single, cohesive data platform that we keep updated. And as I mentioned here, talking to new customers or new prospects, our potential new business, when I describe the model you can just see the light going on and they realize wow, there's a lot more to this than I had imagined. I got it earlier today, I thought you guys only did Hadoop. Which is a little infuriating as a marketer, but I think from a mechanism and a delivery and a message and a story point of view, it's really helped. >> More Cube time will help get this out there. (laughs) >> Well played, well played. >> It's good to have you back on. Okay, so Spark comes along a couple years ago and it was like ah, what's going to happen to Hadoop? So you guys embraced Spark. Talk more specifically about Spark, where it fits in your platform and the ecosystem generally. >> Spark, Hadoop, others as a entity to bring data into the converged data platform, that's one way to think about it. Way oversimplified, obviously, but that's a really great way, I think, to think about it is if we're going to provide this platform that anybody can query on, you can run analytics against. We talk a lot about now converged applications. So taking historical data, taking operational data, so streaming data, great example. Putting those together and you could use the Data Lake example if you want, that's fine. But putting them into a converged application in the middle where they overlap, kind of typical Venn diagram where they overlap, and that middle part is the converged application. What's feeding that? Well, Spark could be feeding that, Hadoop could be feeding that. Just yesterday we announced a Docker for containers, that could be feeding into the converged data platform as well. So we look at all of these things as an opportunity for us to manage data and to make data accessible at the enterprise level. And then that enterprise level goes back to what I was talkin' before, it's got to have all of those things, like multi-tenancy and snapshots and mirroring and data governance, security, et cetera. But Spark is a big component of that. All of the customers who came by here that I mentioned earlier, which are some really good names for us, are all using Spark to drive data into the converged data platform. So we look at it as we can help them build new applications within converged data platform with that data. So whether it's Spark data, Hadoop data, container data, we don't really care. >> So along those lines, if the focus of intense interest right now is on Spark, and Spark says oh, and we work with all these databases, data storers, file systems, if you approach a customer who's Spark first, what's the message relative to all the other data storers that they can get to through, without getting too techy, their API? >> Sure, sure. I think as you know, George, we support a whole bunch of APIs. So I guess for us it's the breadth. >> But I'm thinking of Spark in particular. If someone says specifically, I want to run Databricks, but I need something underneath it to capture the data and to manage it. >> Well I think that's the beauty of our file system there. As I mentioned, if you think about it from an architectural point of view, our file system along the bottom, or it could be our database or our streaming product, but in this instance-- >> George: That's what I'm getting at too, all three. >> Picture that as the bottom layer as your storage-- I shouldn't say storage layer but as the bottom layer. 'Cause it's not just storage, it's more than storage. Middle layer is maybe some of your open source tools and the like, and then above that is what I called your data delivery mechanisms. Which would be Spark, for example, one bucket. Another bucket could be Hadoop, and another bucket could be these microservices we're talking about. Let my draw the picture another way using a partner, SAP. One of the things we've had some success with SAP is SAP HANA sitting up here. SAP would love to have you put all your data in HANA. It's probably not going to happen. >> George: Yeah, good luck. >> Yeah, good luck, right? But what if you, hey customer, what if you put zero to two years worth of data, historical data, in HANA. Okay, maybe the customer starts nodding their head like you just did. Hey customer, what if you put two to five years worth of data in Business Warehouse. Guess what, you already own that. You've been an SAP customer for awhile, you already have it. Okay, the customer's now really nodding their head. You got their attention. To your original question, whether it's Spark or whatever, five plus years, put it in MapR. >> Oh, and then like HANA Vora could do the query. >> Drill can query across all of them. >> Oh, right including the Business Warehouse, okay. >> So we're running in the file system. That, to me, and we do this obviously with our joint SAP MapR customers, that to me is kind of a really cool vision. And to your original question, if that was Spark at the top feeding it rather than SAP, sure, right? Why not? >> What can you share with us, Bill, about business metrics around MapR? However you choose to share it, head count, want to give us gross margins by product, that's great, but-- (laughs) >> Would you like revenues too, Dave? >> We know they're very high because you're a software company, so that's actually a bad question. I've already profit-- (laughs) >> You don't have to give us top line revenues-- >> So what are you guys saying publicly about the company, its growth. >> That's fair. >> Give us the latest. >> Fantastic, number one. Hiring like crazy, we're well north of 500 people now. I actually, you want to hear a funny story? I yesterday was texting in the booth, with a candidate from my team, back and forth on salary. Did the salary negotiation on text right there in the booth and closed her, she starts on the 27th, so. >> Dave: Congratulations. >> I'm very excited about that. So moving along on that. Seven, 800 plus customers as we talk about... We just finished our fiscal year on January 31st, so we're on Feb one fiscal year. And we always do a momentum press release, which will be coming out soon. Hiring, again, like crazy, as I mentioned, executive staff is all filled in and built to scale which we're really excited about. We talk a lot about the kind of uptake of-- it used to be of the file system, Hadoop, et cetera on its own, but now in this one the momentum release we'll be doing, we'll talk about the converged data platform and the uplift we've seen from that. So we obviously can't talk revenue numbers and the like, but everything... David, I got to tell you, we've been doin' this a long time, all of that is just all moving in the right direction. And then the other example I'll give you from my world, in the partner world. Last year I rebranded our partner to the converged partner program. We're going with this whole converged thing, right? And we established three levels, elite, preferred, and affiliate with different levels there. But also, there's revenue requirements at each level, so elite, preferred, and affiliate, and there's resell and influence revenues, we have MDF funds, not only from the big guys coming to us, but we're paying out MDF funds now to select partners as well. So all of this stuff I always talk about as the maturity of the company, right? We're maturing in our messaging, we're maturing in the level of people who are joining, and we're maturing in the customers and the deals, the deal sizes and volumes that we're seeing. It's all movin' in the right direction. >> Dave: Great, awesome, congratulations. >> Bill: Thank you, yeah, I'm excited. >> Can you talk about number of customers or number of employees relative to last year? >> Oh boy. Honestly, George, I don't know off the top of my head. I apologize, I don't know the metric, but I know it's north of 500 today, of employees, and it's like seven, 800 customers. >> Okay, okay. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And a little bit more on this partner, elite, preferred, and affiliate. >> Affiliate, yeah. >> What did you call it, the converged partners program? >> Converged-- Yeah, yeah. >> What are some of the details of that? >> Sure. So the elites are invite only, and those are some of the bigger ones. So for us, we're-- >> Dave: Like, some examples. >> Cisco, SAP, AWS, others, but those are some of the big ones. And they were looking at things like resell and influence revenue. That's what I track in my... I always jokingly say at MapR, even though we're kind of a big startup now, I always jokingly say at MapR you have three jobs. You have the job you were hired for, you have your Thursday night job, and you have your Sunday night job. (Dave and George laugh) In the job that I was hired for, partner marketing, I track influence and resell revenue. So at the elite level, we're doing both. Like Cisco resells us, so this S-Series, we're in their SKU, their sales reps can go sell an S-Series for big data workloads or analytical workloads, MapR, on it, off you go. Our job then is cashing checks, which I like. That's a good job to have in this business. At the preferred level it's kind of that next tier of big players, but revenue thresholds haven't moved into the elite yet. Partners in there, like the MicroStrategies of the world, we're doing a lot with them, Tableau, Talend, a lot of the BI vendors in there. And then the affiliates are the smaller guys who maybe we'll do one piece of a campaign during the year with them. So I'll give you an example, Attunity, you guys know those guys right here? >> Sure >> Yeah, yeah. >> Last year we were doing a campaign on DWO, data warehouse offload. We wanted to bring them in but this was a MapR campaign running for a quarter, and we're typical, like a lot of companies, we run four campaigns a year and then my partner in field stuff kind of opts into that and we run stuff to support it. And then corporate marketing does something. Pretty traditional. But what I try and do is pull these partners into those campaigns. So we did a webinar with Attunity as part of that campaign. So at the affiliate level, the lower level, we're not doing a full go-to-market like we would with the elites at the top, but they're being brought into our campaigns and then obviously hopefully, we hope on the other side they're going to pull us in as well. >> Great, last question. What should we pay attention to, what's comin' up? >> Yeah, so-- >> Let's see, we got some events, we got Strata coming up you'll be out your way, or out MapR way. >> As my Twitter handle says, seat 11A. That's where I am. (laughs) Yeah, I mean the Docker announcement we're really excited about, and microservices. You'll see more from us on the whole microservices thing. Streaming is still a big one, we think, for this year. You guys probably agree. That's why we announced the MapR streaming product last year. So again, from a go-to-market point of view and kind of putting some meat behind streaming not only MapR but with partners, so streaming as a component and a delivery model for managing data in CDP. I think that's a big one. Machine learning is something that we're seeing more and more touching us from a number of customers but also from the partner perspective. I see all the partner requests that come in to join the partner program, and there's been an uptick in the machine learning customers that want to come in and-- Excuse me, partners, that want to be talking to us. Which I think is really interesting. >> Where you would be the sort of prediction serving layer? >> Exactly, exactly. Or a data store. A lot of them are looking for just an easy data store that the MapR file system can do. >> Infrastructure to support that, yeah. >> Commodity, right? The whole old promise of Hadoop or just a generic file system is give me easy access to storage on commodity hardware. The machine learning-- >> That works. >> Right. The existing machine learning vendors need an answer for that. When the customer asks them, they want just an easy answer, say oh, we just use MapR FS for that and we're done. Okay, that's fine with me, I'll take that one. >> So that's the operational end of that machine learning pipeline that we call DevOps for data scientists? >> Correct, right. I guess the nice synergy there is the whole, going back to the Docker microservices one, there's a DevOps component there as well. So, might be interesting marrying those together. >> All right, we got to go, Bill, thanks very much, good to see you again. >> All right, thank you. >> All right, George and I will be back to wrap. We're going to part two of our big data forecast right now, so stay with us, right back. (digital music) (synth music)

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

>> Voiceover: From Orlando, Florida, it's theCube, covering Sapphire now, headline sponsored by SAP, Hana, the Cloud, the leader in Platform as a service, with support from Console Inc, the cloud internet company, now here are your hosts, John Furrier, and Peter Burris. >> Hey welcome back everyone, we are here live at SAP Sapphire in Orlando, Florida, this is theCube, Silicon Angle Media's flagship program, we go out to the events and extract the scene of the noise, I'm John Furrier with my co-host Peter Burris, our next guest is Matt Hayes, VP of SAP Business, Attunity, welcome to theCube. >> Thank you, thank you so much. >> So great to have you on, get the update on Attunity. You've been on theCube many times, you guys have been great supporters of theCube, appreciate that, and want to get a little update, so obviously Attunity, it's all about big data, Hana is a big data machine, it does a lot of things fast, certainly analystics being talked about here, but how do you guys fit in with SAP, what's your role here? How does it fit? >> Sure sure, well I think this is our ninth of tenth time here at Sapphire, we've been in the ecosystem for quite some time, our Gold Client solution is really designed to help SAP customers move data from production to non-production systems, and now, more throughout the landscape, or the enterprise even, so as SAP's evolved, we've evolved with SAP and a lot of our customers get a lot of value by taking real-life production data out of their production system, and moving that to non-production systems, training, sandbox, test environments. Some customer's use it for troubleshooting, you know, you have a problem with some data in production, you can bring that into a non-production system and test that, and some scrambling capabilities as well. Most SAP customers have a lot of risk if their copying the production data into non-production systems that are less secure, less regulated, so some of the data scrambling or obfuscation techniques that we have make it so that that data can safely go into those non-production systems and be protected. >> What's been your evolution? I mean obviously you mentioned you guys been evolving with SAP, so what is the current evolution? What's the highlight, what's the focus? >> So, obviously Hana has been the focus for quite some time and it still is, more and more of our customer's are moving to Hana, and adopting that technology, less so with S4, because that's kind of a newer phase, so a lot of people are making the two step approach of going to Hana, and then looking at S4, but Cloud as well, we can really aid in that Cloud enablement, because the scrambling. When we can scramble that sensitive data, it helps customer's feel comfortable and confident that they can put vendor and customer and other sensitive data in a Cloud based environment. >> And where are you guys winning? So what's the main thrust of why you guys are doing business in the SAP ecosystem. >> So with SAP you're always looking to do things better. And when you do things better, it results in cost savings on your project, and if you could save money on your project and do things smarter, you free up peoples time to focus on the fun projects, to focus on Hana, to focus on Cloud, and with our software, with our technology, by copying that data and providing real production data in the development and sandbox environments, we're impacting and improving the change control processes, we're impacting and improving the testing processes within companies, we're enabling some automation of some of those processes. >> Getting things up and running faster in the POC or Development environment? Real data? >> Yeah because you can be more nimble if you have real production data that you're working with while you're prototyping, you can make changes faster, you can be more confident in what you're promoting to production, you can be avoiding having a bad transport or a bad change going into the production environment and impact your business. So if you're not having to worry about that kind of stuff, you can worry about the fun stuff. You can look at Hana, you can look at Cloud, you can look at some of the newer technologies that SAP is providing. >> So, you guys grew up and matured, as you said, you've grown as SAP has grown, SAP used to be regarded as largely an applications company, now SAP, you know the S4, Hana platform, is a platform, and SAP's talking about partnerships, they're talking about making this whole platform even more available, accessible, to new developers through the Apple partnership etcetera, creates a new dynamic for you guys who have historically been focused on being able to automate the movement of data, certain data, certain processes, how are you preparing to potentially have to accommodate an accelerated rate of digitization as a consequence of all these partners, now working at SAP as a platform? >> That's a great question, and it's actually, it aligns with Attunity's vision and direction as well, so SAP, like you said, used to be an applications company, now it's an applications company with a full platform integrated all the way around, and Attunity is the same way, we came to Attunity through acquisition, and bringing our SAP Gold Client technology, but now we're expanding that, we're expanding it so that we can provide SAP data to other parts of the enterprise, we can combine data, we can combine highly structured SAP data with unstructured data, such as IOT Data, or social media streams in Hadoop, so the big data vision for Attunity is what's key, and right now we're in the process of blending what we do with SAP, with big data, which happens to align with SAP's platform. You know SAP is obviously helping customers move to Hana on the application side, but there's a whole analytics realm to it, that's even a bigger part of SAP's business right now, and that's kind of where we fit in. We're looking at those technologies, we're looking at how we can get data in and out of Hadoop, SAP Data in and out of Hadoop, how we can blend that with non SAP Data, to provide business value to SAP customers through that. >> Are you guys mainly focused on Fren, or are you also helping customer's move stuff into and out of Clouds and inside a hybrid cloud environment? >> Both actually, most SAP customer's are on Premise, so most of our focus is on Premise, we've seen a lot of customers move to the Cloud, either partial or completely. For those customers, they can use our technology the exact same way, and Attunity's replication software works on Prem and in the Cloud as well. So Cloud is definitely a big focus. Also, our relationship with Amazon, and Red Shift, there's a lot of Cloud capabilities and needs for moving data between on Premise and the Cloud, and back and forth. >> As businesses build increasingly complex workloads, which they clearly are, from a business stand point, they're trying to simplify the underlying infrastructure and technology, but they're trying to support increasingly complex types of work. How do you anticipate that the ecosystems ability to be able to map this on to technology is going to impact the role that data movement plays. Let me be a little bit more specific, historically, there were certain rules about how much data could be moved and how much work could be done in a single or a group of transactions. We anticipate that the lost art of data architecture across distances, more complex applications, it's going to become more important, are you being asked by your customers to help them think through, in a global basis, the challenges of data movement, as a set of flows within the enterprise, and not just point to point types of integration? >> I think we're starting to see that. I think it's definitely an evolving aspect of what's going on as, some low level examples that I can share with you on that are, we have some large global customers that have regional SAP environments, they might run one for North America, one for South America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Well they're consolidating them, some of those restrictions have been removed and now they're working on consolidating those regional instances into one global SAP instance. And if they're using that as a catalyst to move to Hana, that's really where you're getting into that realm where you're taking pieces that used to have to be distributed and broken up, and bringing them together, and if you can bring the structured enterprise application data on the SAP side together, now you can start moving towards some of the other aspects of the data like the analytics pieces. >> But you still have to worry about IOT, which is where are we going to process the data? Are we going to bring it back? Are we going to do it locally? You're worrying about sources external to your business, how you're going to move them in so that their intellectual property is controlled, my intellectual property is controlled, there's a lot of work that has to go in to thinking about the role that data movement is going to play within business design. >> Absolutely, and I actually think that that's part of the pieces that need to evolve over the next couple of years, it's kind of like the first time that you were here and heard about Hana, and here we are eight years later, and we understand the vision and the roadmap that that's played. That's happening now too, when you talk to SAP customers, some of them have clearly adopted the Hadoop technology and figured out how to make that work. You've got SAP Vora technology to bring data in and out of Hana from Hadoop, but that stuff is all brand new, we're not talking to a lot of customers that are using those. They're on the roadmap, they're looking at ways to do it, how to do it, but right now it's part of the roadmap. I think what's going to be key for us at Attunity is really helping customers blend that data, that IOT data, that social media stream data, with structured data from SAP. If I can take my customer master out of SAP and have that participate with IOT data, or if I can take my equipment master data out of SAP and combine that with Vlog data, IOT Data, I can start really doing predictive analytics, and if I can do those predictive analytics, with that unstructured data, I can use that to automate features within my enterprise application, so for example, if I know a part's going to fail, between 500 and 1000 hours of use, then I can proactively create maintenance tickets, or service notifications or something, so we can repair the device before it actually breaks. >> So talk about the, for the folks out there who want to kind of know the Attunity story a bit more, take a minute to explain kind of where you fit in, and where you, where SAP hands off to you, and where you fit specifically because big data management, there's are important technologies, but some say, well doesn't SAP have that? So where's the hand off? Where do you guys sister up against these guys the best? How should customers, or potential customers, know when to call you and what not. >> So, I often refer to SAP as a 747 Jumbo Jet right? So it's the big plane, and it's got everything in it. Anything at all, and all that you need to do, you could probably do it somewhere inside of SAP. There's an application for it, there's a platform for it, there's now a database for it, there's everything. So, a lot of customers work only in that realm, but there's a lot of customers that work outside of that too, SAP's an important part of the enterprise landscape, but there's other pieces too. >> People are nibbling at the solution, not fully baked out SAP. >> Right, right. >> You do one App. >> Yeah, and SAP's great at providing tools for example, to load data into Hana, there's a lot of capability to take non-SAP source data and bring it into Hana. But, what if you want to move that data around? What if you wanted to do some things different with it? What if you wanted to move some data out and back in? What if you want to, you know there's just a lot of things you want to be able to do with the data, and if you're all in on the SAP side, and you're all into the Hana platform, and that's what you're doing, you've probably got all the pieces to do that. But if you've got some pieces that are outside of that, and you need it all to play together, that's where Attunity comes in great, because Attunity has that, we're impartial to that, we can take data and move it around wherever, of course SAP is a really important part of our play in what we do, but we need to understand what the customers are doing, and everyday we talk to customers that are always looking, >> Give an example, give it a good example of that, customer that you've worked with, use a case. >> Yeah, let's see, most of my examples are going to be SAP centric, >> That's okay. >> We've got a couple of customers, I don't know if I can mention their names, where they come to us and say, "Hey we've got all this SAP data, and we might have 30 different SAP systems and we need all of that SAP data to pull together for us to be able to analyze it, and then we have non-SAP data that we want to partner with that as well. There might be terra-data, there might be Hadoop, might be some Oracle applications that are external that touch in, and these companies have these complex visions of figuring out how to do it, so when you look at Attunity and what we provide, we've got all these great solutions, we've got the replication technology, we've got the data model on the SAP side to copy the SAP data, we now have the data warehouse automation solution with Compose that keeps finding niche ways to work in, to be highly viable. >> But the main purpose is moving data around within SAP, give or take the Jumbo Jet, or 737. >> Well sometimes you just got to go down to the store and buy a half gallon of milk, right? And you're not going to jump on a Jumbo Jet to go down and get the milk. >> Right. >> You need tooling that makes it easy to get it. >> Got milk, it's the new slogan. Got data. >> Well there you go, the marketing side now. >> Okay so, vibe of the show, what's your take at SAP here, you've been here nine years, you've been looking around the landscape, you guys have been evolving with it, certainly it's exciting now. You're hearing really concrete examples of SAP showing some of the dashboards that McDermott's been showing every year, I remember when the iPad came out, "Oh the iPad's the most amazing thing", of course analytics is pretty obvious. That stuffs now coming to fruition, so there's a lot of growth going on, what's your vibe of the show? You seeing that, can you share any color commentary? Hallway conversations? >> Yeah, Sapphire's, you know, you get everything. You know it's like you said, the half gallon of milk, well we're at the supermarket right now, you need milk, you need eggs, you need flowers, whatever you need is here. >> The cake can be baked, if you have all the ingredients, Steve Job's says "put good frosting on it". (laughs) That's a UX. >> Lots of butter and lots of sugar. But yeah there's so many different focuses here at Sapphire, that it's a very broad show and you have an opportunity, for us it's a great opportunity to work with our partners closer, and it's also a good opportunity to talk to out customers, and certain levels within our customers, CIO's, VIP's. >> They're all together, they're all here. >> Right exactly, and you get to hear what their broader vision is, because every day we're talking to customers, and yeah we're hearing their broader vision, but here we hear more of it in a very confined space, and we get to map that up against our roadmap and see what we're doing and kind of say, yeah we're on the right track, I mean we need to be on the right track in two fronts. First and foremost with our customers, and second of all with SAP. And part of our long term success has been watching SAP and saying "okay, we can see where they're going with this, we can see where they're going with this, and this one they're driving really fast on, we've got to get on this track, you know, Hana. >> So the folks watching that aren't here, any highlights that you'd like to share? >> Wow, well you guys said yourself, Reggie Jackson was here the other night, that was pretty fantastic. I'm a huge baseball fan, go Cubby's, but it was fun to see Reggie Jackson. >> Park Ball, you know you had a share of calamities, I'm a Red Sox's man. >> Yeah you're wounds have been healed though (laughs). >> We've had the Holy Water been thrown from Babe Ruth. It was great that Reggie though was interesting, because we talk about a baseball concept that was about the unwritten rules, we saw Batista get cold-cocked a couple of days ago, and it brought up this whole unwritten rules, and we kind of had a tie in to business, which is the rules are changing, certainly in the business that we're in, and he talked about the unwritten rules of Baseball and at the end he said, "No, they aren't unwritten rules, they're written" And he was hardcore like MLB should not be messing with the game. >> Yeah. >> I mean Batista got fined, I think, what, five games? Was that the key mount? >> Yeah, yup. >> Didn't he get one game, and the guy that punched him got eight. >> That's right, he got it, eight games, that's right. So okay, MLB's putting pressure on them for structuring the game, should we let this stuff go? We came in late, second base, okay, what's your take on that? >> Well I mean as a Baseball fan I love the unwritten rules, I love the fact that the players police the game. >> Well that's what he was talking about, in his mind that's exactly what he was saying. That the rules amongst the players for policing the game are very, very well understood, and if Baseball tries to legislate and take it out of the players hands, it's going to lead to a whole bunch of chaotic behavior, and it's probably right. >> Yeah, and you've already got replay, and what was it, the Met's guy said he misses arguing with the umpires, and the next day he got thrown out (laughs). >> Probably means he wanted to get thrown out, needed a day off. What's going on with Attunity, what's next for you guys? What's next show, what's put on the business,. >> So, show-wise this is one of our most important shows of the year, events of the year, well I'll always be a tech-head, tech-heads are very targeted audience for us, we have a new version of Gold Client that's out a bit later this month, more under the hood stuff, just making things faster, and aligning it better with Hana and things like that, but we're really focused on integrating the solutions at Attunity right now. I mean you look at Attunity and Attunity had grown by acquisition, the RepliWeb acquisition in '11, and the acquisition of my company in 2013, we've added Compose, we've added Visibility, so now we've got this breath of solutions here and we're now knitting them together, and they're really coming together nicely. The Compose product, the data warehouse automation, I mean it's a new concept, but every time we show it to somebody they love it. You can't really point it at a SAP database, cause the data mile's too complex, but for data warehouse's of applications that have simple data models where you just need to do some data warehousing, basic data warehouses, it's phenomenal. And we've even figured out with SAP how we can break down certain aspects of that data, like just the financial data. If we just break down the financial data, can we create some replication and some change data capture there using the replicate technology and then feed it into Compose, provide a simple data warehouse solution that basic users can use. You know, you've got your BW, you've got your business objects and all that, but there's always that lower level, we're always talking to customers where they're still doing stuff like downloading contents of tables into spreadsheets and working with it, so Compose kind of a niche there. The visibility being able to identify what data's being used and what's not used, we're looking at combining that and pointing that at an SAP system and combining that with archiving technology and data retention technologies to figure out how we can tell a customer, alright here's your data retention policies, but here's where you're touching and not touching your data, and how can we move that around and get that out. >> Great stuff Matt, thanks for coming on theCube, appreciate that, if anything else I got to congratulate you on your success and, again, it's early stages and it's just going to get bigger and bigger, you know having that robust platform, and remember, not everyone runs their entire business on SAP, so there's a lot of other data warehouses coming round the corner. >> Yeah that's for sure, and we're well positioned and well aligned to deal with all types of data, me as an SAP guy, I love working with SAP data, but we've got a broader vision, and I think our broader visions really align nicely with what our customers want. >> Inter-operating the data, making it work for you, Got Data's new slogan here on theCube, we're going to coin that, 'Got Milk', 'Got Data'. Thanks to Peter Burris, bringing the magic here on theCube, we are live in Orlando, you're watching theCube. (techno music) >> Voiceover: There'll be millions of people in the near future that will want to be involved in their own personal well-being and wellness.

>> Voiceover: It's theCUBE covering Sapphire Now. Headlines sponsored by SAP HANA Cloud, the leader in platform as a service. With support from Console Inc., the cloud internet company. Now, here are your hosts: John Furrier and Peter Burris. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are here live in Orlando, Florida, for exclusive coverage of SAP Sapphire Now. This is theCUBE's SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris. I want to thank our sponsors for allowing us to get down here, SAP HANA Cloud Platform, Console Inc., Capgemini, and EMC, thanks so much for supporting us. Our next guest is Ifran Khan, who is the SVP General Manager of digital enterprise platforms which includes HANA, end-to-end. Welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> John: Good to see you. >> Lovely to be back here again. >> John: So, you know theCUBE history. We go way back, we've done pretty much every Hadoop World up until 2013, now we have an event the same day, week Estrada, New York, NSV, and we've been to every Sapphire since 2010 except for 2014, 2015. We had a little conflict of events, but it's been great. It's been big data. I remember Bill McDermott got up there when HANA was announced, kind of, or pre-built before Hadoop hit. So, you had HANA coming out of the oven, Hadoop hits the scene, Hadoop gets all the press, HANA's now rolling, so then you roll forward to four more years, we're here. What's your take on this, because it's been an interesting shift. Hadoop, some are saying, is hard to use, total costs of ownership. Now, HANA's rising, Hadoop is sliding. That's my opinion, but what's your opinion? >> Well, that's a well, sort of, summarized history lesson there, so to speak. Well, firstly, great to be on theCUBE again. It's always lovely to see you gentlemen here, you do a wonderful job. What I'd perhaps just highlight is maybe some of they key milestones that I've observed over the last four or five years. Ironically, 2010 when I arrived at SAP, when the entire, sort of if you like, trajectory of HANA started going in that direction, and Hadoop was sort of there, but it was maybe petering out a little bit because it was the unknown, the uncertainty of scale in whether or not this is going to be only batch or whether it's going to ever become real-time. So, I would maybe make the two or three milestones from the SAP side. HANA started off as a disruptive technology, which was perhaps conceived as being a response to a lot of internal challenges that we were running into using the systems of record of yester-era. They were incapable of dealing with SAP applications, incapable of giving us what we now refer to as a digital core, and that were incapable of giving our customers truly what they needed. As a response, HANA was introduced into the market, but it wasn't limited in scope to the, if you like the historical baggage of the relational era, or even the Hadoop era, so to speak. It was completely new imagined technologies built around in-memory computing, a columnar architecture, and therefore it gave us an opportunity to project ultimately what we could achieve with this as a foundation. So, HANA came into the market focusing on analytics to start with, going full circle into being able to do transactionality, as well, and where we are today? I think Hadoop is now being recognized, I would say probably as a de facto data operating system. So, HDFS is a very significant sort of extension to most IT organizations, but it's still lacking the compute capabilities. This is what's given their eyes a spark, and of course with HANA, HANA isn't, within itself, a very significant computing engine. >> John: And Vora. And Vora a-- >> Ifran: Of course, and Vora, as well. Now you're finishing off my sentences. Thank you. >> (laughs) This is what theCUBE is all about, we got a good cadence going here. Alright, so but now the challenge. HANA's also, by the way, was super fast when it came out, but then it didn't really fire in my opinion. It's swim-lane. It seems now, it's so clear that the fruit is coming off the tree, now. You're seeing it blossom beautifully. You got S/4 HANA, you got the core... Explain that because people get confused. Am I buying HANA Cloud, am I buying HANA Cloud Platform? Share how this is all segmented to the buyer, to the customer, to the customer. >> Sure, I mean firstly, SAP applications need to have a system of record. HANA is a system of record. It has a database capability, but ultimately HANA is not just a database. It's an entire platform with integration, and application services, and, of course, with data services. Now, as a consequence, when we talk about the HANA Cloud Platform, this is taking HANA as a core technology, as a platform, embedding it inside of a cloud deployment environment called a HANA Cloud Platform. It gives on opportunity where customers are perhaps implementing on premise S/4, or even in a public S/4 instance, an opportunity to extend those applications as perhaps they may need or require to do so for their business requirements. So, in layman's terms, you have a system of record requirement with SAP applications, that is HANA. It is only HANA now in the case of S/4. And in order to extend the application as customers want to customize those applications, there is one definitive extension venue, and that's called the HANA Cloud Platform. >> John: And that mainly is for developers, too. I call it the developer cloud, for lack of a better description or a more generic one. That's the cloud foundry. Basically the platform is a service that is actually bolting on, I guess a developer on-ramp, if you will. Is that a safe way to look at it? >> Ifran: Yeah, I mean I think the developer interaction point with SAP now certainly becomes HCP, but it also is a significant ecosystem enabler, as well. Only last week, or week-before-last in fact, we announced the relationship with Apple, which is a phenomenal extension of what we do with business applications, and HCP is the definitive venue for the Apple relationship in effect. >> So, tell us a little bit about borrowing or building upon that. What is increasingly... How should an executive, when I think about digitalization, how should they think about it? Is this something that is a new set of channels, or the ability to reach new customers, or is there something for fundamental going on here? Is it really about trying to translate more of your business into data in a way that it's accessible so it can be put to use and put to work in more and different ways? >> Sure, it's a great question. So, what is digitalization? Well, firstly, it's not new. I mean, SAP didn't invent digitalization, but I think we know a fair bit about where digitalization is going to take many businesses in the next three to five years. So, I would say that there's five prevailing trends that are fueling the need to go digital. The first thing is about hyperconnectivity. If we understand that data and information is not only just consumed, it's created in a variety of places, and geographically just about anywhere now is connected. I mean, in fact, I read one statistic that 90 percent of the world's inhabitable land masses have either cellular or wireless reception. So, truly, we're hyperconnected. The second thing is about the scale of the cloud, right? The cloud gives us compute, not just on the desktop, but anywhere; and by definition of anywhere, we're saying if you have a smart appliance at an edge, that is, in fact, supercomputing because it gives you an extension to be able to get to any compute device. And then you've got cloud, and on top of which, you have cyber-security, and a variety of other things like IOT. These things are all fueling the need to become digitally aware enterprises, and what's ultimately happening is that business transformation is happening because somebody without any premises, without any assets, comes along and disrupts a business. In fact, one study from Capgemini and, of course, from MIT back in 2013, was revealing that in the year 2,000 and 20, 2020 rather, out of the SMP 500, approximately 40 percent of the businesses are going to cease to exist. For the simple reason, those business transformations that are going on disrupting their classical business models are going to change the way that they operate. So, I would just, in a concatenated way of answering your question, digital transformation at the executive level is about, not just surviving, it's about thriving. It's about taking advantage of the digital trends. It's about making sure that, as you reinvent your businesses, you're not just looking at what you do today. You're always looking at that as a line that's been deprecated. What are you going to do in addition to that? That's where your growth is going to come from, and SAP's all about helping customers become digitally aware and transform their organizations. >> Paul: So, you're having conversations with customers all the time about the evolution of data management technologies, and your argument being is that HANA is more advanced, a columnar database in memory, speed, more complexity in the IO, all kinds of wonderful things that it makes possible can then be reflected in more complex, or more rich, value creating applications. But, the data is often undervalued. >> Ifran: Of course. >> The data itself. We haven't figured out how to look at that data, and start treating it literally as capital. We talk about a business problem, we talk about how much money we want to put there, how much people we want to put there, but we don't yet talk about how much data is going to be required either to go there and make it work, or that we're going to capture out of it. How are you working with customers to think that problem through? Are they thinking it through differently in your experience? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So, firstly, if I was to look at their value association with data, we can borrow from the airline industry perhaps as an analogy. If you look at data, it's very equivalent to passengers. The businesses that we typically operate on are working on first and business class data. They've actually made significant investments around how to securely store, access, process, manage all of this business class and first class data. But, there's an economy class of data which is significant and very pervasive, and if you look at it from the airline's point of view, an economy class individual passenger doesn't really equate to an awful lot, but if you aggregate all the economy class passengers, it's significant. It's actually more than your business and first class revenue, so to speak. So, consequently, large organizations have to start looking at data, monetizing the data, and not ignoring all of the noise signals that come out of the sensors, out of the various machinery, and making sure that they can aggregate that data, and build context around it. So, we have to start thinking along those ways. >> John: Yes, I love that analogy, so good. But, let's take that one step further. I want to make sure I go on the right plane, right? So, one, that's the data aware. So, digital assets is the data, so evaluation techniques come into play, but having a horizontally traversal data plane really, in real time, is a big thing because, not only do I go through security, put my shoes through, my laptop out, that's just IT. The plane is where the action is. I want to be on the right plane. That's making data aware, the alchemy behind it, that's the trick. What's your thoughts on that because this is a cutting area. You hear AI ontolgies and stuff going on there now, machine learning, certainly. Surely not advancing to the point where it's really working yet. It's getting there, but what's your thoughts on all this? >> Yeah, so I think the vehicle that you're referring to, whether it's a plane or whatever the mode of transportation is, at a metaphor level, we have to understand that there is a value in association with making decisions at the right time when you have all the information that you need, and by definition, we have created a culture in IT where we segregate data. We create this almost two swim lane approach. This is my now data, this is my transactional data, and here's my data that will then feed into some other environment, and I may look to analyze it after the event. Now, getting back to the HANA philosophy from day one, it was about creating a simplified model where you can do live analytics on transactional data. This is a big, significant shift. So, using your aircraft analogy, as I'm on there, I don't want to suddenly worry about I didn't pick up my magazine from Duty Free or whatever, from the newspaper stand. I've got no content now, I can't do anything. Alright, for the next nine hours, I'm on a plane now and I've got nothing to do. I've got no internet, I've got no connectivity. The idea is that you want to have all of the right information readily available and make real time decisions. That calls for simplified architectures all about HANA. >> We're getting the signal here. I know you're super busy. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I want to get one final question in. What's your vision around your plans? I'll say it's cutting-edge, you get a great area, ecosystem's developing nicely. What's your goals for the next year? What are you looking to do? What are your key KPI's? What are you trying to knock down this year? What's your plans? >> I mean, first and foremost, we've spent an awful lot of time talking about SAP transformations and around SAP customer landscape transformations. S/4 is all about that. That is a digital core. The translation of digital core to SAP should not be inhibiting other customers who don't have an SAP transaction or application foundation. We want to be able to take SAP to every single platform usage out there and most customers will have a need for HANA-like technology. So, the top of my agenda is let's increase the full use requirements and actual value of HANA, and we're seeing an awful lot of traction there. The second thing is, we're now driving towards the cloud. HCP is the definitive venue not just for the ecosystem, for the developer and also for the traditional SAP customers, and we're going to be promoting an awful lot more exciting relationships, and I'd love to be able to speak to you again in the future about how the evolution is taking place. >> John: We wish we had more time. You're a super guest, great insight. Thank you for sharing the data here >> Ifran: Thank you for having me. >> John: On theCUBE. We'll be right back with more live coverage here inside the cube at Sapphire Now. You're watching theCUBE. (techno music) (calm music) >> Voiceover: There'll be millions of people in the near future that want to be involved in their own personal well-being and well--