>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We're in Orlando at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. We're in the NetApp booth, and we are now talking to Wolfgang Hopfes, the Head of the SAP Business EMEIA for Fujitsu. Wolfgang, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. >> Great to meet you. So Fujitsu and SAP have been partners, global partners in technology in services and hosting for over 40 years. Fujitsu runs SAP, SAP runs Fujitsu. You guys have about 8,000 joint customers worldwide. We are at an enormous event. This is not just 20-plus thousand people, but this event location is about 16 American football fields. >> Really? >> It's huge. Tell us about what's new with Fujitsu and SAP. What excites you about this longstanding partnership? >> Number one, we are building, or we are trying to build additional business on our strong foundation, which has been growing over 40 years. So we are coming from very early days, where we were named Fujitsu and transformed several times into that. Nevertheless, the customer requirements to a company like us are kind of stay the same and stable. Also, everybody's evolving. So what we are trying to do is, we are trying to accompany our customers in a way where their customer requirements transform quicker than they are able to react, where all the technology is filling in quicker than we can expect, software technologies, artificial intelligence, and we try to be a company that helps the customer managing all these complexities in a really powerful IT world. >> So, let's talk about that from a practical sense. Fujitsu, if the average would think, "Oh, Fujitsu, servers; NetApp, storage; "SAP, software; we understand your relationship." But the relationship is much more complex than that. Fujitsu not only provides the physical infrastructure, but you guys offer services as well. >> What are some of the services that you offer? How does that feed back to the infrastructure? >> So general, and this is really something that at the moment we are trying to fundamentally change, because we are coming this is based on history from a strong technology foundation, yeah? Over the time, we added some system integration and consulting capabilities and skills across Europe, and this is what we are trying to change at the moment. So we tried to make out of at least two to three distinct business areas. We tried to glue them together and start thinking from a customer perspective. So because the customer no longer buys technology, the customer buys the functionality. And look maybe 20 years back. Maybe it's a little bit longer, but when I was young, when I bought my car, I bought a car, and then I started to integrate different things: a stereo, speaker systems, whatsoever kind of fancy things. And you did it by your own. Today, you order a car in a completely different way. You have a configuration tool at your manufacturer of choice, and you say, "I wanna have leather seats, seat heater, "whatsoever kind of things," and then you click, and you get the car which is perfectly designed for you in a different way of standards. And this is exactly my vision of what I wanna achieve in the IT world. So I wanna make the complexity and the technology consumable for the business units and not for IT guys. So that means that we glue together our services capabilities, our technology capabilities, to provide the customer an SAP system for his future needs. That will include all these fancy stuff, like artificial intelligence, blockchain, analytics, big data, all these kind of things are coming together. And we heard an announcement today from SAP, the HANA database management suite, which is, my understanding so far, kind of an umbrella kind of thing gluing different functional building blocks together. And you need more integrating, technology integration, application integration, capabilities in your company, to make your customers landscape-run, and this is what we are trying to achieve. >> So there's two similar, I think, adjacencies to your example. The first, you know, when I got my first car a little bit ago, five years ago I just got my license five years ago. You know, I'm so young. I'd have those challenges. I'd buy a stereo or I'll buy a after-market something to improve or customize my car. However, when it was time to upgrade or do maintenance, I'd take it into the shop, and they'll look at this thing and say, "Oh, it's not standard. "We can't fix it, "because you've modified it in a way that breaks it." One of the challenges with SAP is that customers in the past modified the solution to fit their needs. One of the challenges with SAP and infrastructure in general is that it's very bespoke, and I've designed a server, storage, and compute model that was very bespoke to my business. Talk about how Fujitsu is helping customers, through the relationship with SAP, deal with this modernization of their datasets. >> So there are a couple of different aspects in the whole thing. The first one is, so when we're talking about NetApp and Fujitsu, so, the two companies sat together maybe a year ago, maybe a little bit longer, and came up with the concept that is called NFLEX, which is an integrated system that reduces already this complexity, because it glues the compute and the storage power together. Also, some networking kind of things. And this gives the customer already a ready-to-run platform just from a technical point of view. So if you use this building block and find different and we are working on that on the application side, different building blocks And we're really we can deliver the whole stack that is, the foundation is built on Fujitsu and NetApp compute and storage power. So we are combining the different technology worlds with the special needs for our customers. This is what we are doing. >> So along those lines, I just read that Fujitsu was named the Competitive IT Strategy Company for 2018. So I'm curious, what is it that Fujitsu is driving towards in 2018 to deliver this competitive IT strategy, like what you just talked about. How does that give you a competitive edge? >> Yeah. So first of all, we have and this is based in our headquarters in Japan. We have really a lot of things to talk about when it comes to artificial intelligence, deep learning, blockchain and big data. So the company is investing heavily in these things. And this is what we are trying to tie together, because this gives us a uniqueness in the market. These are elements that everybody needs for the digital transformation. And today, you often hear some sentence like, "It's running on a platform." "It's running on a SAP platform." The reality is that about 90% of today's S/4HANA customers are still running on premise. So we see a move into cloud environments. We see a move into hybrid or multi-cloud engagements in customers, and this is exactly When we just look onto the application or this digital side of the business, we forget that the customer has a business and a technology foundation, too. And this is where we are taking care of. And this gives us this advantage where we think this is needed from the customer. >> So, talking about customer experiences, customer relationships, what are some of the key considerations as customers look at Fujitsu? I will call this infrastructure is Fujitsu's wheelhouse. >> Yeah. >> What are some of the key differentiators customers need to look at as they examine potential infrastructure solutions? >> You need to differentiate and this brings me back to my car comparison. If you wanna have just building blocks, and it's the customer's responsibility to, number one, get them to run, and number two, operate them over a certain period of time with a service level. So within Fujitsu, we are prepackaging and we are taking care of the customer. So, first of all, we are not delivering components. We are delivering an up-and-running platform. And secondly, we are taking the risk away from the customer. So that means we give service levels, we give maintenance, we offer managed services so that the customer can really focus on their business instead of wasting energy on his IT systems, because this is what we are good at, and this is what we are offering to the customer. So this is a really big difference. We are providing a ready-to-run system, and we are taking care on the maintenance, regardless of what components are in the system. So we are also taking care, if we put on NetApp storage and the Fujitsu server together, Fujitsu is taking care on the maintenance issues. Whenever something may go wrong with the system, it's one face to the customer. And this give us a very strong position. >> So for that managing servers, how deep does that stack go? I mean, one of the appeals to customers when it comes to cloud is that, you know what, all the way, to some cases, BASIS is handled by someone else. I'm just laying my application. I'm installing my application. I'm making the modifications that SAP kind of says, "These are the guardrails we'll make." And from every other system, you can count on consistently from SAP platform the SAP platform. How far does Fujitsu go in managing service for SAP? >> So we are offering many services, starting technology foundation, starting going into SAP BASIS, going into the complete application. So we are offering the complete stack also on the managed services side. The customer can start with an easy, just managing his hardware, managing his platform, managing his whole system. So the whole landscape can be under contract of Fujitsu. And it's just a consumption model for the customer. Risk-free, that's all what he needs to take care of. So we are really taking based on customer needs, requirements, and desires, we are taking the risk on the Fujitsu side that the customer has an up-and-running SAP landscape. >> So one of the big challenges that enterprises face when it comes to SAP in general and it's not just SAP, it's all big enterprise apps. On the stage floor, Bill McDermott said this morning and I was taken aback, I don't know if this is, in my experience, it hasn't been quite the experience that he had a customer from discussion to implementation to all business processes, six weeks to implement S/4. That was a bit of a dream. >> Absolutely. >> Not typical of the experience, but even, let's say, a lot less complex than just raising a developing environment, where customers just want to experiment, they wanna fail fast, they wanna take a copy of production, put it into development, create an application, see if it works. How does Fujitsu help speed agility of customers who just simply wanna get up a faster-running development environment? >> So, in this case, we'd definitely recommend. So these are use cases where we would recommend going into a cloud-like environment. So, easy. In an Amazon or other world, you get one-terabyte HANA system within 24 hours later. So you just need a credit card; that's all you need. The interesting part starts when you exactly go through this exercise, and did your experience, and then you wanna take whatever you experienced back into your production system, because then, the complexity for the customer starts. Because what you get in these hyperscaler clouds isn't platform. But you're not getting service to get your results back onto your production system. And this is where are taking care on. So we are going beyond this "just a platform" or "just a device" or "just a server," because the agility to get a platform is not necessary. You can have this everywhere. The luxury to get your results, your data, back and forth from your production system, make a copy, move them, transform them into an Amazon and back again, after you've made your four-weeks development cycle, that's something where the value for our customer is in. So sometimes, it's not only about the speed and the time and the agility. Sometimes it's about the completeness of getting the whole thing back again so that you can use your results, use your experience that you made over this short period of time, and bring it into your production system. That's a key message. >> Yeah, well I'm glad you answered I think that's legitimately how customers look at it. The cloud is for a short burst, I need to get it up and ready and quick. Steady state, SAP HANA, SAP in the cloud, and especially hyperscaler specifically, probably doesn't make any sense because those are known steady workloads that are probably best suited for the private data center. >> Not only that, so it's about the stability. So my experiences in talking to customers and I know at least two, and both are in the Middle East. Two customers who decided to go out of the cloud again because of, it does not make sense for them. So cloud is especially for this use case, try something, start something, four weeks, collapse it and do something else again. The important part is, normally customers wanna be sure of where their data is. This is a big issue at these times, especially GDPR, especially in Europe. So I've seen customers asking me somewhere in Russia or the Middle East, "Can you ensure that my data "is stored in Western Europe? "Or, even better, in Germany?" So, yes we can, with our concept. And most of these customers are likely to wanna have control over their production systems. So the core, where the customers' data are located, they wanna have this somewhere where they can go and feel and touch it. So this is important for them. Everything else can be in the cloud. So that means two-third of today's SAP landscapes have the ability to be moved in a cloud. But the stable core, which is S/4HANA core business, should be somewhere where the customer can get feel it again. >> Get their hands on it. Wolfgang, thanks so much for stopping by and sharing with us what's new with Fujitsu and SAP, and we appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. >> We wanna thank you for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from Orlando at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Thanks for watching.

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018, brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I am Lisa Martin, with Keith Townsend. We have been here all day at SAP Sapphire 2018. Keith, this venue in Orlando is so huge. It's the equivalent of 16 American football fields. >> Yeah, probably should not have worn a pair of new shoes. >> No, but you did close your rings, so it's a trade-off, right? >> It's a trade-off, yeah. >> So, the keynote this morning started out with a bang. Bill McDermott, the CEO of SAP, is probably the most energetic, evangelical, C-level I've ever seen on stage. You really could feel the excitement, the momentum. They also followed that with some great announcements. You know, they've been saying for awhile, being pretty bullish about wanting to not just disrupt the Sierra market, but wanting to become one of the world's most valuable brands. They wanna be up there with the Apples, and the Googles, and Coca-Cola and Mercedes-Benz, who all have products that we all see, and touch, and feel, and buy. And they announced that the brands e-rankings just came out the other day, that they're number 17, up four spots from last year. So, their momentum is, they're really putting their money where their mouth is. >> Yeah, so SAP is the cash register of the world. 70% of the world's transactions go through SAP, but most of us don't see it. So, it's amazing to see that they're ranked number 17 on those brands that are very, you know, if you told somebody you worked for SAP, they'd be like, oh, okay, I think I might have heard of that. >> Right. >> Or, I've heard that that was the reason why manufacturing is down, because the SAP system was down. So, it is a bold statement to say that you're gonna go from that, to a household name. Interestingly enough, part of that is becoming an ecosystem. So, becoming a platform. What we've heard today was a lot of talk about how SAP is transforming from a product company. You know, a point-of-sale system is one thing, but to say that you've built a ecosystem, and a platform around that, is the goal that I think I heard today from the stage floor. >> And you're right, you talk about, you know, them becoming a household name, with a product that's basically invisible to most people who probably use it. They have amassed 390,000 customers in 46 years. They've been around for a long time. This event, though, is massive. The partner area alone is huge. There's probably more than 20,000 people not just that are here, in Orlando, but, he said, Bill McDermott, a million people engaging with SAP Sapphire via the online experience. That's enormous. But to your point, it's all really fundamentally due to the partnerships, the systems integrators, the technology partners and more who have helped them on their transformation. >> Yeah, we had KPIT on, they said the guest has been on 20 Sapphires for 20 years, the event has gone on for 25 years in some form. He remembered, initially, they might have had one or two sessions. They have 12, KPIT has 12 sessions this year at the Sapphire 2018. There's a huge ecosystem of partners, here on the show floor. Over 500, I think, sessions in general. We had the VP of Community for S/4. They have 1,000 how-to videos on how to just do basic things in S/4. Huge community, huge event. SAP is starting to make end rolls and becoming, again, not just a products company, but an ecosystem company, I think. Sapphire in Orlando is a great example of how they're expanding the brand. >> Yes, and in fact, on the brand part, you know, that's one of the things that their CMO, Alicia Tillman, who was on main stage this morning, that's something that I've heard her talk about before. She's been the CMO for about nine months now, and she said, you know, and marketers will know, campaigns and messaging will change every quarter, six months, and that is fine. It's the brand narrative that they really started to work on at SAP. So, you're seeing this "Best-run companies run on SAP", it's sharing the value of what SAP can deliver with their partner ecosystem, in terms of how it's helping customers transform their businesses, transform industries, save lives. They've done a very focused job on showing how this invisible technology is really revolutionizing the world. They're now going, you know, full-force, embedding A.I., and really being quite bold, they're saying. I loved what Bill McDermott had on the slide this morning, of augmented intelligence. And there's always a lot of concern with A.I, right? Jobs being replaced. And he talked about what he, and some of the other world leaders, were talking about. And I liked augmented intelligence, to augment humanity, this connection of humans and machines working together. They're really being quite bold, and focused, in that area. I'm just curious what your take was from an advanced analytics A.I. perspective. >> So, there's a lot of talk around advanced A.I. analytics. At the end of the day, it's about actual business results. We're here in the booth of NetApp, who has done a great job, frankly, of transforming their image from a storage company in the middle of a transformation to being known as a data-driven company. So, NetApp has gone through a similar change that SAP is looking to do, from a brand perspective. Reasonably enough, we had the CIO, Bill, from NetApp, that talked about that transformation, and how data is a key part of their own transformation, internally. And, how SAP could probably hold NetApp up as a great example of a company that's using the predecessor to C/4HANA, which was just announced, on the staged hypers of taking data, analyzing that data, applying A.I, machine learning, more like machine learning in reality. Machine learning to that data, and then getting insights, so that humans can make better decisions. >> Right. You know, on that front, one of the themes I heard today, Keith, from not just Bill Miller, the CIO of NetApp, who was on here with us earlier, but some of their other partners, NetApp and SAP's partners, all talk about their own transformations, internally, as essential for them to become intelligent enterprises, which is a lot of what SAP's talking about. But I also thought that was quite valuable, from an external perspective, to hear NetApp talk so candidly about their transformation, and share that with their customers who are in similar positions. I think, when vendors will, say, drink their own champagne, and there's real proof there in the pudding. I think that's tremendously valuable for these brands. And we've just heard that kind of consistently throughout the day today, of companies that are showing how they're transforming to then help their customers also transform. >> So, one of the things that we like to ask on theCUBE is not just about current customer base, but, what new customers are you attracting? So, one of the interesting conversations is one of the last ones we had with WorkSpan, and how they're a small company, and they started out the gate with SAP, and how the brand has gone beyond this, oh, this is a manufacturing, supply chain, you must be a Fortune 500 company to even consider rolling it out to. You know what? We're a brand new company, providing a data-driven product, and out of the gate, we're selecting a S/4HANA and the platform to create this new product that's consumed by not necessarily technologists, that powers an alliance platform to find and curate business alliances. I thought that was an extremely interesting interview that shows the power of expanding beyond just a focus on traditional enterprise, but the power of data. And once you've become a platform, how you can power your partner ecosystem. >> I thought that was a great example, as well, of a company that's only been in business for three years, less than four years. How they saw this gap in the market, where they said, you know, we're surrounded by alliance partners of SAP's in this 16 football fields location that we're in. And WorkSpan found that 60 to 75% of announced alliances fail. Huge opportunity for them to then get in from a systematic perspective and align, you know, two companies' marketing automation systems, for example, and sales automation systems. And they really saw this big opportunity to, like you were saying, create an entirely new product, and probably create a new market as a result. I thought that was a really modern example of an idea that saw a huge gap, and can be transformative. I asked Ahmed, after we stopped rolling the cameras, all right, so you found 60 to 75% of these announced alliances fail, typically. What does WorkSpan think you can do to bring that number down? And he said, within two years, we wanna get that down to about 30%. >> Wow. That is an amazing stat. So, let's look at the companies that are digitally transforming. So we had two guests that I want to highlight, one with Mike McGivney from SAP SuccessFactors, which is SAP's people-focused cloud, and then Wolfgang Hopfes, the head of SAP Business for EMEA. And they're on a unique challenge. SAP has been around for 46 years, and in IT years, that's like, you know, 1,000. So, there's a lot of technical debt, that companies are now paying for. You know, back in the nineties, early 2000s, customizing SAP was all the rage. Now, customers are faced with, they have to digitally transform their organizations, how do they do so? Well, it's not so easy to move from a customized SAP to S/4. Bill trumpeted the numbers of 1,800 SAP HANA customers, which is great, well over a billion dollars in sales for an in-memory database. However, SAP has over 300,000 customers. So there's a lot of opportunity, but a lot of challenge. So, the ecosystem of partners, Fujitsu, NetApp, other infrastructure companies looking to help simplify the infrastructure so that technologists within these customer organizations can focus on the higher stack of those larger business challenges of basically pulling apart what they've built. Bill from NetApp shared how difficult their transformation was from their CRM to >> Hypers? >> Hypers. He called it painful, a painful six months. And what we saw today, I think, was a reality check. A lot of enterprises have a lot of pain ahead of them. >> Well, it's pain in a number of areas, and one of them is cultural. And I really thought, you know, you say, SAP being 46 years old is like, 1,000 in IT, or dog years. They're like the Gandalf of IT, right? But one of the things that I found quite remarkable is 46 year-old history, 390,000 customers. But clearly, they have been able to evolve their culture to be able to support what their customers need, and go from just being a supply chain procurement-focused type of business. And I thought that was really quite compelling, to see how they must have had to transform their culture, so that they can help businesses transform. They make it look easy, with the messaging and the momentum, but that was something that for a company that's an incumbent like that, is a bit of, you might say, even a model for how to do that right. >> Yeah, we talked to Joe Lazar, he's the SAP VP of Global Technology Partners. He talked about how SAP likes to be pushed to be a little uncomfortable by their partners, and we asked him the tough questions. You know, there's been tweets and there's been announcements from all the ACI vendors. I've talked to customer after customer that says, you know what, S/4HANA on HCI is what we want. A very quotable comment that he made was, we're not doing S/4 on HANA because we want to, we're doing S/4 on HANA because customers demand it. So, SAP is definitely listening to customer demand, S/4 on HANA is one of those things. You know, he tried to stay away from the bad word of certified on 4HANA, and validated, and focused on solutions, but SAP has a little ways to go. And that's kind of a, you talk to any HCI customer, validated and certified 4HANA is a bad word today, but SAP understands it and they're moving to certify the platform for HCI, so I thought that was a great example of them listening to customers and continuing to transform over the years. >> You're absolutely right. In fact, you know, if you look up digital transformation, one of the first pillars that you're gonna see is you gotta become customer-centric. And we really heard that a lot today. Even NetApp, when you were talking with Bill Miller about ONTAP in the cloud, going it's okay guys, maybe we have to listen to our customers. If we don't we won't be in business. That's a hallmark of an enterprise that is digitally transforming. >> Yeah, I'd argue that Dave Hitts was the one who forced that, that kind of cultural change. You had to bring in the founder to talk to the engineers and that had very engineer-driven thinking And I think Dave was very direct, like you know, we have to make the change or we won't be in business. The pendulum has changed to cloud. The SAP, which is not by any stretch of the mind, was never designed to run in the cloud, but they're adopting the technology for what customers are demanding. There's an AWS booth here, Fujitsu was the first one to say that, you know what, if customers need fail-fast environments, that's exactly where they should go, and put S/4 implementations, and then steady states should be moved to RMPRAM or private dating center or hosted solutions. So, the ecosystem seems to be embracing this change. >> Definitely. Anything that you're particularly looking forward to tomorrow for Day 2? >> You know what? I love talking to customers, so I'm looking forward to more customer conversations, talking about how is this being used? We haven't really talked a lot about Leonardo much. So, you know, IoT, A.I., how are these things that get a lot of press being perceived by actual customers? How are they being implemented? What's their true adoption rate? >> Awesome. Well, I look forward to hosting with you tomorrow, Keith. Thanks so much. >> I appreciate it. >> Thanks for watching. Keith and I have been at SAP Sapphire, bringing you some hopefully great informative content. From the NetApp booth, Lisa Martin for Keith Townsend. Thanks for watching.