>> Announcer: theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. >> We're back at the formerly the Sands Convention Center, it's called the Venetian Convention Center now, Dave Vellante and John Furrier here covering day three, HPE Discover 2022, it's hot outside, it's cool in here, and we're going to heat it up with Rashmi Kumar, who's the Senior Vice President and CIO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, great to see you face to face, it's been a while. >> Same here, last couple of years, we were all virtual. >> Yeah, that's right. So we've talked before about sort of your internal as-a-service transformation, you know, we do call it dog fooding, everybody likes to course correct and say, no, no, it's drinking your own champagne, is it really that pretty? >> It is, and the way I put it is, no pressure to my product teams, it's being customer zero. >> Right, take us through the acceleration on how everything's been going with you guys, obviously, the pandemic was an impact to certainly the CIO role and your team but now you've got GreenLake coming in and Antonio's big statement before the pandemic, by 2022 everything will be as a service and then everything went remote, VPNs and all this new stuff, how's it going? >> Yeah, so from business perspective, that's a great point to start that, right? Antonio promised in 2019 that HPE will be Everything-as-a-Service company and he had no view of what's going to happen with COVID. But guess what? So many businesses became digital and as-a-service during those two years, right? And now we came back this year, it was so exciting to be part of Discover when now we are Everything-as-a-Service. So great from business perspective but, when I look at our own transformation, behind the scene, what IT has been busy with and we haven't caught a breadth because of pandemic, we have taken care of all that change, but at the same time have driven our transformation to make HPE, edge to cloud platform as a service company. >> You know, I saw a survey, I referenced it earlier today, it was a survey, I think it was been by Couchbase, it was a CIO survey, so they asked, who was responsible at your organization for the digital transformation? And overwhelming, like 75% said, CIO, which surprised me 'cause, you know, in line with the business and so forth but in fact I thought, well, maybe, because of the forced march to digital that's what was top of their mind, so who is responsible for, and I know it's not just one person, for the digital transformation? Describe that dynamic. >> Yeah, so definitely it's not one person, but you do need that whole accountable, responsible, informed, right, in the context of digital transformation. And you call them CIO, you call them CDIO or CDO and whatnot but, end of the day, technology is becoming an imperative for a business to be successful and COVID alone has accelerated it, I'm repeating this maybe millions time if you Google it but, CIOs are best positioned because they connect the dots across organization. In my organization at HPE, we embarked upon this large transformation where we were consolidating 10 different ERPs, multiple master data system into one and it wasn't about doing digital which is e-commerce website or one technology, it was creating that digital foundation for the company then to transform that entire organization to be a physical product company to a digital product company. And we needed that foundation for us to get that code to cash experience, not only in our traditional business, but in our as-a-service company. >> So maybe that wasn't confirmation bias, I want to ask you about, we've been talking a lot about sustainability and I've made the comment that, if you go back, you know, 10, 12 years and you were CIO IT at that time, CIO really didn't care about the energy bill, that was paid for by facilities, they really didn't talk to each other much and that's completely changed, why has it changed? How should a CIO, how do your your peers think about energy costs today? >> Yeah, so, at some point look, ESG is the biggest agenda for companies, regulators, even kind of the watchers of ISS and Glass Lewis type thing and boards are becoming aware of it. If you look at 2-4% of greenhouse emission comes from infrastructure, specifically technology infrastructure, as part of this transformation within HPE, I also did what I call private cloud transformation. Remember, it's not data center transformation, it's private cloud transformation. And if you can take your traditional workload and cloudify it which runs on a GreenLake type platform, it's currently 30% more efficient than traditional way of handling the workload and the infrastructure but, we recently published our green living progress report and we talk about efficiency, by 2020 if you have achieved three times, the plan is to get to 30 times by 2050 where, infrastructure will not contribute to energy bill in turn the greenhouse emission as well. I think CIOs are responsible multifold on the sustainability piece. One is how they run their data center, make it efficient with GreenLake type implementations, demand from your hyperscaler to provide that, what Fidelma just launched, sustainability scorecard of the infrastructure, second piece is, we are the data gods in the company, right? We have access to all kinds of data, provide that to the product teams and have them, if we cannot measure, we cannot improve. So if you work with your product team, work with your BU leader, provide them data around greenhouse gas and how they're impacting a mission through their products and how can they make it better going forward, and that can be done through technology, right? All the measurements come from technology. So what technology we need to provide to our manufacturing lines so that they can monitor and improve on the sustainability front as well. >> You mentioned data, I wanted to bring that up 'cause I was going to bring that up in another top track here, data as an asset now is at play, so I get the data on the sustainability, feed that in, but as companies go to the cloud operating model, they go, hey, I got the hyperscalers, you call microscale, Amazon for instance, and you got on-premises data center, which is a large edge and you got the edge, the data control plane, and then the control plane and the data plane are always seem to be like the battle ground, I want to control the data plane, will customers own the data plane or will the infrastructure providers control that data plane? And how do you see that? Because we want to power the machine learning, so data plane control plane, it seems to be like the new middleware, what's your view on that? How do you look at that holistically? >> Yeah, so I'll start based on the hyperscaler conversation, right? And I had this conversation with one of the very big ones recently, or even our partner, SAP, when they talk about RISE, data center and how I host my application infrastructure, that's the lowest common denominator of our job. When I talk about CIOs being responsible for digital transformation, that means how do I make my business process more innovative? How do I make my data more accessible, right? So, if you look at data as an asset for the company, it's again, they're responsible, accountable. As CIO, I'm responsible to have it managed, have it on a technology platform, which makes it accessible by it and our business leader accountable to define the right metrics, right kind of KPIs, drive outcome from that data. IT organization, we are also too busy driving a lot of activities and today's world is going to bad business outcome. So with the data that I'm collecting, how do I enable my business leader to be able to drive business outcome through the use of the data? That's extremely important, and at HPE, we have achieved it, there are two ways, right? Now I have one single ERP, so all the data that I need for what I call operational reporting, get hindsight and insight is available at one place and they can drive their day to day business with that, but longer term, what's going to happen based on what happened, which I call insight to foresight comes from a integrated data platform, which I have control of, and you know, we are fragmenting it because companies now have Databox, Snowflake, AWS data analytics tool, Azure data analytics tool, I call it data torture. CIOs should get control of common set of data and enable their businesses to define better measurements and KPIs to be able to drive the data. >> So data's a crown jewel then, it's crown jewel not-- >> Can we double-click on that because, okay, so you take your ERP system, the consumers of data in the ERP system, they have the context that we've kind of operationalized those systems. We haven't operationalized our analytics systems in the same way, which is kind of a weird dynamic, and so you, right, I think correctly noted Rashmi that, we are creating all these stove pipes. Now, think I heard from you, you're gaining control of those stove pipes, but then how do you put data back in the hands of those line of business users without having to go through a hyper specialized analytics team? And that's a real challenge I think for data. >> It is challenge and I'll tell you, it's messy even in my world but, I have dealt with data long enough, the value lies in how do I take control of all stove pipes, bring it all together, but don't make it a data lake which is built out of multiple puddles, that data lake promise hasn't delivered, right? So the value lies in the conformed layer which then it's easier for businesses to access and run their analytics from, because they need a playground because all the answers they don't have, on the operation side, as you mentioned, we got it, right? It'll happen, but on the fore site side and deeper insight side based on driving the key metrics, two challenges; understanding what's the key metrics in KPI, but the second is, how to drive visibility and understanding of it. So we need to get technology out of the conversation, bring in understanding of the data into the conversation and we need to drive towards that path. >> As a business, you know, line of business person putting that hat on, I would love to have this conversation with my CIO because I would say, I just want self-service infrastructure and I want to have access to the data that I need, I know what metrics I need to run my business so now I want the technology to be just a technical detail, you take care of that and then somebody in the organization, probably not the line of business person wants to make sure that that data is governed and secure. So there's somebody else and that maybe is your responsibility, so how do you handle that real problem? So I think you're well on the track with GreenLake for self-serve infrastructure, right, how do you handle the sort of automated governance piece of it, make that computational? Yeah, so one thing is technology is important because that's bringing all the data together at one place with single version of truth. And then, that's why I say my sons are data scientist, by the way, I tell them that the magic happens at the intersection of technology knowledge, data knowledge, and business knowledge, and that's where the talent, which is very hard to find who can connect dots across these three kind of circles and focus on that middle where the value lies and pushing businesses to, because, you know, business is messy, I've worked on pharma companies, utilities, now technology, order does not mean revenue, right? There's a lot more that happen and pricing or chargeback, rebates, all that things, if somebody can kind of make sense out of it through incremental innovation, it's not like a big bang I know it all, but finding those areas and applying what you said, I call it the G word, governance, to make sure your source is right and then creating that conform layer then makes into the dashboard the right information about those types of metrics is extreme. >> And then bringing that to the ecosystem, now I just made it 10 times more complicated. >> Yeah, this is a great conversation, we on theCUBE interview one time we're talking about the old software days where shrink-wrap software be on the shelf, you wouldn't know if was successful until you looked at the sales data, well after the fact, now everything's instrumented, SaaS companies, you know exactly what the adoption is, either people like it or they don't, the data doesn't lie. So now companies are realizing, okay, I got data, I can instrument everything, your customers are now saying, I can get to the value fast now. So knowing what that value is is what everyone's talking about. How do you see that changing the data equation? >> Yeah, that's so true even for our business, right? If you talk to Fidelma today, who is our CTO, she's bringing together the platform and multiple platforms that we had so far to go to as-a-service business, right? Infosite, Aruba Central, GLCP, or now we call it it's all HPE GreenLake, but now this gives us the opportunity to really be a alongside customer. It's no more, I sold a box, I'll come back to you three years later for a refresh, now we are in touch with our customer real time through Telemetry data that's coming from our products and really understanding how our customers are reacting with that, right? And that's where we instantiated what we call is a federated data lake where, marketing, product, sales, all teams can come together and look at what's going on. Customer360, right? Data is locked in Salesforce from opportunity, leads, codes perspective, and then real time orders are locked in S4. The challenge is, how do we bring both together so that our sales people have on their fingertip whats the install base look like, how much business that we did and the traditional side and the GreenLake side and what are the opportunities here to support our customers? >> Real quick, I know we don't have a lot of time left, but I want to touch on machine learning, which basically feeds AI, machine learning, AI go together, it's only as good as the data you can provide to it. So to your point about exposing the data while having the stove pipes for compliance and governance, how do you architect that properly? You mentioned federated data lake and earlier you said the data lake promise hasn't come back, is it data meshes? What is the architecture to have as much available data to be addressed by applications while preserving the protection? >> Yeah, so, machine learning and AI, I will also add chatbots and conversational AI, right? Because that becomes the front end of it. And that's kind of the automation process promise in the data space, right? So, the point is that, if we talk about federated data lake around one capability which I'm talking about GreenLake consumption, right? So one piece is around, how do I get data cleanly? How do I relate it across various products? How do I create metrics out of it? But how do I make it more accessible for our users? And that's where the conversational AI and chatbot comes in. And then the opportunity comes in is around not only real time, but analytics, I believe Salesforce had a pitch called customer insight few years ago, where they said, we have so many of you on our platform, now I can combine all the data that I can access and want to give you a view of how every company is interacting with their customer and how you can improve it, that's where we want to go. And I completely agree, it ends up being clean data, governed data, secure data, but having that understanding of what we want to project out and how do I make it accessible for our users very seamlessly. >> Last question, what's your number one challenge right now in this post isolation world? >> Talent, we haven't talked about that, right? >> Got to get that out there. >> All these promises, right, the entire end to end foundational transformation, as-a-service transformation, talking about the promise of data analytics, we talked about governance and security, all that is possible because of the talent we have or we will have, and our ability to attract and retain them. So as CIO, I personally spend a lot of time, CEO, John Schultz, Antonio, very, very focused on creating that employee experience and what we call everything is edge for us, so edge to office initiative where we are giving them hybrid work capabilities, people are very passionate about purpose, so sustainability, quality, all these are big deal for them, making sure that senior leadership is focused on the right thing, so, hybrid working capability, hiring the right set of people with the right skill set and keeping them excited about the work we are doing, having a purpose, and being honest about it means I haven't seen a more authentic leader than Antonio, who opens up his keynote for this type of convention, with the purpose that he's very passionate about in current environment. >> Awesome, Rashmi, always great to have you on, wonderful to have you face to face, such a clear thinker in bringing your experience to our audience, really appreciate it. >> Thank you, I'm a big consumer of CUBE and look forward to having-- >> All right, and keep it right there, John and I will be back to wrap up with Norm Follett, from HPE discover 2022, you're watching theCUBE. 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(bright music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's virtual coverage of HPE's big customer event. Of course, the virtual edition and we're going to dig into transformations, the role of technology and the role of senior technology leadership. Look, let's face it, HPE has gone through a pretty dramatic transformation itself in the past few years so it makes a great example in case study and with me is Rashmi Kumar who is the senior vice president and CIO at HPE, Rashmi welcome come on inside theCUBE. >> Hi Dave nice to be here. >> Well it's been almost a year since COVID you know changed the world as we know it. How would you say the role of the CIO specifically in generally IT has changed? I mean you got digital, zero trust has gone from buzzword to mandate, digital, everybody was you know complacent about digital in many ways and now it's really accelerated, remote work, hybrid, how do you see it? >> Absolutely, as I said in the last Discover that COVID has been the biggest reason to accelerate digital transformation in the companies. I see CIO's role has changed tremendously in the last 15 months. It's no more just keep the operations running, that's become a table stake. Our roles have become not only to create digital customer experience, engage with our customers in different ways, but also to transform the company operations from inside out to be able to give that digital experience from beginning to end of the customer engagement going forward. We have also become responsible for switching our strategies around the companies as the COVID hit in different parts of the world at different times and how companies structured their operations to go from one region to another, a global company like HPE had to look into its supply chain differently, had to look into strategies to mitigate the risk that was created because of the supply chain disruptions, as well as you go to taking care of our employees. How do you create this digital collaboration experience where teams can still come together and make the work happen for our end customers? How do we think about future employee engagement when people are not coming into these big buildings and offices and working together, but how do you create the same level of collaboration, coordination, as well as delivery of faster, good and services which is enabled by technology going forward. So CIO and IT's role has gone from giving a different level of customer experience to different level of employee experience, as well as enabling day-to-day operations of the companies. CEOs have realized that digital is the way to go forward, it does not matter what industry you are in and now CIOs have their seat at the table to define what the future of every company now which is a technology company irrespective you are in oil and gas, or mining, or a technical product, or a car or a mobility company, end of the day you have to act and behave like a technology company. >> So I want to ask you about that because you've been a CIO at a leading technology provider now for the last three years and you've had previous roles and were, you know non-technical, technology, you know, selling to IT companies and as you point out those worlds are coming together. Everybody's a technology company today. How do you think that changes the role of the CIO because it would always seem to me that there was a difference between a CIO at a tech company you know what I mean by that and a CIO at sort of every other company is, are those two worlds converging? >> Absolutely and it's interesting you pointed out that I have worked in many different industries from healthcare and pharma, to entertainment, to utilities and now at a technology company. End of the day the issues that IT deals with are pretty similar across the organization. What is different here is now my customers are people like me in other industries and I have little bit of an advantage because just having the experience across various ecosystem even that HPE look I was fortunate at HPE because of Antonio's leadership we had top-down mandate to transform how we did business and I talked about my NextGEN IT program in last year's CUBE interview. But at the same time while we were changing our customer, partner's experience from ordering, to order processing, to supply chain, to finance, we decided this pivot of becoming as a service company. And if you think about that pivot, it's pretty common. If it was a technology company or non-technology company. At HPE we were very used to selling a product and coming back three years later at the time of refresh of infrastructure or hardware. That's no more true for us. Now we are becoming an as a service or a subscription company and IT played a major role to enable that quote-to-cash experience which is very different than the traditional experience, around how we stay connected with our customer, how we proactively understand their behavior. I always talk about this term digital exhaust which results into data, which can result into better insight and you can not only upsell, cross-sell because now you have more data about your product usage, but first and foremost give what your customer wants in a much better way because you can proactively understand their needs and wants because you are providing a digital product versus a physical product. So this is the change that most of the companies are now going through. If you look at Domino's transition, they are pizza sellers but they did better because they had better digital experience. If you look at Chipotle, these are food service companies. Ikea which is a furniture manufacturer, across the board we have helped our customers and industries to understand how to become a more digital provider. And remember when HPE says edge to cloud platform as a service, edge is the product, the customers is what we deal with and how do we get that, help them get that data, understand how the product is behaving and then get the information to cloud for further analysis and understanding from the data that comes out of the products that they sell. >> I think you've been at HPE now I think around three years and I've been watching of course for decades, you know HPE, well HP then HPE is, I feel like it's entering now that sort of third phase of its transformation, your phase one was okay we got to figure out how to deal or operate as separate companies, okay, that took some time and then it was okay, now how do we align our resources? And you know what are the waves that we're going to ride? And how do we take our human capital, our investments and what bets do we place? And you're all in on as a service and now it's like okay, you know how do we deliver on all those promises? So pretty massive transformations. You talked about edge to cloud as a service so you've got this huge pivot in your business. What's the technology strategy to support that transformation? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So as I mentioned first, your second phase which was becoming a stand-alone company was the NextGEN IT program where we brought in S4 and 60 related ecosystem application where even in the traditional business there was a realization that we were 120 billion company, we are a 30 billion company, we need different types of technologies as well as more integrated across our product line, across the globe and we, I'm very happy to report that we are the last leg of NextGEN IT transformation. Where we have brought in new customer experience through low-touch or no-touch order processing, a very strong S4 capabilities where we are now able to run all global orders across all our hardware and services business together and I'm happy to report that we have been able to successfully run through the transformation which a typical company of our size would take five or six years to do in around close to three years. But at the same time while we were building this foundation and the capabilities to be able to do order management supply chain and data and analytics platforms, we also made the pivot to go to as a service. Now for as a service and subscription selling, it needs a very different quote-to-cash experience for our customers. And that's where we had bring in platforms like BRIM to do subscription billing, convergent charging and a whole different way to address. But we were lucky to have this transformation completed on which we could bolt on this new capability and we had the data analytics platform built which now these as a service products can also use to drive better insight into our customer behavior as well as how they're using our product real time for our operations teams. >> Well they say follow the money, in theCUBE we love to say follow the data. I mean data is obviously a crucial component of competitive advantage, business value, so talk a little bit more about the role of data, I'm interested in where IT fits. You know a lot of companies they'll have a chief data officer, or a CIO, sometimes they're separate sometimes they work, you know for each other, or CDO works for CIO, how do you guys approach the whole data conversation? >> Yeah that's a great question and has been top of the mind of a lot of CEOs, CIOs, chief digital officers in many different companies. The way we have set it up here is we do have a chief data officer and we do have a head of technology and platform and data lake within IT. Look the way I see is that I call the term data torture. If they have multiple data lakes, if they have multiple data locations and the data is not coming together at one place at the first time that it comes out to the source system, we end up with data swamps and it's very difficult to drive insights, it's very difficult to have single version of truth. So HPE had two-pronged approach. First one was as part of this NextGEN IT transformation we embarked upon the journey first of all to define our customers and products in a very uniform way across the globe. It's called entity master data and product master data program. These were very, very difficult program. We are now happy to report that we can understand the customer from cold stage to servicing stage beginning to end across all our system. It's been a tough journey but it was effort well spent. At the same time while we were building this master data capability we also invested time in our analytics platform. Because we are generating so much data now globally as one footprint, how do we link our data lake to our SAP and Salesforce and all these systems where our customer data flows through and create analytics and insight from it from our customers or our operations team. At the same time we also created a chief data officer role where the responsibility is really to drive business from understanding what decision making and analytics they need around product, around customer, around their usage around their experience to be able to drive better alignment with our customers and products going forward. So this creates efficiencies in the organization. If you have a leader who is taking care of your platforms and data, building single source of truth and you have a leader who is propagating this mature notion of handling data as enterprise data and driving that focus on understanding the metrics and the insight that the businesses need to drive better customer alignment, that's when we gain those efficiencies and behind the scenes the chief data officer and the data leader within my organization work very, very closely to understand each other needs, sometimes art of the possible, where do we need the data processing? Is it at the edge? Is it in the cloud? What's the best way to drive the technology and the platform forward? And they kind of rely on each other's knowledge and intelligence to give us superior results. And I have done data analytics in many different companies, this model works. Where you have focus on insight and analytics without, because data without insight is of no value. But at the same time you need clean data, you need efficient, fast platforms to process that insight at the functional non-functional requirement that our business partners have. And that's how we have established in here and we have seen many successes recently as of now. >> I want to ask you a kind of a harder, maybe it's not a harder question it's a weird question around single version of the truth. 'Cause it's clearly a challenge for organizations and there's many applications, workloads that require that single version of the truth, the operational systems, the transaction systems, the HR, the Salesforce and clearly you have to have a single version of the truth. I feel like, however we're on the cusp of a new era where business lines see an opportunity for whatever, their own truth to work with a partner to create some kind of new data product. And it's early days in that but I wonder, maybe not the right question for HPE but I wonder if you see it with in your ecosystems where it's yes, single version of truth is sort of one class of data and analytics got to have that nailed down, data quality, everything else. But then there's this sort of artistic version of the data where business people need more freedom, they need more latitude to create. Are you seeing that? Maybe you can help me put that into context. >> That's a great question Dave and I'm glad you asked it so. I think Tom Davenport, who is known in the data space talks about the offensive and the defensive use cases of leveraging data. I think the piece that you talked about where it's clean, it's pristine, it's quality, it's all that, most of those offer the offensive use cases where you are improving companies' operations incrementally because you have very clean data, you have very good understanding of how my territories are doing, how my customers are doing, how my products are doing, how am I meeting my SLAs or how my financials are looking, there's no room for failure in that area. The other area is though which works on the same set of data. It's not a different set of data but the need is more around finding needles in the haystack to come up with new needs, new wants in customers or new business models that we go with. The way we have done it is we do take this data, take out what's not allowed for everybody to be seen and then what we call is a private space but that's this entire data available to our business leader not real time, because the need is not as real time because they are doing more, what we call this predictive analytics to be able to leverage the same data set and run their analytics. And we work very closely with business units, we educate them, we tell them how to leverage this data set and use it and gather their feedback to understand what they need in that space to continue to run with their analytics. I think as we talk about hindsight, insight and foresight, hindsight and insight happens more from this clean data lakes where you have authenticity, you have quality and then most of the foresight happens in a different space where the users have more leverage to use data in many different ways to drive analytics and insights which is not readily available. >> Great thank you for that. That's an interesting discussion. You know digital transformation it's a journey and it's going to take you know many years. I know a lot of ways, not a lot of ways, 2020 was a forced march to digital you know. If you weren't a digital business you were out of business and so you really didn't have much time to plan. So now organizations are stepping back saying, okay, let's really lean into our strategy, the journey and along the way, there's going to be blind spots, there's bumps in the road, when you look out what are the potential disruptions that you see maybe in terms of how companies are currently approaching their digital transformations? >> That's a great question Dave and I'm going to take a little bit more longer-term view on this topic, right? And what's top of my mind recently is the whole topic of ESG, environmental, social and governance. Most of the companies have governance in place right? Because they are either public companies, or they're under some kind of scrutiny from different regulatory bodies or whatnot even if you're a startup you need to do things with our customers and whatnot. It has been there for companies, it continues to be there. We the public companies are very good at making sure that we have the right compliance, right privacy, right governance in place. Now we'll talk about cybersecurity I think that creates a whole new challenge in that governance space, however we have the setup within our companies to be able to handle that challenge. Now, when we go to social, what happened last year was really important. And now as each and every company we need to think about what are we doing from our perspective to play our part in that and not only the bigger companies, leaders at our level I would say that between last March and this year I have hired more than 400 people during pandemic which was all virtual, but me and my team have made sure that we are doing the right thing to drive inclusion and diversity which is also very big objective for HPE and Antonio himself has been very active in various round tables in US at the World Economic Forum level and I think it's really important for companies to create that opportunity, remove that disparity that's there for the underserved communities. If we want to continue to be successful in this world to create innovative product and services we need to sell it to the broader cross section of populations and to be able to do that we need to bring them in our fold and enable them to create that equal consumption capabilities across different sets of people. HPE has taken many initiatives and so are many companies. I feel like the momentum that companies have now created around the topic of equality is very important. I'm also very excited to see that a lot of startups are now coming up to serve that 99% versus just the shiny ones as you know in the Bay Area to create better delivery methods of food or products right? But the third piece which is environmental is extremely important as well. As we have seen recently in many companies and where even the dollar or the economic value is flowing are around the companies which are serious about environmental. HPE recently published it's a Living Progress Report, we have been in the forefront of innovation to reduce carbon emissions, we help our customers through those processes. Again, if we don't, if our planet is on fire none of us will exist right? So we all have to do that every little part to be able to do better. And I'm happy to report I myself as a person solar panels, battery, electric cars, whatever I can do. But I think something more needs to happen right? Where as an individual I need to pitch in but maybe utilities will be so green in the future that I don't need to put panels on my roof which again creates a different kind of race going forward. So when you ask me about disruptions, I personally feel that successful company like ours have to have ESG top of their mind and think of product and services from that perspective, which creates equal opportunity for people, which creates better environment sustainability going forward and you know our customers, our investors are very interested in seeing what we are doing to be able to serve that cause for bigger cross section of companies. And I'm most of the time very happy to share with my CIO cohort around how our HPEFS capabilities creates or feeds into the circular economy, how much e-waste we have recycled or kept it off of landfills, our green lake capabilities, how it reduces the e-waste going forward, as well as our sustainability initiatives which can help other CIOs to be more carbon neutral going forward as well. >> You know that's a great answer Rashmi thank you for that 'cause I got to tell you I hear a lot of mumbo jumbo about ESG but that was a very substantive, thoughtful response that I think tech companies in particular are, have to lead and are leading in this area. So I really appreciate that sentiment. I want to end with a very important topic which is cyber it's, obviously you know escalated in the news the last several months, it's always in the news but, you know 10 or 15 years ago there was this mentality of failure equals fire. And now we realize, hey they're going to get in, it's how you handle it. Cyber has become a board-level topic. You know years ago there was a lot of discussion, oh you can't have the SecOps team working for the CIO because that's like the fox watching the hen house that's changed. It's been a real awakening, a kind of a rude awakening so the world is now more virtual, you've got a secure physical assets. I mean any knucklehead can now become a ransomware attacker, they can buy ransomware as a service in the dark web so that's something we've never seen before. You're seeing supply chains get hacked and self-forming malware I mean it's a really scary time. So you've got these intellectual assets it's a top priority for organizations. Are you seeing a convergence of the CISO role, the CIO role, the line of business roles relative to sort of prior years in terms of driving security throughout organizations? >> Yeah this is a great question and this was a big discussion at my public board meeting a couple of days ago. It's, as I talk about many topics, if you think digital, if you think data, if you think ESG, it's no more one organization's business, it's now everybody's responsibility. I saw a Wall Street Journal article a couple of days ago where somebody has compared cyber to 9/11 type scenario that if it happens for a company that's the level of impact you feel on your operations. So, you know all models are going to change where CISO reports to CIO, at HPE we are also into product security and that's why CISO is a peer of mine who I work with very closely, who also worked with product teams where we are saving our customers from lot of pain in this space going forward and HPE itself is investing enormous amount of efforts and time in coming out of products which are secure and are not vulnerable to these types of attacks. The way I see it is CISO role has become extremely critical in every company and a big part of that role is to make people understand that cybersecurity is also everybody's responsibility. That's why an IT we propagate DevSecOps, as we talk about it we are very, very careful about picking the right products and services. This is one area where companies cannot shy away from investing. You have to continuously looking at cybersecurity architecture, you have to continuously look at and understand where the gaps are and how do we switch our product or service that we use from the providers to make sure our companies stay secure. The training not only for individual employees around anti-phishing or what does cybersecurity mean, but also to the executive committee and to the board around what cyber security means, what zero trust means, but at the same time doing drive-ins. We did it for business continuity and disaster recovery before, now it is time we do it for a ransomware attack and stay prepared. As you mentioned and we all say in tech community, it's always if not when. No company can take them their chest and say, "oh we are fully secure," because something can happen going forward. But what is the readiness for something that can happen? It has to be handled at the same risk level as a pandemic, or a earthquake, or a natural disaster and assume that it's going to happen and how as a company we will behave when something like this happens. So I'm huge believer in the framework of protect, detect, govern and respond as these things happen. So we need to have exercises within the company to ensure that everybody's aware of the part that they play day to day but at the same time when some event happen and making sure we do very periodic reviews of IT and cyber practices across the company, there is no more differentiation between IT and OT. That was 10 years ago. I remember working with different industries where OT was totally out of reach of IT and guess what happened? WannaCry and Petya and XP machines were still running your supply chains and they were not protected. So, if it's a technology it needs to be protected. That's the mindset people need to go with. Invest in education, training, awareness of your employees, your management committee, your board and do frequent exercises to understand how to respond when something like this happen. See it's a big responsibility to protect our customer data, our customer's operations and we all need to be responsible and accountable to be able to provide all our product and services to our customers when something unforeseen like this happens. >> Rashmi you're very generous with your time thank you so much for coming back in theCUBE it was great to have you again. >> Thank you Dave, it was really nice chatting with you. >> And thanks for being with us for our ongoing coverage of HPE Discover '21. This is Dave Vellante you're watching the virtual CUBE, the leader in digital tech coverage we'll be right back. (bright music)

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi lisa martin with the cube here covering some news from dell technologies i'm pleased to welcome one of its customers liam furlong the i.t manager from revelation software liam great to see you today thanks lisa it's fantastic to be with you and we're socially distant california you're down in australia i know it's early morning for you but we're pleased to be chatting with you so give me and our audience an overview of revelation software who are you and what do you do yeah sure revelation software is a software development company no surprises there and our primary product is a tool called revtrack and for all those sap users out there we help you get your changes navigated safely through the wide landscapes and the open seas of your sap environment so we're all about change management and delivering certainty in what is really rapidly changing landscapes uh in the it world so customers can go to you for all of their challenges with all their sap data and sort of offload that basically i mean that sounds lovely i'm sure many of them would take that so talk to me about your itune manager talking about your i.t environment i know you're highly virtualized just give us an overview of what your data environment looks like we um like a lot of software companies we give our development teams a lot of freedom and so over the years a lot has definitely built into our environment we have hundreds of vms and even more sap landscapes we are committed to our customers to provide a lot of previous version compatibility both in our product but also in sap we support more of sap's old versions than they do we just want to make sure that everyone is able to do their job and focus on what they're trying to do rather than worrying about you know do i have to upgrade am i going to be forced ahead uh in you know especially in a change management landscape and so we have a lot of history a lot of old environments and we manage that by using a lot of on-prem we have local data centers like everyone i guess but also we've got a great multi-cloud environment now and it helps us to really uh provide an excellent environment for our teams to develop in the way that they want to support our customers uh in an efficient way but also without us having to over commit to hardware and so on so you have highly virtualized environment about 150 vms nearly 500 sap landscapes so big administration of overhead talk to me about how you were protecting your data i'm assuming vms maybe some sap databases and servers how are you protecting that before using dell's new integrative approach yeah we uh used a targeted appliance uh style i guess we built up what we thought was the right solution we had a lot of legacy thinking really but uh tools we used a lot of scripts previously we used the veeam platform and that presented an ever increasing set of challenges as you can imagine with s s3 s4 hana rolling along the environment just had to change our backup load was increasing our backup windows weren't getting any larger and our backup targets weren't getting any larger so we really needed to ask some hard questions about what we were doing and whether it was working for us we had absolutely no cloud integration our off-site copies were completely inadequate and so as an i-team manager who is um the guy at the end of the road when it comes to rpo and rto and uh certainty of restorability i was not sleeping well it's fair to say well and that's something that obviously you you look to a company like dell technologies to help with sleep as a sleep aid but you guys i saw that after 20 years you were testing and a hosted version of your rev track insights product and needed cloud dr and you kind of talked about meeting customer slas and i was reading your case study and there was some big challenges there with respect to the sla front yeah definitely um i guess uh actually we were really fortunate to have started a conversation with dell even before we were bringing our cloud platform online we knew we were going to need to be able to address cloud dr it was on the horizon for us and so being able to talk with a vendor that had everything wrapped in uh the idea of an integrated appliance was really quite foreign to me the um the the thought that i could trust dell technologies to actually do this better than me i made that that sounds a bit uh arrogant but the truth is you know i knew my environment and they didn't but what was really stand out for us in the process is dell knew that too and they climbed into our environment and worked really hard they really actually wanted to understand well what were our challenges and what were our loads what was our environment really like and then work with us on a strong solution and i was amazed it felt really like the cavalry had arrived and they knew exactly what they were doing and then they worked overtime to help us find a great solution and it has been a fantastic solution not only solving the challenges we faced at that time of deployment but knowing what was on the horizon going into the cloud and having a sas platform uh we were future-proofed in a way that i was hopeful about but now that we're using it in that way i'm confident and every day i know that it's working properly for us that confidence is absolutely critical but you use the term that we hear so often in technology future proof talk to me about when you hear that as an i.t manager what does that mean to you and how is dell tech with the integrated approach delivering that yeah i think um i mean if i'm just being honest uh i generally dismiss that when i hear anyone say that they're future-proofed because no one knows what's coming i mean here we are living this year outright and uh we we knew 2020 was going to be a big year but not in the ways that it has been uh i think that even though we wanted to believe that this backup tool would cover us we weren't sure uh what it has meant is there are two real standout things one there's a suite of functionality and in the integrated appliance which we didn't need then but it was standing by and it was easy to turn on it wasn't like oh and now you'll have to pay this extra fee or now you'll have to deploy these extra tools it was all ready to go and so they've brought their years of experience and forecasting and built in a bunch of functions which you're not going to need and no one is going to need all of the tools out of the box but over time you can deploy it and the other really big one for us is all of the extra storage that we might need as our backup requirements grow shipped in the box which is a huge cost to the vendor um but it's just sitting there ready for us to consume as we need which is absolutely fantastic for me i don't need to take our backup system offline to upgrade i don't need to consume more rack space i don't need to use more power it's already doing everything it needs to and it's just about rolling forward easily as we move forward as a company so walk us through what the environment looks like now we mentioned 150 vms a big sap landscape give us a picture of the technologies and what dell is helping to protect in your environment yeah so um dell dell covers everything the the integrated appliance we're using um actually it meets all of our needs uh i'm a paranoid and in my job so we have extra bits and pieces kicking around but the power protect device is our go-to we know that it's going to be there it's going to be online it's going to have covered everything from our on-prem so we use a vmware environment locally and we're backing up all of those vms every night about 54 terabytes of data and we knock that out in about a 90 minute window which is absolutely fantastic so that backs up to local and then it ships up to our cloud environment so we've got our offsite covered in that same night then we've also got environment i guess using the amazon example we have a multi-cloud so we've got things in a couple of different cloud providers but to use amazon as an example we have production systems running up there we have our sas environment running up there and we capture that also with our power protect device and bring everything back down and so now we've got that covered as well and so no matter what our problem is i've just got one place to go to to say i need to restore this and i need to do it fast and we can get that done uh straight away it's fantastic and that's what i've been hearing i've spoken with a number of folks already including the vp of product marketing caitlin gordon and we're hearing a lot of that one-stop shop sort of description for the integrated appliance i'm wondering if you could give us a compare and contrast uh power protect the integrated appliance as you said and described the benefits that you've already achieved versus the targeted approach with theme that you had before yeah sure um what we came from was only being able to back up mission critical systems nightly and everything else had to be backed up weekly to achieve our backup windows even still monday morning was uh was a nerve wracking a few hours while the weekend back up kind of crawled through and finished and people are like oh systems are a bit slow this morning like oh yeah we're looking at that you know um we came from that to getting as i said earlier everything done every night which is a complete transformation for us it means that we don't need to worry about we used to have to supplement our veeam backup with scripts because we could get the scripted backup done uh much faster and so we would go oh we'll restore with veeam and then we'll lay a script over the top to recover everything up to last night but now um it's just all uh covered through that one appliance um again in our cloud environments we use the local tools to provide a local backup and that's great to have previously that was mission critical we had to have that working and we had to have our technicians up to speed with four or five different uh tool sets but now they it's great that they are aware of those tools but really it's just about understanding uh one application in regards to a targeted solution you end up having really all these building blocks that only one person really knows how they all string together but now not only do our whole team understand how it works together but it's one phone number to find a whole group of people who know how it works together and they can help us you know from upgrades deployments restores anything we need if i'm on leave then i know that someone else from deltek can step in and cover me for any of their questions it might normally bubble up to my level um one of my favorite numbers i'm sorry i feel like i'm ranting but one of my favorite numbers is you know we came from using a different hardware vendor's san and we were getting compression maybe of three to six times uh on data we get compression from a month view of 150 to 200 times and if we expand that out to an annual view we get compression rates of 300 times on our data which means instead of having literally 15 ru of storage we have two u of storage uh the cost per terabyte is down by hundreds of dollars it it makes me look really good and i haven't had to do anything all i did was just go yep you guys do it you guys deploy your solution so it's been those are huge deduplication numbers i know caitlin gordon shared with me on average 65 to 1 but you you basically at least double that and in terms of of making you look good that's something that's actually quite important in terms of i.t and the business uh making sure that what you can deliver to the business is the confidence and you and your team that their data is protected can you share a little bit about maybe the i.t business relations and how this technology has helped them just have that confidence yeah definitely um i mean as you say every part of the business sees a different thing our development team are paying attention to very different things to our accounting team these numbers definitely help me to make friends in both teams as a it manager if the backups do their job properly if this all works no one notices if this goes wrong i break the business so the stakes are pretty high with backup but even though that's true and we know that's true committing a big financial investment is still hard it's still a moment where you hold your breath and ask was it worth it but now that we've been able to show the numbers to our executive teams and they can see how much money they're saving how much money we would normally be reinvesting at this point but we can now make that available for other projects we can put that into further development we can put that into improving our sas platform that really works for us as a business we want to serve our customers better we don't want to waste our time and money on stuff that affects just our day-to-day we want to be really focused where our people are and with what they care about so by putting money back in the pockets uh that's a big win and by making our uh infrastructure teams more free their time is freer because they're not spending you know we do restores every week pardon me every week because those restores now run more smoothly and they are faster and there's less hunting around to try and find the backup that actually worked then that means our infrastructure teams are free to also now do other upgrades to work alongside say our developers they want to be running the current versions of the atlassian suite not you know a version from a year ago but we've got more time to do that work now it makes a big difference well that workforce productivity that you're alluding to it can be hugely impactful across the business it's not just that now you know you've got one solution one phone number to call if there's issues you've got more time back to be more innovative more strategic and so do the rest of the folks on your team so the business overall that workforce productivity can really be very widespread in a good way absolutely and it's well felt i think you know one of the things that it's really hard to put a dollar value on but it is really key is people don't like doing rework and backup recovery feels like reworking like i've been here before and so by mitigating particularly this aspect of our roles our teams are happier they generally are enjoying their work more because they're as i say they've got more time to work on things that are energizing and rewarding and across the business people feel better as well there are a lot of complications in anyone's job but certainly from the direction that hardware and storage and backup is being uh concerned we've taken away a big stress for me for example it's important that we test our dr scenario obviously everyone says that but now we can actually do it and now we can actually do a full dr production outage and go okay great let's shut it down and see what happens and we were able to do that a couple of times a year we don't have to pay for a cold dc or a warm dc in the wings we can recover to the cloud we our dr site is vmware cloud on amazon so we can spin it up and do the whole dr scenario our dr is engaged within about three hours from a full building loss and not only is that great peace of mind but also again it puts great data into the hands of my cio he's able to present on business continuity issues to the executive team and show that we're actually caring about the business and caring about the things that people do worry about and again makes people look good which is uh which is always helpful it is absolutely as you said it's really you know if you can't restore the data you're kind of stuck so now i know why you look so rested because you you have the solution you're sleeping better at night liam has been such a pleasure talking to you great work and we look forward to hearing more great stories to come from revelation software thanks so much lisa it's been a wonderful time per liam furlong i'm lisa martin you're watching the cube you

(futuristic electronic music) >> Live from London, England, it's theCUBE covering .Next Conference Europe 2018. Brought to you buy Nutanix. >> Welcome back to Nutanix .Next 2018 in beautiful London, England. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host Joep Piscaer, and happy to welcome back to the program, third time guest, I believe, Chris Hallenbeck, who's the senior vice president of database and data management with SAP. Fresh off the keynote stage this morning. Were you were with CEO Dheeraj Panday? >> I was, a great time. >> So, SAP, things are going well. I see SAP at lots of shows. You've been on our program at a few different ones. You are based here in Europe now, you're from the US. Chris, introduce us a little bit. Give us some of the summary of what brings you specifically to the event. >> Well, I mean, several things. So, my responsibility is looking after data platform. And what we're doing from a strategy perspective, what we're doing, what applications we're building on that in the cloud, what we're doing, everyone asks what are you doing with HANA? What are you doing with Data Hub? And so that's the core of what I spend time on. But equally I think you need to step back and look at SAP's business 'cause we're also, we're our own OEM, right? HANA's what makes S4 possible. HANA's what powers all of our cloud applications. We're going to announce now that everyone one of those, everyone of the acquired companies now runs on HANA and not on any other database. And so you really see these three pillars of SAP. You talk about I've been with SAP seven years ago, and everyone said, why would you go there? Because there's this old applications company that seems to be getting, oh, and even Hasso Plattner, our founder, was saying that was true. Came out with HANA, that we quickly streamed up. Passed Teradata, become the number four database company in the world. Still growing phenomenally. They used HANA as a method of rejuvenation for originally S4 and now that's gone to the cloud. And during that time, we were able to acquire all these cloud applications and build those, SuccessFactors, Ariba, and other stuff, and that's become a wildly successful business. >> Yeah, Chris, I wanted to step back for a second because you talk about data products. >> Yeah. >> You know, I've watched databases for my entire career. I've watched the huge growth of the importance of data. Especially the last few years. You know, we went through that big data wave, which was kind of middle end success, but everything today, data is the center of it all. You know database is where a lot of data live, but how am I getting, and how are customer getting more advantage out of their data when they are using your products? >> It's a great question. So, one is it continues to be the fact that now, people now have realtime access to that information. And it continues to actually be the biggest driver, to be honest. The other one where we see HANA getting picked, especially, is when you have tens or even hundreds of data feeds coming in simultaneously. Frequently, some are streaming, some are traditionally relational, coming from all different systems, and people then want to do analytics on that. But when we talk about analytics, I don't just mean a BI tool, although you could, but now we're doing predictive on that. And, in fact, and then figuring out how does a data scientist then go through, do machine learning, build a model, deploy for scoring, from a full lifecycle perspective. And that's where HANA's getting used tremendously, is in these analytic systems, and data warehousing, and in particularly people going, I want a realtime data warehouse. The other one where we see it being a lot more is in applications where HANA originally was only for SAP applications. We got a huge amount of work on that to make it work for OEM, ISVs, to port their applications over. And you've been seeing that continuously. I think there's some phenomenal work we've done with Esri. HANA's now the fastest geospatial database in the world. And Esri has about 80% of the geospatial market. Now prefers and runs on HANA. So that's been huge. So customers are beginning to use it in more areas. Not just SAP customers, or the CIO who ran the SAP systems, we're getting used a lot by the chief data officer's division. We're getting used out by other groups. We're getting used by specialty firms doing things like geospatial, doing text analytics. And so it's been kind of exciting. I don't know if I answered your question, by the way, but-- >> No, I think that was really good. >> So that sounds like you positioned yourself to enable customers to make the most out of the cloud, make the most out of data, make the most out of IoT. But I'm curious, how are helping customers succeed in that digital transformation? >> Yeah, well, with the digital transformation, and the way I always look at digital transformation, well, it's like big data, what does it mean, right? But what you see the patterns are is people are trying to remove layers between them and the actual consumer or the product. And if I can take those layers out, now you have people like Netflix who went all the way from just saying, let's make it easier to get a DVD, but now they are the movie studio directly to the consumer. They got rid of the 18-year-old kid at the video store, they got rid of everything through streaming. They went out on the, business. They took out all these layers and got closer. Whether it's Airbnb and all these pure plays, that's exactly, they've reduced the number of layers. Our existing customers are trying to do the same thing. They're saying, how do I get closer? How do I understand them? That requires, like if I'm running machinery, IoT data will tell me exactly how they use my machinery. If I can then start to take a look at that, now they want to work with me in different ways. Customers dictate how they're going to work with me. That means if they want to come over the web one time, other time they want to phone, they should always be treated equally based on how important they are to me. Reducing layers. Equally, though, you always have to be worried about someone coming out of nowhere, the pure play that comes in with a brilliant idea in your division, and you can't let 'em just take you out. So what we're seeing is these traditional companies, not necessarily know what the digital transformation is, but saying, I've basically got to get fit. And I can't do that with a really complicated landscape. If my department says, oh, that's great, new business model? We got to have the accounting up and ready in three years to compete with this new entrant. It's not going to work. Yet you upgrade your systems, and let's say SAP is financials, somebody comes up with a new business model, that's a day change in the system. You want to reorganize, that's a few clicks in the system, and I have a new hierarchy. That used to be a two year process. And so we working in all different aspects. We can do the IoT, we can do the agile work, we can have the data science machine learning understand the customer, all the way back to the applications that are agile now as people upgrade to the S4 system. >> Alright, I want to bring us back to the Nutanix show here, Chris. >> We like Nutanix, let's help them here. >> That's great, let's talk about platforms out there. You have applications that they all want to get certified on. Your application certified on their platform, so it's always, okay, am I SAP certified? And, okay, Nutanix even went through some redesign in there file system to make sure that they run really well for HANA and we're real excited for the certification there. Talk a little bit about what goes into that. Is there joint efforts between the companies? Or is it just their going through and following the process that you've got to describe? >> While I was on stage with Dheeraj and this wasn't, although it's nice to say supported database, this was a year and half effort. In memory computing, people get in and go, okay, it's not just a big data cache, this is a fundamentally different way software runs. How data stored in memory uses caches. So Nutanix worked with us, back and forth, on we would have this happen. Now it was worth it to us. Our customers have been demanding simpler infrastructure. And these hyper-converged infrastructures are exactly that. And Nutanix being the leader, we wanted to be supportive. This is good for both of us. If our customers can have agility on both sides of the business, running traditional SAP applications, they've got to ramp up, they need to add 100,000 users at quarter end, they can do that with a Nutanix platform. Equally, they want to quickly bring up an agile data mark for project basis, click a button, have a new data mark in seven minutes like they did on stage. And maybe they don't even want to do that when they're on on-prem/cloud. They want to do that on AWS or somewhere, GCP, they can do that. Yet that's all controlled from a single interface running through Nutanix. So really, really good for both of us. >> SAP is partial with a lot of companies out there, so you have kind of a neutral view when it comes down to everything. I'm sure you have certain partners you work more with and less. But what are you hearing from your customers? How do they think of cloud today? And any more about the Nutanix connection along the way. >> Yeah, it's interesting 'cause talk about data density, the most valuable data a company has is sitting, you typically, if they're an SAP customer, it's in their SAP system. It's exactly who is my customer, what did they buy, what is their service, what is their bill of material? All that, it's very value dense. It's the huge amount of security governance. What we've actually been seeing is a lot of them, yes, we're moving those workloads to the cloud to save money, I've actually seen a fair number come back on-premise. 'Cause they're saying, look, I'm not getting rid of SAP for easily the next seven, but we have no plans. So then they're realizing, I can run this on a private cloud infrastructure and actually save a ton of money. So they've been pulling back on prem, and we've been hearing that from all, the Forrester, and Gartner, and IDC are saying the same things. We have a lot of folks who don't want to go to the cloud with that core system yet, or they're saying, look, I got to save money and I think I'm going to the cloud, but I'm not ready. And so that's exactly where we see private cloud being really, really crucial, and then the ability to then push out and be ready to go to the cloud. Nutanix really is a good solution for that. And in particular, on-prem database right now, depends who you get your estimates on, is roughly growing at 5% to 8%, five year kay-ger. On-prem private cloud is forecasted to go up 26%. I mean, that is massive. Cloud's only 40 overall for databases. So you see it's a close second. So, huge, huge growth. What's declining is bare metal on-prem, it's gone. Everyone wants to run an either virtualized or fully hyper-converged infrastructure now, even on-prem. So we see people, like I said, staying on, getting ready to go to the cloud. A lot of people pushing workloads to the cloud, but even some repatriation. >> Alright, well, Chris Hallenbeck, really appreciate the updates. Thanks for everything and-- >> Well, thanks for having me. I always love speaking with you guys, thank you. >> Awesome, thanks so much. Joep Piscaer, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more programming from Nutanix .Next 2018, thanks for watching theCUBE. (futuristic buzzing) (futuristic electronic music)

from Orlando Florida it's the cube covering si P sapphire now 2018 brought to you by net app welcome to the cube I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we are in Orlando Florida that sa piece a fire now 2018 or in the net out booth really cool sa piece a fire is an enormous event this is like the 25th year they've been doing it and it's been really interesting to learn Keith about sa P and how they have really transformed and one of the things that's critical is their partner ecosystem so we're excited to welcome back to the cube a cube alumni Paul Young who is the director of sa P go to market from Google platform Paul it's nice to see you thanks so what is the current news with Google and sa P so you know I think we're making a major push into this three Marquette I think the the yesterday's announcements are we all still have a four tire buy on a server online but we also brought up capacity all the way up to 20 terabytes so we really can handle pretty much all the customer base at this point so on the one end that's good there is however a lot of other stuff we're doing in the AI space in the joint engineering space with SCP and and a lot of work we're doing in the make it a lot easier for SUV customers to adopt the cloud right and and beyond just what's happening a lot in the market right now which is you know 80 percent of the customers who mu and s pieces in the cloud just do straight lift and shift so there's no for momentum with a it's just ticking the box you're in the cloud we're doing a ton of work in engineering on our own and with SCP right now to make that a much more valuable journey for the customers so yeah I don't wake up in the morning at Google and think what am I going to do today it's you know it's a there's a lot of stuff going on so Paul let's not be shy that we've had you on the cube before and your ear s AP alone and as you look out at the hyper scalars the big cloud providers s ap more or less has a reference architecture for how to do cloud how to do s AP and a hyper scale of cloud but it's not just about that base capability when I when I talk to my phone I love asking Google questions when I look at you know capabilities like AI and tensor flow and machine learning that gets me excited just in general what as you looked out at the Haifa scalers what excited you about Google is specific as you we were s ap work to fall 3 so what's so exciting about Google I did I joke internally I was I was a customer of recipes for seven years I did 20 years of SVP and and yeah and and then woke up one morning and decided to go to Google yeah I do I get this question a lot on the yeah my conversation always is it wasn't based on the cafeteria food there are other things to join me across it seriously cuz in my last roll at scpi I was working with all three the hyper scalars and one of the questions I always got from SCP people is well they're all just the same right or and when you actually work with them you discover the are different and that's no disrespect to anyone but they approach the world differently they all have different business models and and the Google thing that really put me is that the the kind of engineering and the future focus was just tremendous right this other girl could do was was immense and so I said I'll jump forward to the future and then will come back but just if you look at the investment school was making in AI and machine learning all the stuff we were order a Google i/o with the the you know custom-built testable computers that can just do an amazing performance greatness or but it's got to be applied right so so things that partially built with Deloitte it's a deletion of the demonstration for it but just to give an example of where we think the future is we build a model in Nai where we have we basically two invoices and we taught the AI system to do data entry and SCP so that's not an interface we didn't say hey here's an invoice and here's all the fields and we map them all across and here's ETL and here's other things we do right here's our interface mapping we literally said imagine you're an AP processor how do you enter an invoice and you give it detail universities and it spends a lot of time doing really stupid things trying to put addresses in the number field of someone else and then suddenly it works so how to enter an invoice and at that point it knows how to enter an invoice and then what you do is you give it more and more invoices or more and more different structures and it learns how to what an invoice is and it learns how to process that and then suddenly it can do complete data entry right so we build as a model this is sort of thing Google does just to test the limits Deloitte came along and said well that's really cool could we actually take it and run it as a product and so the light now has that in there there are engineering further out where literally you can give it any invoice it will it's not OCR it will look at the invoice and it will work out that is an invoice where all the bits you need are from it it will then work out how you would do data entry on that into an SUV system and it will enter the invoice that's a future world where I know SUVs already launched the I our own doing three-way match interesting we're talking about future won't where your your entire accounts payable Department is a Gmail inbox where they mail you invoices that you've never seen before but we're able to understand what a vendor is grantee as a vendor guarantee is not fraud checked and do the deed to entry completely automatically that is the massive new world right and that's just a tiny little bit of what we can do at Google we have it just pretty also we haven't demo running on the booth where we have tensorflow looking at pure experience pharmaceuticals right right we have we have a demo run on the booth which is a graphic of someone we're actually running at customers where we have a camera reading pharmaceutical boxes as they go past or their pinky perfect curlers in this case but it doesn't just look at the box and say I count one box it reads the text on the box but it reads the text in the box was in noise from STP was supposed to be manufactured and it comes back and says well am I putting double-strength pills and single side boxes is this most legal have I mean sent the correct box is it you know is the packaging correct it also knows what a good box looks like and it learns what a damaged box looks like a nice packaging looks like an it knows how to reject them and again that level of technology where we can monitor all of your production lines and give you guarantee quality and pharmaceuticals anywhere else tell me six months ago anyone even imagined that was possible we're doing that right now all right that that ability to work with SCP because it's all integrated with SCP we're doing Depot of efficient that ability to deliver that sort of capability at the speed we deliver that is world-changing right well you know one of the things that I just kept imagining as you gwangsu the description of invoicing thankee was on a run of the day I'm a small business owner and these things are troublesome like you get in an invoice and I'm thinking you know I got a deal my my wife does the Council of payable accounts receivable I'm like there has to be a way to automate get but then I thought about just those challenges like you get one person says an invoice that the invoices at the bottom right hand corner the the invoice numbers on the bottom right hand corner the the amount due etcetera etc just really silly questions that AI should be AI machine learning should be able to deal with build mederma yesterday on stage says that AI should all been human capability and that's a great example of how a I augments you might take a bit and it doesn't in the AP example it doesn't do a hundred percent correct all the time right it knows what it's wrong in the example of Joey runs your seat comes up and says the dates wrong here I need to fix it so it's taken the it's taken the menial work out of the process and it's lighten people really add value in it but it's also a great example of the cloud at work and what it's supposed to do right again if all you do is take official SCP and drop it in the cloud you're just running in a different place if you get to a world where with Google we we don't expose your data to everybody else but we understand what the world's invoices look like and we have that knowledge and we make the entire world more efficient by having the model know how to work that's a radically better place right and that's that's that's there's just never been that value prop before and that's it's a great big exciting thing to wake up in the morning to think that's what we do right so Lisa in the industry we have this term that data has credit I think it's fairly safe at the this week we can say that processing technology compute has gravity it's we had another guest on it says that they use a process and a technology in solution and one customer works out fine and another customer not the same results it's this complexity is this kind of dish 'part of technology that is just not easy to apply across across companies so the other part really quickly that I want to talk about is you know this isn't just about AI right it's not just about the future I mean one of the key in me I said I'm a long-term HCV customer I work a lot of customers everybody wants to get to the cool bit you know and though I always used to joke internally everybody wants to eat candy they're ready vegetables first right and so we better get you across or you can candida vegetables whichever way you've got to eat both there's some point right so um so look just getting customers into the club becomes one of the challenges it's one of the other areas where we're really applying engineering so I'm three weeks ago we bought della Strada as an example Villa Stratos is an amazing company what well so it does basically it's a plug into VMware you drop it into VMware and it watches your SUV systems running it profiles them and it works out what size capacity you're going to need in the cloud at the point where it's then got enough information it'll basically ping you and say hey I know no I'm not a machine do you want exactly the same performance at lowest price in the cloud or do you want better performance here's two configurations pick the one you want give it your Google user ID and password it will build the security build the application servers and begin a migration for you automatically depending on the timing demand the size the box between 30 minutes and two hours later you will have a running version of your SCP system in the closet never been done before that's been performance the way it works basically it's a bit a little bit of magic but it knows how much what's the minimum amount of data we need to ship across through NSEP it knows where all the data is hidden on the box on the disk then sdb needs to run and it just ships that first and then it fills in the gaps afterwards the repair mechanism so from there on the one hand you could do lists and share and frankly our competitors have been using it to do lift and shift in the past it over some a ton of potential right for a bunch of customers we can replicate their production boxes in real time and give them 30-second RPO RTO in high availability but that done but it's like that I can now take that replicated image and I can run operations on it I can run tests on I can run QE rebuilds were you because of the Google pricing model you don't pay me in advance you pay me in arrears for only the computer time that you use so you are a QA system you've got two days worth of work to rebuild it don't shut down your QA system pay me for two days rebuild and you're done or we have integrated it directly into the SDP upgrade tools so you can pipe across your system to us and we will immediately do a test upgrade for you into s4 HANA or you see us rocky or BW an Hana whatever you want I have a customer in Canada who really jumped from ECC e6 and hazard by 5 to s4 Hana using an earlier version of the tools in 72 hours with a lot of gaps to look at in between we reckon we're gonna crush that down into under 24 hours so under 24 hours we can you can literally click on an SUV server and we will not just bring you to the cloud but we will upgrade you all the way to the latest version and we we have all the components we've done it we're pushing that through right and so what we're doing now is taken the hard work and automating that so we can get to the really cool stuff in the eye side right that's way again this is where all of us for all the hyper scalers hosts you know SV systems we want to do something that's better than that right we want to make it easy to get there but we know that in order to justify what you do we're all have seven your room app 2x or hard on right so we want to make it really easy to do that and we want to make it incredibly easy to add in AI and all the other technologies along the way that's a DES and a pricing model that nobody will be right and that's that's a pretty cool place to be I'm mighty glad to be a good place I could tell by your energy so ease of use everybody wants that you talked about just the example of invoices how they can vary so dramatically and you know whether you're a small business owner to a large enterprise there's so much complexity and and fact that was one of the things that was talked about it was this morning well yeah when how so plot I was even talking about naming conventions and how customers were starting to get confused with all of the different acquisitions SAT has done so a I what Google is doing with AI on sa piece sounds like a huge differentiator so tell us as we wrap up here what makes you know in a nutshell Google different than the other hyper scale that s AP partners with and specifically what excites you about going to market with s AP at the base level your Google's just on a different scale from everybody right we are effectively put 25% of the internet if you look at our own assets we we own dark fiber that's equivalent to about 4% of the entire caballo sorry four times the entire capacity of the Internet right MA so my ability to deliver to those customers at scale and up performance levels just unchallenged in this space so you know it's a Google clearly is excelled in a lot of different areas it's been credibly starting to bring that to SVP and carry through but you're right that the the the value add ultimately isn't just the hey I can I can run you and I can run you better write the value add is so March we announced direct innovation rihana and Google bigquery when you're talking about bigquery right massive datasets that you can know Bridge to Hana if you're a retailer this is one last example I can now join all the ad tech data Google has so I can tell you all the agile currently run in Google once we march was being viewed anonymized in clusters so you can't tell the original consumers but I know that data and directly worded to bigquery and I can join at stp so I can now say you are advertising in this area let's being clicked on but I know you don't have the inventory to actually support the advertising so I want you to move advertising somewhere else right and so I can do that manually rename when I had any I to that the potential is is incredible right we've only just started so ya know next time I want the cube we'll see where we're at but it's a it's a fun place to be speaking the next time gasps have a conference coming up Google next is coming up at the end of July yeah it's we have a lot of announcements through probably the rest of the year right there's a lot of stuff going on as we come to massive scale in the SUV space so yeah anyone who's interested in this stuff especially even if you're just interesting the I stuff Google next is the place to be so sounds like it I'm expecting some big things from that based on what you talked about on how enthusiastic you are about being at Google Paul thanks so much for joining Keith and me back on the cube and we look forward to talking to you again Thanks thank you for watching the cube Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend @s AP Safire 2018 thanks for watching

>> From Orlando, Florida It's theCube covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018! Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome, you're watching theCube, On The Ground at SAP Sapphire Now. I'm your host, Keith Townsend. We're in steamy Orlando. Great convention center size of 16 American football fields. Got in about three thousand steps this morning, but you know what, I'm not here to talk about me. We're here talking about the relationship between Microsoft and NetApp. We have Brad Berkey, GM SAP Global at Microsoft and Kevin Zhang, Tech Solutions Pro, and this is a mouthful, SAP on Azure Intelligent Global and you're a black belt? >> Yes. >> Oh wow! >> Yes, I can kickbox. >> You can kick some SAP butt. >> Yes (laughs) oh no, yes, yes we do great solutions. >> So first off let's talk about the NetApp, Microsoft relationship as it pertains to SAP. What's the story behind NetApp and Microsoft? >> The great thing aout NetApp and Microsoft is you both have the same vision, right. For us, it's about our responsibility to help our customers innovate. And NetApp is a key partner for us in our ability to help our customers innovate and provide solutions around SAP. >> So, let's talk about those solutions around SAP. One of the things that's getting pushed an awful lot is that SAP is now cloud ready. We can go to the cloud. We can go to these hyperscalers, such as Azure or As-zure and swipe a credit card and get up and running with HANA. Tell us about that experience. How does that go exactly? >> Kevin? >> Oh yeah, so I don't know if you have heard. We just announced we released a 12 terabyte memory size virtual machine. Our Halo logging instances can go up to 24 terabytes. So we ran the largest SAP workload in the world. There are so many customers, about 400 SAP Azure customer. Personally I work with about 30 SAP on Azure customers and over 77 or 80 SAP HANA on Azure customers. So, it's very exciting and we see that the trend is picking up, the demand is picking up worldwide. >> Wow! Bill McDermott on stage yesterday gave the numbers around SAP HANA in general, 1800 customers. So Microsoft having 400 SAP HANA customers. >> Sure, just to be clear on that. So when we talk about customers that are sitting inside of Azure for their SAP Landscape, that's both traditional NetLever base and HANA base and I think the number that you have is closer to 70 of that larger number. The real important thing that customers are seeing today is the... When people think of cloud, they think about cost reduction. I'm gonna save money because I'm gonna be renting equipment. The true value is in your ability to be nimble to innovate, right? So imagine a customer puts their SAP Landscape inside of Azure and it's NetLever based say the older stuff. At any point along that journey, they can call us up and say, "I want the infrastructure for HANA." They can innovate at will. If they buy hardware that sits on-premise, that hardware's set to run that particular landscape, it's not set to run HANA. So there's some opportunities for the customer to innovate using Azure. It's not just cost savings, it's around efficiencies and the ability to innovate at will. >> So let's talk about hybrid clouds scenarios around that very concept. We had another NetApp partner on that talked about the scenario in which customers have this desire to innovate quickly. Traditionally, in a traditional enterprise, to your point, if I wanted to spin up a HANA workload, I'd have to procure hardware, I'd have to get my bases team to lay down the NetWeaver stack along with HANA. It could be a couple of months before I'm up and running. Then I can innovate, do my innovation. How does Microsoft help shorten that cycle? >> I can speak to it. We actually have another partner here with there model, as well, SUSE. HANA is drawn SUSE right ahead and different flavors of Linux. and they're running on Azure. Today, we are able to deploy the entire SAP Landscape using alternative scripts inside Azure. In 30 minutes, you have the entire SAP Landscape deployed including the large virtual machine M series for your HANA cluster. You also have the ESCS, the central instances and also the AFS Cluster as well as your application servers. All of those things running your automation, your cloud speed in 30 minutes instead of three months. >> So one of the obviously manages of cloud, in general, is this ability to get to agility. There's a concept that once I've innovated in the cloud, I know what the workload is, it's stable, it's not changing that I bring that back in house. Is that something that you're seeing, are people continuing to run these workloads steady state in the cloud as well? >> I think they're gonna run more so in steady state. We don't see them kind of moving it back. The idea that in a traditional SAP Landscape is that everything is always on. >> Right. >> Right. Since the lights are always on, why not I have my own equipment as opposed to renting just compute from a hyperscaler like Microsoft. The reality is, is again, back to that notion of innovating. If I'm gonna role out, let's say, S4 on top of HANA, so you think about Suite on HANA and then S4, I'm gonna set up all of these test environments, multiple test environments, versions of it as I roll out. I'm gonna be really big for a short period of time then I'm gonna roll it out and shrink back down. Also, when I do upgrades, you think about it like if you're doing payroll at the end of the month, I'm gonna be big for short periods of time. So we call that bursting, and it's that bursting that allows you to continually to reduce costs you wouldn't bring back on-prem, where you can't burst, right? Makes sense? >> That makes sense. So let's talk about some of these business conversations that you've had with customers. What have been some of the primary drivers other than the obvious agility? What are some of the conversations that you look at the broader Microsoft portfolio solutions that you're able to bring into customer conversations? >> Two things come to mind. One of which is when you think about enterprise-class security across all domains, right? So right now we provide Azure for Office 365. That's an Azure tenant. And we can give you advance security for that. Imagine that I can provide that same security for your SAP system. I want to give you an example of the type of security solutions. We have an intelligent IOT-based security model that sits inside of Azure that will predict hacks. They'll look at your environment and say, "you look just like a customer who has been hacked" or "you have the attributes of a customer "who could get hacked" and they'll proactively come in and say you need to make these adjustments That kind of stuff sits inside of the cloud in Azure. So it's not just... And again, I think the misnomer is it's just about cost savings 'cause if it was just about cost savings, then at some point, your depreciation models for on-premise hardware as long as you can stay and not change, so not changing would save you a lot of money. So that's why I get back to you, it'll allows you to change without burden of impact. >> Talking about change in the industry, we can't have a 7.5 billion dollar acquisition and not talk about it on theCube. We kind of eat this stuff up. You guys acquired GitHub. Let's talk about the relationship of developers, one of the things I haven't heard a lot, at least in conversations I've had on theCube so far this week have been about the developer. Talk about the importance of the developer relationship and potential integrations with GitHub, if you can, and SAP. >> First, that is one of my favorite topics I have. I came from a development background we call enable agility allow you to run continuous development and continuous integration, and the GitHub has been a integrate part of Microsoft Solution already. We are probably the largest contributor in the GitHub before Google and Facebook where if you ranking based on the history. The open source has been cultural after the Satya takeover as CEO has been our winning grace, open source, and we actually... The majority of our code and our deployment is in the GitHub. In the SAP world, the ARM templates for automation templates, JSON templates, and all the automation scripts we deployed in the GitHub, and we share with customer as a community. If they actually use those scripts through their deployment, continuously improve the scripts for automation. >> So, continuous integration, continued development is not a term that we hear a lot in the SAP world. As we're bringing these concepts from I think thought into reality with services such as GitHub to store DevOps scripts, automation scripts, what has been the business impact of being able to bring a continuous integration, continued development practice to SAP which is usually not big? >> I'll give you a good example. For example, when Brad Berkey mentioned earlier doing the SAP Landscape deployment, you have no N+1 deployment and you want to do a test environment, you want to do a Sandbox to troubleshoot the incidence. Today, with the scripts automation, you can spring up an entire system in three hours, four hours, including S4, including the time old system when you put in the business object BI and the other things together. You can test this and then shut down the entire system and delay the resource group inside Azure. As we move that system, they re-spring up as necessary. Also, we're working with SAP called Landscape Manager which allows you to clone the system inside the Azure. The scripts behind it is actually a computer integration into the dual element type of scripts allows you to replicate system files, allow you to deploy another testing system or training system. It gives you a lot of modern deployment methodology to give you fast agility to the business. >> So Microsoft, the ultimate platform company, one of the things that designates the platform company is that your partners basically make more money than you off the platform. Windows is a great example of a platform. So you have platform, Azure is definitely becoming known as a platform, and then we have NetApp, the data driven company. Talk through the value of the NetApp data fabric, data driven technology and platform as it pertains to the ability to have the same data operation strategy on-prem and in the Microsoft Cloud. >> Okay, I'll give you an example. A lot of our customer, Brad sells a lot of SAP on Azure to many customers. I've supported those customers. Many of them because NetApp has a super, very high speed fastest management, snapshot management to data protection and data recovery and backup, and also the DR capability, customers demand asks us can we actually work with Microsoft in the cloud or use a similar technology. So they deployed the NetApp ONTAP inside of Azure today. And we're able to support AFS file services to file sync from on-prem to the cloud, from one Azure region to another region, leverage those ONTAP snap mirroring and all the technology as well. So to enable to provide an enterprise level file sync, file protection, file recovery and warning replication as well. >> So, you guys are pretty good. I'm trying to throw you curve balls but you're pretty much knocking 'em out the park, so I'ma try to throw another curve ball. Bring the hybrid IT story in for me from a Microsoft perspective when it comes to Azure stack. How does Azure stack play a role in the overall vision whether it's Edge, Core, or like stationed into the cloud, how does Azure stack play a role in it? >> In Azure stacks. It's not for SAP. >> Yeah, okay. Azure stack is a very important overall view from Edge to the entire cloud. We have the 50 regions globally. We have many data centers combined. The largest of public quota from region perspective, but still they're areas, for example, like a cruise ship, like a defense department, they may actually require Edge inside a prime type of technology stack. Azure stack allow you to use the same interface, same view to deploy the technology. When you actually connect it, you can synchronize your subscription. So it can allow you to have end-to-end access from your on-premise into the cloud. Microsoft has the perfect hybrid cloud strategy here, and it allow you to do not only the IaaS and PaaS and also the SaaS solution to our customers. >> So, okay, let's bring the conversation back up a couple of levels and talk, Brad, what have been the conversations here? After the keynote this morning, talking about the intelligent business, the conversations yesterday with Bill McDermott with the super-high energy about SAP going into CRM, what has been the conversations with customers? >> We've had a privilege for a lot of customer meetings in here. The great thing about SAP Sapphire is you got about 20,000 customer attendees here. They're the big ones, and at the C-Suite, so we get to have some great conversations. The customer conversations have been around the notion of the responsibility that Microsoft and SAP have to them. To the point where I was speaking with a customer early, he says, "You have an accountability "to help me be innovative." That's a very important responsibility. A lot of that revolves around enterprise-class security. A lot of that revolves around uptime and legacies between those environments. "What's my performance attribute?" and "Are you going to be there with me forever?" Now when a customer chooses Azure or they choose SAP and they choose Azure, certainly, it's really a three-part partnership. The customer, Microsoft, and SAP as a partnership. If I had to add a fourth one to that, it would be the systems integrator because in the case, Microsoft doesn't upgrade, migrate, move or install anything. So we rely on all the many partners that are here to do that set of work, everywhere from Accenture to Gemini to Brave New World. That was ABC, right? I got those out, right? All of those partners are very key to both Microsoft and SAP to ensure customer success. So a lot of the meetings that we've had here have been with those partners and those customers. >> Wow, to be a fly on the wall for those. I would love to go into more detail. We've run out of time. I'm getting the wrap sign, but I would love to have a conversation around support, integration, way more areas than we have time for. We'll have to get you on theCube again. You're now Cube veterans. From Orlando, this is Keith Townsend for theCube. Stay tuned or stay in the YouTube feed to find out more about what's going on about SAP Sapphire Now On The Ground. Talk to you soon. (lively music)

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. Welcome to theCUBE, we are on the ground in the NetApp booth at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018. I'm Lisa Martin, I'm hanging out with Keith Townsend. Today we are joined by RJ Bibby, who is the SAP Global Alliance Chief of Staff at NetApp. RJ, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, we're so glad you guys are here. >> So, this, is a huge event. There are, I've heard 20,000 attendees live, but they were saying at the keynote this morning, Bill McDermott was, over a million people are expected to engage with the SAP experience both in person and online, that's enormous, enormous. SAP and NetApp have been partners for 17 plus years now. Right, you've got thousands of customers that run SAP on NetApp. What's current with the partnership? What's going on there from your perspective? >> Well thanks Lisa, thanks Keith. But first off I want to thank you all for being here. We're ecstatic for having theCUBE in our booth. We haven't been back here as a sponsor in a couple years. So being a platinum sponsor, 40 people here on the ground from all over the world. Like you said, we're about 26,000 people this week. So, really busy, we're in our 18th year. This year, as a partnership with SAP. To answer that question, it's really exciting. We have a very unique partnership with SAP. It's a true 360 partnership, and what I mean by that. One, we co-innovate together. So we're doing co-innovation where NetApp on SAP on NetApp. What that mean is basically a lot of the SAP products, like hybris, like Ariba, SuccessFactors are built on NetApp. We're doing co-innovation on blockchain, on HANA, IOT. So, we're really looking at that next phase of automation in data management. And we'll get into data management in a bit. We're both customers to each other. We just had our CIO met with a customer success office this morning to talk about some of the integrations of products that we're doing. Second year in a row SAP has been our largest customer. So the growth on that end is great, and then lastly the GODA market, and that's really what I really do from the alliance side. So, heavily around HANA acceleration. How we constantly are helping our customers move to HANA with our NetApp data fabric and ONTAP, our core signature products that deploy SAP. And we're very focused on industry, very focused on a global to local partner for life. We both have really warm, loyal customers. And then there's a kind of G100 strategic approach too. So that's the partnership, it's been a lot of fun. And we're gonna see where it goes in 2018. >> So RJ, talk to us a little bit more. Add some color on this relationship between Netapp and SAP in the market. NetApp, data driven company. SAP, probably the premier data analysis, analytics. We saw on stage from customer experience all the way to backend. You can't do that without a solid, robust infrastructure that's focused on SAP. What are some of the key technologies and strategy that NetApp and SAP have teamed together, bring together such successes? >> No, great question Keith. Really it goes down to the core of data. So NetApp has done a transformation the last two years, where we're gonna be now the data management company for hybrid cloud. So in that core, customers are looking to do a bunch of different things with NetApp. We want to manage, transport, analyze and protect data. A lot of data on SAP. So they're modernizing their data centers, how do we move to the hybrid cloud? With our ONTAP product, which is really a software capability, really turning into a software company in the cloud, as is SAP. So the core products of HANA, SuccessFactors, Ariba, Field Glass, Concur, all the things from an operations standpoint that's been automated for their business is kind of built on NetApp. Is built on NetApp, a lot of them. So our approach to the customer is how do we help the experience? And, we're doing that transformation internally, so we're going through it with SAP. There's lessons there. SAP did this and moved to a kind of cloud company a couple years ago on NetApp. Those are some of the core instances, but there's a modernizing a data center approach, there's a hybrid cloud. But it still just comes down to, oh my God, data runs my business. I'm really scared about it from protection. There's too much of it. How do I monetize? What are the analytics behind it? And that's what NetApp is really on the forefront of doing. Our CIO talked about this, this week. He's going to talk about it this week, about choice. What we're hearing for customers is, I need choice. I need to move my data around on PRAM, into whatever hybrid hyperscaler environment you want fast, efficient, with analytics read outs. So that's kind of the approach we're starting to take to market. I find it to be a very consultative of approach where it's Mister Customer, SAP NetApp, whoever your hybrid cloud choice is, who your SI is, the other technology partners are. We're all together collectively, almost like a innovation program for a customer approach. And that's kind of, not my secret, but one of my secrets of how we're going to market with the sales teams. >> I'm curious, NetApp is 26 years old. 26 years young maybe. I worked there I was telling you, for a few years as well. On marketing, which was awesome. Lot of evolution from a storage perspective. You say NetApp runs a SAP, SAP runs a NetApp as well. Talk to us about this maybe SAP as an influencer of the evolution of NetApp from storage company to now as you said, data authority for hybrid cloud. >> Yeah, no great question. I think it started where we wanted, we saw that software was kind of taking over. The automation, right? So it's almost like storage is a service. In my four years at NetApp, we never approach SAP as a partner or the customer talking about storage or infrastructure per se. Kind of around this data management methodology a while back. I think SAP has been an influencer internally fpr us in a couple regards. One they have the state of the art, a lot of the software operations. Things that we needed to run the business. There's been some kinks, there's some things that we probably need to customize that fit our business. NetApp's really unique, we're about 6 billion dollars, with 10,000 employees, with three business units. And we're a very unique company. The culture is awesome, we're empowered. Salespeople on the ground are empowered. Me helping run the alliance, we can be very strategic on how and what we want to do. Hey, we want to have CUBE at SAPPHIRE, absolutely do it, as an example. So, with that empowerment, we've been able to look at the best of breed in tools. And I think the tools are helping us from looking at the business and really how the customer experience. I'll give you one example on that. We're listening to our customers and how they want to transform their data, in their data on SAP. Well, I need to also be able to look at the analytics internally on okay, does my customer need a technical refresh? What are they doing on SAP? Is it SAP on Oracle? What products do they have of NetApp? Do our salespeople properly enabled on selling SAP on Cloud? Are they talking to their counterparts at the account from SAP, from a CISCO or Fujitsu, AWS, and then whatever SI. So there's a lot of complexity, there's an art and a science to it. And it's in our transformation in SAP from the tools perspectives at the core of that. >> RJ let's talk about the alliance beyond just the SAP to NetApp. This is really complex, I mean even with the tools, you know, ONTAP on the cloud, ONTAP in your data center. ONTAP kind of in the fog later, wherever you want to say that's at. That normalizes the data, it kind of validates the NetApp as the data driven company. However, when you go to an enterprise and you say that, you know what, this thing that used to live at my data center is now spread across these three different environments. It's really hard to figure out. How do SIs play a role into shaping the strategy in this alliance? Yeah, that's a whole other layer right? The complexity, 'cause I find, I came from the SI side of the house. I worked at Accenture for a really long time prior to my career in the partnership side. You know, I think they're very good from a consultative approach of hey, how do we want to design this thing? How do we want to implement it? How do we want to run it? And where does everybody's silo of stuff or technologies fall into that? I think the art part of it is hey, as NetApp or with MRSI, hey man, how do we help design with you? How do we consult the end to end approach here? I think we're the expert from an end to end data management approach. So there's some butting of heads at times depending on which SI, because they do. They have these long standing executive partnerships. There's a lot of investment from SIs at the account. I was just at a leadership conference with Accenture. And they're spending three billion dollars on three different things around automation. One, training. They can't get people, it's still about people in process. How do we get the process and tools in place? Where do we need to go merger and acquisition on the latest products? And how do we implement with that ecosystem? So I always think it's a work in progress. It's gone well, I think that's something I'd like to see us improve on. I think the SAP to NetApp partnership is advanced. In a lot of regards to that. It's like anything, it's also like when you look at salespeople internally at NetApp with our transformation. How do you get people out of the conference zone talking to their infrastructure lead, their line of business lead. And elevate to the cloud conversation. Going to the CXO, I think the Chief Security Offer is the key executive now in our sales process. Because of data protection. And that's something that we do well, and that's something they own, and I'm always trying to be creative. There might lots of dollars to protect data. How do we turn that into a whole strategy conversation with all the partners? >> So let's go a little deeper on NetApp's value propositions. You know what? Infrastructure is infrastructure, why should it matter? How do you guys differentiate between your competitors and running S4 HANA, the cloud strategy, you know what, end memory databases, storage is no longer needed, that's not true, but what's the story? >> Good question. The story for us is the ONTAP product that we have, the software because what we can do is deploy SAP really fast. Really fast, just some stats. You can get 45% project timeline savings with our deployment of SAP. The secret sauce in that is, the tools of the replication in the snapshot. When you're doing constant development ongoing maintenance, we can do snapshots in real time. That is the key thing that keeps the production going live faster. >> You know, because CICD is not something that we do, I've managed SAP for a long time. And CICD wasn't exactly a concept in SAP. So we rely on the infrastructure a lot to do. So snapshots is an amazing example of how you bring the CICD approach to something that is stayed as SAP. You can't just shut down SAP for the weekend to apply a update five times a year. >> Correct, so hours and hours of down time, where we can do it in three hours. A lot of times it's real time. I was just at a HANA Conference in Vegas and we got a lot of one on one time with customers. It was awesome, and that was the biggest things they said they need more of NetApp. And the differentiator is we're continue to expand our approach to managing the data, and I need the replication and the cloning specifically to run the production value end to end. So that's the other part of it. It's really just doing that end to end landscape management of SAP and Non-SAP workloads. The one thing that's great about the cloud part of this is you do need a lot of storage, and it's software based storage. So I think the approach in NetApp is going in the right direction. I've been working with SAP as a partner now for 12 years. I think that this is probably the best momentum I've had with SAP ever. And one of the reasons why is one, data is the story, right? What does Bill McDermott always say? Data is now the currency. Well today he was saying now trust is the currency, which is completely true too. But from the data being the currency perspective, it's now the end game for both of us. So we've kind of, in all companies, have gone into the middle. That's kind of not only the messaging, but kind of the central thing we're trying to deliver value on. And the choice, I want to keep saying the fact that customers now want choice on where they put their data. That's the thing that we're really promoting here at SAPPHIRE this week. >> Last question RJ. >> Last? All day! >> I know, I know right? Speaking of choice, you mentioned customers want choice. They do want choice. You talked about value, delivering value. From a competitive perspective, customers have choice. They've got other storage vendors they can work with. Give us your best elevator pitch. What makes NetApp and SAP different and better than say, some of those, maybe orange colored competitors? >> Sure, no, no, it's a great question. The biggest differentiator is just the fact that we are the one company out there that can provide data management in any hybrid environment. AWS, a hyperscaler, Microsoft, Google, we're doing cloud volumes just announced a Google Cloud platform. You know, we're one of the premier technology from HANA and Azure. So I think number one it's that. Secondly, we can deploy SAP really quickly, which consumes licenses. So one, the customer really likes that. Two, SAP sales loves it 'cause then it gives them a chance to go back to the customer. And then just the end to end data management that we can provide our customers value. I would say choice one. >> Awesome, well I said a few minutes ago to Keith that Bill McDermott is probably the most energetic C level that I've ever seen. Your energy level RJ, right there with his. >> You know why? 'Cause it's go time, it's SAPPHIRE day one. >> The stage might have exploded if we had them both at the same time. >> That would've been fun. >> Pyrotechnics on day one! Well RJ thank you so much, not only for visiting with Keith and me this morning. But also of having theCube in the NetApp booth at SAPPHIRE. >> We love it, we can't wait. Thanks everybody. >> I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend at theCUBE on the ground at SAPPHIRE NOW day one. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest.

>> Narrator: It's the Cube. Covering Sapphire Now 2017. Brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform. And HANA Enterprise Cloud. (electronic music) >> Welcome to the Cube everyone. We're here for the special exclusive Sapphire Now 2017 coverage from Palo Alto studio. I'm John Furrier, three days of Sapphire coverage. Our next guest is Jason Kotsaftis who's with Senior Director Database Solutions at EMC. Who came in here in Palo Alto. You guys have some news down there, full team down there. I know, normally we cover SAP, it's our first year we're doing it from our studio. But EMC's always been on the cube. You guys had a great relationship with SAP. I think our first year we've done the cube in 2010. >> Jason: That's right, yes, I remember. >> You were that SAP Sapphire. >> You guys were. You were on the Cube. You've been with us for awhile, but the relationship with an SAP, and EMC, now Dell EMC, it's pretty significant. What's the big news you guys have going on? >> Yeah, I mean, it's a huge relationship for us. We've been, even before we were merged with Dell, one of our top partnerships. Now it's even bigger. We've been amazed at how much Dell had been doing with SAP, and we're bringing the best of the two companies together right now. So, yeah, we have a huge presence at Sapphire as you mentioned. We saw Michael Dell do a brief speech at the show, and I thought that really helped set the stage for, not just Dell and EMC with SAP, but even some of the words he said were a good microcosm of Dell and EMC talking about the importance of bringing together people and processes. And we're going through that right now, and we're we're going through how we're going to merge the portfolio to go after Cloud, go after HANA, internet of things, data center transformation, all of those major things. >> Well surely SAP, the theme is Cloud, Multi-Cloud is a big message. >> SAP Cloud platform, we had Dan Lahl on the Cube. We also interviewed the HANA Enterprise Cloud group there also, got a huge alliance with Amazon Web Service, Terry Wise, there. We all saw Century Link. So you start to see the industry formation going on. The fog is lifting, you're starting to get some clear visibility on swim lanes, tactics, we'll help people with settling in. Whatever metaphor you want to use, people are finding it. Dell EMC is just absolutely just a monster now. I mean that in a good way, I don't mean that in a bad way. But it's so big. EMC was already very powerful, and winning in the storage business. Great enterprise jobs, the sales force, the culture, really well, great culture as you know, we know them. Dell has been lean and mean, like a speed boat. Great with channels, great with operations, very lean and efficient. EMC, the direct selling, you bring them together and now the supplier relationships are changed. I was talking with your team. Dell brings to the table deep Microsoft Intel relations. Not that you guys didn't have them, but they have deep relationships. >> Correct. >> You guys bring deep relationships. How has that new culture dealings changed your relationship? And specifically, what's the impact to SAP? >> Sure, you know, great question. First of all, it's been very complimentary. And we felt that going into the merger. I've been at EMC for 21 years right. So I had worked with Dell 10-15 years ago. Very, very complimentary, and you nailed it. They're very good at one segment of the market historically, we're very good at another. You know, for the most part I think it's been a really, really good matching, made sense from merger perspective. If we think about SAP for a second, one of the first things that we've been bringing together is, we have two very complimentary HANA portfolios. So, HANA is obviously a huge focus for SAP customers. I was just at Dell EMC world last week, every single customer that I talked to, whether they were running Oracle or Microsoft, they're all asking about HANA. We had a great focus at EMC with our enterprise HANA systems. And at Dell they have a very good packaged appliances and Scale Up bundles. And right now we feel like we can address the whole breath of what people may want to do with HANA. Whether it's, TDI, Scale Up, Scale Out. Very, very strong and >> John: Where does HANA fit in, because I want you to just take a minute to explain this, because it used to be a blanket word, even when they were kind of getting it out early. It was great marketing from the beginning, You know, it has legacy to it, but as the market changed, HANA changed. And as SAP changed, they changed from their positioning. Specifically, they used to call it HANA Cloud Platform. And they have HANA Enterprise Cloud. Now they've renamed it to SAP Cloud Platform, which is the platform as a service, the cloud native stuff. And then HANA Enterprise Cloud, which is really the managed service. So from your perspective, how do you define what HANA is today. And where is is settling in? Is it just the core engine of SAP? But how's it relate to all these new things? >> Yeah, for us it's really a platform. So if we think about where HANA began when we started working with SAP, it was all about analytics. Collecting data, analyzing data, making better business decisions. Now with S4 on the horizon, and the inevitable cut over to that from all the other enterprise applications of SAP, we really view it as a platform. And it's going to have big implications. If we look at our own SAP install base at EMC, there's a lot of customers that run Oracle underneath their SAP apps. So it's part of the HANA transformation, where we're going to be getting them, hopefully, on the road to, not just take advantage of HANA today, but as they go forward how are they going to get ready for S4 and have, hopefully, a smooth migration path to that. >> Obviously their cloud platform, I mean, their cloud strategy, or cloud direction. I don't know if you can have a cloud strategy. As Michael Dell said, Clouds like the internet, it's everything. >> Jason: Right. >> So, there's no real strategy, it's just the way life is. They're going to be on premise and off premise. And they're clearly targeting multiple Clouds, unlike say Oracle, for instance. But neither here nor there. The point is, is that on premise there's still going to be a 10 year plus journey, nothing's going to be disappearing over night. So the on prem Cloud dynamic is interesting, cuz they used the word mission critical. That was a big buzz word with when I talked to Michael Dell, He banged home mission critical. A lot of the teams in Dell EMC World last week was around mission critical work loads and choice. So you guys have that same mojo going on with SAP, how is that translating for you guys? Big new business, new opportunities? >> Great question. So one of the big things that we've acquired and focused on in the SAP space was Virtustream. So they've been a really big off premise cloud provider for us, but at the same time, when you look at what we've been building at EMC even before that we had our own enterprise hybrid cloud offering. One of the things that we're talking about this week at Sapphire is actually bringing those two together. So we can have people have an off premise and an on premise experience, a single view of their data, a uniform way to manage SAP in the cloud, and to the point of mission critical like you said is, as much as we see people moving to the cloud, there are still people that want to have for certain production systems they want to control that. They don't want to give it off to the cloud yet. They may not want to control the hardware but they certainly want to control the data. And with this new relationship that we're blending in the EHC and Virtustream we can actually allow them to have that choice to your point. >> John: What's EHC? >> The EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. So that's our own self service automation of software framework that we put around the cloud. >> Which cloud, your cloud or other people's cloud? >> Right now it's our cloud offering. >> So you have a public cloud. >> We have a cloud offering that's a hybrid cloud offering. That you can deploy on premise or off premise, and Virtustream has been historically used off premise. >> So you use Virtustream as your off premise component of that piece? >> Correct. >> That makes sense. Cuz you bought them in January, I get that. >> That's right, and we had to bring the two together, and that's been a big new step for us. In that regard we think it's very, very complementary for SAP, that's one option we provide, right. We also work through SAP's own offerings to make sure we give them the right and the best infrastructure behind what they're trying to do with their own cloud. I was at a large partner of ours recently, OpenText, and we were talking about content archive, all the things that they do there, they're very deep in the SAP cloud, so we're working with them to start to potentially build the right archiving and capabilities behind that. >> So what's the big news for SAP this year, obviously we saw the coverage, we got some folks calling in, we had some folks down on the floor giving us some input, but from an SAP EMC, Dell, now Dell EMC relationship, what's the big news, what's the big story for you guys? What are you leading with, what's the announcements, be specific. >> The big news is we're all about the cloud. The bringing together of the on premise and off premise EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Virtustream, giving them that uniform way to consume SAP in a cloud based model, whether it be on premise or off premise, that is absolutely our biggest new highlight. >> You guys released that was a hard news that went out for you guys or... >> Yeah it was part of an EHC evolution story that we brought out, the other things that we have that are not necessarily formally announced but are more things that help the day to day administration of SAP applications, we often forget about that. We're pushing people to the cloud and we all talk about cloud. >> So there's no big splash in the pool like, hey we're releasing a new VxRail version of whatever, it's momentum specific. >> Correct. >> What are the big momentum's you plan, you can look back now and we've seen a lot of the evolution, we've seen the relationship with SAP grow, we've seen the converge infrastructure movement, now going to a whole nother level, hybrid cloud and converge infrastructure is happening. What's the new wave that you guys are riding with SAP together besides the cloud, it's generically cloud. What's specifically, can the customer pinpoint that you guys have solved? >> I think you just touched upon it, it's the whole build versus buy model. So historically if you look at where the SAP customers spend the most of their money, it's the op ex. It's the operational expense of administering and maintaining the SAP landscapes. >> You mean like total cost of ownership stuff, just like, easing some of the pain between deployment and costing. >> Workflow automation, copy clone refresh, backup recovery, performance automation, disaster recovery, all the things that you got to do to keep the SAP applications generating value to the business is heavy operational cost to them. That holds them back from doing innovation and investments. >> Those are the details you got to get down and dirty on. >> Yeah. We've done some great studies with you guys on this, one of the things that, there's different ways to go about tackling that. One of the ways that we believe is good is to simplify what you can. And so one way to do that is, well from an infrastructure perspective, you should have the ability to basically buy the infrastructure as an outcome, not have to build all the components and get it together. >> All the provisioning pain that goes with it. >> Yeah, and so when we were just EMC, we had one choice. We had what was called a Vblock, and then we build VxRacks and VxRails. >> Vblock was so successful, it really was, you did a good job of that. >> Yeah, a lot of customers from the SAP. Now that we're Dell though, we have the PowerEdge family, and we've been bringing that in to not only Racks and Rails, but looking at that in terms of building what we call Ready Bundles, where we can actually deliver as a single... >> Think about this ready solution, because the thing that got me at Dell EMC World was two things. The purpose built mission continued, I mean that in a good way. And two, the disruption of data backup protection and backup with the cloud. With the cloud as a new disruptor. For some reason backup and recoveries, clearly different in the cloud than it is on prem. So we've seen a lot of action in there too. Those are the two ready areas, and then also, dynamic changes going on with backup and recovery. >> Yeah, ready solutions was a huge thing, and this is part of the merger we rebranded our solutions organizations into one. Our whole, as the name implies, the whole goal is to deliver a ready infrastructure to the customer that they can just deploy, so they can focus on their applications and their business and not worry about the server, the network, the storage, which ones do I put together for what reason. We want to give them that menu of choice, whether it's a single node, a bundle of components, or an actual system, and deploy that in any way they want. >> What can we expect from Dell EMC, from your team VZB, with respect to SAP? Next couple months, next year, what's the plans, what's the continued momentum playbook? >> Some things that you'll be seeing more of if you go to the Dell blueprints page where we have all our solutions. You'll be seeing some new and refreshed offerings around HANA, you'll be seeing some new things around SAP landscapes, and you'll be seeing much more formal communication around the cloud offering I talked about. >> And cloud seems to be, again, cloud is taking it outside the four walls, which is different, great capabilities, people going in analytics, putting a lot of analytics in the cloud. So seeing that being the first wave beyond dev tests. Dev tests, even though Oracle says dev tests is really going to be around for a long, long time, people are already moving to analytics in the cloud. That's interesting for instrumenting for backup and recovery, what's possible. Quick thoughts on the changes there, in the landscape between the old way of thinking about backup and recovery, and by the way you guys have some of the best solutions out there that will data domain, scratch record goes to history, but now it goes to the cloud. What's the tricky parts that you guys are watching? >> Well I think on the one hand there'll be people that want to worry about their mission critical, like you said we have great integrated offerings to the workload, so you can have a backup team handle it or you can have your workload team handle it, it's really up to you. As people go into the cloud I think they have to decide, what's the tiering strategy they want to approach that, what's the retention data strategies that they need, how's that going to, >> Where the hell is the data going? >> Where's the data going, is it safe and secure, and how does that relate to how they're protecting their on premise data. I mean from our perspective, and back to the SAP example of where we have this uniform cloud approach, we have the backup capabilities built into that. Whether it's long term data retention, short term backup and recovery, yep. >> Question for you, this is a test, a real time cube test. I'm sure you'll pass with flying colors. What is the most, what are the biggest two waves that the customers should be surfing in the enterprise, top two most important waves? >> I think one of them we've already talked about, which is certainly cloud. I think if you look at the whole digital transformation, which I know is related to cloud, but the whole digital transformation wave I think is separate from that. So if you look at big data and analytics and machine data, every customer, whether it's a traditional RDBMS environment or what have you, they're all looking at how to harness that data. I think when you get into that and look at all the data in your data center that you may not be using today, you may not have been trying to take advantage of, with technologies like Splunk and other things that are out there to help you do that, that's a great thing to look at. We're seeing heavy.. >> So data basically, cloud and data are the two big waves. >> Yeah, digital transformation of data and taking advantage of that data. >> Well they go hand in hand, cuz you got the scale of the cloud for compute and other things, data drives the digital chest of digitalized data, digital assets are data, right, everything's data. So you would agree, cloud and data, two big waves. >> Yes. >> Jason, thanks so much for coming on the Cube special coverage and final comment, I'll give you the last word on SAP Sapphire, I know you got a relationship, you're probably going to be like oh yeah, SAP, everything's great. Be straight, what's going on with SAP. What's the outlook for SAP from your perspective. >> I think there's a great opportunity to your point, but there's also a good challenge, cuz we're going through a merger. I think we're making great progress to bring the two portfolios together, and SAP's being a great partner helping working with us. >> And you're cool with them now, you guys feel good about SAP. >> We feel great about them, we use them in our own environment at Dell as Michael talked about, to run our own business. So it's a great relationship >> Jeremy's been a remote telecast performer at EMC World. >> As you know, these partnerships in the industry go up and down, we talked a little bit about Oracle over the years, that's fluctuated. >> I was dating myself the other day on a Cube gig, and I said, oh it's a Barney deal, which my language was, you know, no real deal, cuz Barney was a character that kids watched, my kids watched, you know, I love you, you love me, it's kind of a love fest, but nothing happens. It's called a Barney deal. I need a new meme now because most of the people in the industry don't know who Barney is. >> Oh I remember, we used to joke about him when I was in alliances, we called them Barney meetings. You got a good meeting with a partner, you'd all talk and nothing would happen. >> You guys do not have a Barney deal with SAP, it's pretty deep across the board, SAP has good relationships, I got to say, they tend to do really, really good. They're either in or they're not, it's pretty obvious. Thank you Jason, so much. Jason Kotsaftis, who's the senior director of the database solutions group with Dell EMC joining us for a special three day coverage of Sapphire now from our studio. Great week, we had Informatica World in San Francisco, Google IO going on today as well, we've got live coverage today with Rob Hove, also VeeamOn is in New Orleans, Dave Vellante is there, and I'm in SAP Sapphire. A lot of coverage for events for the Cube, stay with us more for live coverage after this short break. (techno music)

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

>> Narrator: It's theCUBE, covering Sapphire Now 2017. Brought to you by SAP Cloud platform and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Welcome, this is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. Special Sapphire Now 2017 coverage here in theCUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier and I'm with Frank Pulambo with Cisco, on my left Margaret Anderson with SAP and Gary Gauba with CenturyLink. Some significant news announcing, in conjunction with Sapphire is the relationship between you guys around a significant cloud and cloud computing deal. Margaret, congratulations. This is significant because customers want more flexibility. They want to have a cloud native, they want to have the flexibility of a data center. Frank, talk about the deal from a Cisco perspective and the relationship to the context of this deal. >> John, we're super excited to be part of it, and especially with CenturyLink and a vendor like SAP. Really, our role in it is to help our customers run on print, run in the cloud and really our infrastructure products need to provide the simplicity to performance and the security for them to do that. >> Margaret, talk about the deal specifics. What does the deal entail? >> Well, it's a unique deal, because CenturyLink was already on of our partners for the HANA Enterprise cloud business. Then when the Cisco team came along and said, "You know what? "If we put our gear into the CenturyLink data centers "and power the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, "that would be a tremendous win for everybody." And so, we're very excited about that. >> Gary, I find this deal interesting because you have the engine of the SAP, you have the network and all the benefits that Cisco brings to the table. You're dealing with the implementation and manage to serve the customers. What's the important takeaway from this announcement? >> To me, I think if you take a step back, as we're siting down with some of the top SAP execs, and Chuck from Cisco and our CEO, Glen Post. We're talking, "Okay, how do we leverage "our joint assets together? "How do we create more value for our customers?" If you look at today, every customer the number one priority is digital transformation. The cloud obviously is part of that equation, right. The other bigger priority is, "Okay, how do I monetize this data "in this new connected world?" You're looking at 1.8 trillion connected objects by the year 2020, which will be generating 43 zetabytes of data. But let me quiz you out, how many zeros in a zetabyte? >> I think I knew this answer going in, since I got it wrong on our previous take. So, 12, it's 21. >> Maybe. (panel laughs) >> Okay. >> It's a lot. >> All right, I'm going to say 21 too. >> All right. >> Well, just a lot. It's a lot of data, a lot of devices. >> Yeah, I got to go with 21. It sounds like a good number. >> These are my cheat sheets, right. Anyway, they had-- >> Too many zeros. >> Too many zeros. >> Margaret: Yeah, too many zeros. >> And a significant, it's getting worse, the data tsunami is coming, it's already happening. >> It's happening. You think about the amount of data which is being generated. What we want to do is we want to provide highly secure, automated and in this case SAP certified private cloud platform from CenturyLink. Where we can really have the customers laser focus on the business they do. We help them with the deep platform which can help them monetize their data, help them drive their top line, increase the bottom line. Mitigate the rest in a fast manner and a highly secure manner as well, I'll talk more about that. >> Gary, you bring up a good point, and I want to get Frank involved in this and next I want to double down on the data comment. Because you factor in even the IoT, Internet of Things growth. It's going to be even more significant. Then, the security question pops up, because as the data centers move to the cloud and the hybrid and or pure cloud, the perimeter is gone. Now, the perimeter is how we managed security in the past. But now with the perimeter-less environments security is critical. How does this customer feel secure? And if you guys comment on the security aspect of how this relationship will roll out and the non-disruptive nature that you guys bring to the table? Because that's what customers want to know. >> John, from a Cisco perspective and Gary mentioned, when we talk about the digital transformation. And that's the buzzword in the industry, but most customers are looking for a business outcome. Really, to get that business outcome they have to make a business decision probably based off the technology like SAP HANA. This is mission critical information. At Cisco that's why we're in tune for what the network can do, because it's going to provide security at a lot of layers. Whether it's at the edge, whether it's at the aggregation point or all the way back to the data center, or into the cloud. The security at multi-layers and multiple places. With the bad actors out there that's the way you need to implement it. So you can start to bring this stuff together and give the customers the confidence that, "Hey, this transactionous data is going to be secure." >> Gary, the outcome that we're talking about is no hacks, no breaches, secure? >> Yeah, well it is highly secure, but you got to always be prepared. If you think about it, CenturyLink, we have 550,000 miles of fiber. Once we complete the level three acquisition, we'll add another 200,000 miles of fiber. You're talking about 750,000 miles of fiber touching 100 countries over six continents and 35 person of the global internet traffic going to our network. Once the level three acquisition is complete, we'll be the second largest network and we're critical to countries' infrastructure. There's a deep focus on cyber threats, things we do to avoid the bad actors getting in. >> I think that network intelligence too is going to give you more data to fight the actors as well. >> Absolutely, but to your earlier point, we truly, the situation gets compounded with this connected world revolution. When you are connecting these 1.8 trillion objects, you got to ensure each of these objects is secure. This is where the intersection of cyber security and IoT kicks in, and that's right in our wheel house. >> Don't forget latency, a word that's reering its head. More importantly it has people move across with IoT and across the cloud. Margaret, talk about the role that the HANA Enterprise Cloud plays in all of this. Is it the glue, is it the connecting tissue? What's the role of the HANA Cloud platform? HANA Enterprise Cloud, sorry. >> Yeah, I was just going to say. From a HANA Cloud perspective, it's a private managed cloud. We do an awful lot of work from an SAP perspective to make sure that the customer's environment is totally secure, but is also accessible all of the time for the customer. Because today, most businesses run 24/7 and they run all around the globe. When some team is working and this is their prime business day, later in the US business day, it's prime business time out in Asia, it's prime business time in Europe. You need a cloud that's always available, always up and it's secure. You can guarantee that no other data is leaking into it or out of it. That's really important for our customers, because if you think about it, we have customers today that are SAP customers running in the HANA Enterprise Cloud that are competitors to each other. You have to make sure that you can guarantee that there's not going to be any, data is going to sneak out the back door here or something is going to get in the back door over there. We have a fairly large security team at SAP. We have very stringent standards at SAP. Every time we form partnership with somebody, we say, "Here are our standards. "If you can't comply to these, "we can't do business with you as a partner." From our perspective, it's very important to know that anybody that we work with takes security as serious as we do. >> Well, certainly these guys are big partners, they're known companies, Cisco and CenturyLink. This is big. Talk about the unified, how you guys are going to help with the unified competing architecture that Cisco has. Because you guys have mastered this in the data center and you guys have a lot of experience with now the cloud. What's your vision on how this is going to play out from a Cisco standpoint? >> As Margaret described, their multi-tenancy in the SAP environment is a pillar for them, they have to make that work for the customer and that's something we've been driving at Cisco for a long time. When it comes to the computer platform, which we call UCS, we've been really the leader in converge infrastructure platforms for a long time with UCS and most recently now we're the number one platform for SAT with UCS in the converge environment. It's those attributes that have enabled us to really get inserted there to provide the customer value. >> You get the packet level of the network transformations, >> Yeah, John. >> So picked very nicely. >> You're more of a geek than I know. You're pretty good. >> Well, we follow Looking at the 5G network transformation you're seeing a lot of end-to-end architectures really winning out. I think why I'm excited about this new is essentially it's a partnership that's providing an need-to-end solution. Gary you are in the front line, you're the manager of service. Talk about the impact that you see this deal, because now you have to turn up services and have that customer touch point. >> If you look at how we're pulling together the solution. Obviously if look on the compute side we're using the UCS and on the switches there's the Cisco networking switches and then you're looking at the-- >> Nexus, Gary, Nexus. >> Nexus, all right. >> I didn't get to that. >> I wanted to make sure Frank is paying attention. (panel laughs) Then you're looking at the net app storage and the VMWare for virtualization. Then another key element we're using is Winamix, which integrates with the UCS and is pretty much integrating all the APIs for all these components. Obviously the powerful in memory HANA engine. All these things are pulled together to create a platform which we are providing to the customers, so that they can really focus on what they are good at, their business and they're delivering a powerful rally to their customers. What it does is, with the UCS and the Winamix and some of the other elements, we can onboard customers within this. What used to take us 32, 33 days now we can do that within 9 to 11 days which is a big big plus when a customer approaches us. >> It's a huge shape in the business model first of all, the client delivery on your end and service is significant. There's a lot of automation involved. In fact I was talking to a venture capitalist recently here in Silicon Valley and we were talking about network transformation, digital transformation and they invest in infrastructure. He goes, "Oh no, not a lot of new companies are coming out "with an infrastructure making hardware just as the cloud." He says plumbers are turning into machinists kind of indicating that a lot of automation is happening at the lower end of the stack and the action is happening higher up in the stack to your point. Things are happening faster in terms of level of services. >> Absolutely and I think another thing which we also bring to the table is that the deep essence expartice if you look at some of the mission critical applications whether it is SVOHANA, suite on HANA the ECC or the entire BI suite enterprise portal and the list goes on right. And that becomes critical so we can get them up and running very quickly and give us all in one on to the country. >> A significant endorsement with you, make a comment? >> Am just saying when you're talking about the visibility of the SAP platform this is something the customers thought about right. Its going to get to all levels of the organization and really they're making critical business decisions off of the SAP HANA platform its got to be there. I mean and that's obviously our challenge to meet that for customers. >> Margaret, HANA Enterprise cloud is the engine and you guys are providing significant on it. How do you see this collaboration playing out for customers? What should they expect from the collaboration of Cisco and CenturyLink? >> Well what we want the customer to have is a seamless experience. We tell them upfront that we have this partnership and that we're going to work together but we really want to keep them focused on the value that they get from running their applications. Because, think about it this way, when you get in the car and you turn on the engine, you want to drive away right? You know the engine is there, you know that the engine, depending on how much horse power you've invested in, depending on what kind of make and model, you get different things from it. But you know it's going to always be there, it's always going to work. Then if you want to enhance the engine, shall we say you want to know that the right people have the skillset for those enhancements. When customers come into the HANA Enterprise Cloud, sometimes they start off with the migration. One of the things you're doing is you're kind of sunsetting all the old stuff and you're helping them move on to our HANA platforms whether is S4, whether it's Suite on HANA, whether it's our VI suite, you're helping the customer get started. But that's the start, because after that there's all this other wonderful stuff that we develop at SAP being that we're a software house, like IoT and our Leonardo that's being announced in Sapphire and we want customers to be ready to take advantage of that. We tell the customers, "You need to move away from all the "old stuff because it's not reliable any more, "we want to move you into a different level "of reliability so that you're ready "to scale up your organization. "And so that you can do more business." And in the end the customer says, "Okay, I need to know the cloud is there for me, "I don't want to have to be thinking about it everyday. "What I want to be thinking about is "how can I do new business, how can I open up offices "in other parts of the world, "how can I transact business globally?" They're not really thinking about, okay, I need more stuff. If they need to expand we call up our partners and we say, Okay the customer wants five more terabits or something, 10 more terabits of whatever, and they just want it to happen. They don't want to have really long projects, they just want it to be there for them, they want to know that they can scale out and scale up. >> One thing just to add, I think Richard mentioned, it just becomes critical that the redundancy is there. This is where the MetroDR capabilities which we bring to the table. That becomes very powerful and if you look at what we have done is, we have created 10 parts, in the US you have those in Santa Clara, Dallas, Chicago and the Dc Sterling area. Then Singapore and the London market. The MetroDr capabilities are available in all the three markets. Which is a very critical element that the customers know. >> This is, the recovery certainly is really a big deal because you can think about after effect, you've got to think about the upfront in the service. You cannot just say, "Oh I forgot that thing about DR." >> The thing is, you get into a lot more preventive maintenance because this is where there are dedicated teams which are doing nothing. Once the bill processes down you get them up and running and how do you ensure we are able to predict before anything? >> I think this news is significant, one the size of the players involved but two, it speaks to the transformation that's happening in the market place. Customers are moving to a new way to operate their business and at the end of the day you guys are making it easier to run some of the core software that can scale. But it comes down to, how do you migrate and scale without having any kind rip and replace or lift and shift. Lift and shift, I would have said is codeword for rip and replace, but customers are on an evolution journey, there is no silver bullet in the cloud in my opinion, some we've covered that with you. You're thoughts on this, do you guys see it the same way? Customers aren't just going to move tomorrow, they're going to want an evolutionary approach, but they're going to want to have a scale. >> It's a journey, oftentimes customers say to us, what's the safest thing to do first? What pieces of my environment can I take into the cloud and then gradually over time, whether it's a few months, whether it's six months increments. It depends on how the customer is running their business. Can I keep moving it in there so I can keep getting value and at some point his is all done, goes away and now I'm fully transformed into the cloud. We see some customers who can do really quick projects, they're very agile and they're very nimble and so we can migrate them in and get them going and running very quickly. We've got other customers who are more risk adverse. They want to proceed a little slowly. We can do all of the flavors, depending on what they want to do and so when we first talk to customers about the HANA enterprise cloud, we talk about the options. We talk about what they can do, we make recommendations from an SAP perspective as to what we think their speed could be and then we help them get into the cloud. Because they might get left behind if they don't make that move. >> The modernization trend is key, people want to be modern, the apps are being written differently, the more the relevance is more towards agile and speed. I think I like this announcement you've got the reliability that Cisco would move in packets around the data center rock solid, the software, core engine on Enterprise cloud and scale the manage service level that can give you the flexibility to run whatever you want. I think that's interesting, did I get that right? >> I think the other thing is, it's not like we've been working on this thing for a week, we've bene working together on this solution for years now that you've got to make it right. There's different stages along the way. >> What are some of those key stages that a customer should know about? >> We were just talking about HANA Enterprise Cloud, could you run HANA in the cloud now? No, that's faded completely, it's already done you certainly can't. Customers can make decisions now to say, "Hey am I going to start on prime, am I going to start "in the cloud?" And go though that whole kind of process of what's the best thing. We're providing that flexibility but this is something we've been working on for a while and I think, when you look at the other solutions out there of customers making the right evaluation, you want to go with a CenturyLink SAP and Cisco to say, "Hey, this is the right muscle, "the right process behind us." >> This is amazing, you guys are a great deal, again Frank, senior vice president Cisco and Gary who is the chief relationship officer and president of the Advanced Solution Group and Margaret. All the senior executives, the principals here congratulation on this news, we'll wait to see how it plays out. >> Margaret: Thank you for having us today. >> Special keep coverage of Sapphire 2017, I'm John Furrier. Back with more live coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

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

>> Voiceover: Live from Orlando, Florida, It's The Cube covering Sapphire Now, headlining sponsored by SAP HANA Cloud, the leader in platform-as-a-service with support from Console Inc., the cloud internet company. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone, We are here, live, in Orlando, Florida SAP Sapphire Now. This is SiliconANGLE Media's The Cube. It's our flagship program, we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Peter Burris, want to give a shout out to our sponsors, SAP Hana Cloud Platform, Console Inc, Capgemini, EMC, thanks so much for sponsoring us. Our next guest is Pat Bakey who's the president of SAP's Industry Cloud group. It's the core of the cloud, all SAP. Welcome to The Cube. >> Hi, it's great to be in The Cube, first time in The Cube. >> First time on The Cube, congratulations first time Cuber. Great to have you. You have, as holistically viewing across all the different lines of business, Cloud will be a very big part of the future and across all of SAP, that's the core business. Yet, now you have Hana cloud platform, you got all this other stuff going on. Now, you have cloudification of SAP in kind of a real time happening in this show, it's going to have an impact to the deployment model, the consumption model, and the economics. What's the take, what's the internal discussions? How you guys talk about it externally with costumers and how is it received? >> Right, so, you know what, I'll tell you what, this is the industry cloud organization, so, maybe I can start there. What's industry and cloud doing in the same sentence, in the same title? So, when you talk about digitization, what customers are looking for today, it's value and speed, right, speed and agility. So, the industry part of the equation is all about value. How do we communicated the value of our innovations in a message and understanding that gives the customers confidence to invest in a innovation agenda and that's kind of, historically, has always been the strength of SAP, is the language that we speak with our customers, it's well understood, we just make sure that we express that well across all industries and line of business with the digitization agenda. The cloud portion is where speed and agility comes into play. How do you move quickly, how do you move fast? If in yesterday's business the strength was your ownership of assets, the strength today, the attributes in which these companies compete on is speed, innovation, agility, and that's where cloud comes into play. >> And knowledge of the customer. How are you then bringing those two things together for your customerS? >> So, we're helping, actually, customers across all industries get closer to the customer. If there's one strategy that every customer in every industry is pursuing is get close to the customer. This is important, it may seem sort of simplistic, but it's easy to say, it's hard to do. So, we are helping customers understand what their customers and what their customer's customers are doing. It's driving a blurring of industries. You may say that I'm responsible for 26 industries, maybe oversimplifying 'cause we see this massive blurring of industries because as customers in industries are trying to get closer to their customers, they cross boundaries. >> And conversation let's them do that. >> Yeah, it's like we were talking about before, in this world of atoms, very restrictive, very kind of two-dimensional. Digital, it defies gravity, it defies boundaries, and that's why you see this blurring of boundaries in cross industry plays. >> Yeah, we're seeing that, too, you guys talk about it here, I heard it many times, breaking down the silos and the keynotes, but at the same time, you want to have that getting close to your customer mindset which means that the apps, the workloads are domain specific and there's some blurring, so the question is, how can you be vertically integrated at some level for that domain expertise and then be horizontally scalable because the data really becomes the blurring component, too, you have data moving around, so how do you guys look at that and are customers asking for this kind of architecture? >> Yeah, it's exactly, so... It's interesting, in the old world, you either had deep industry expertise in your applications, your technology, or you had sort of a broad, horizontal, and that got you a seat at the table. You had to be best in class in either of those. So, those still get you to the table, if you have those, but it may be a small table like the table that we deal with, with our customers, is an innovation table, it's a growth table, and it involves the whole board, the whole enterprise. If you get to that table, you need to have deep industry expertise and what do I mean by that? First, you speak the language, you understand their industry from a process and the capability area and then you have to express that across their businesses, so whether that business are traditional COM, the customer business around people, HR, or around procurement or even in the industries where you're taking look at supply chain or you're looking at planning, you need to be able to integrate the industry with the horizontal. When you have that conversation and that message, which we have, you're at the big table. >> The big boy table, so what are some of the conversations at the table, is it really more revenue-driving for the customer's customers? Is it cost-saving, both, is it implementation? What are some of the trending conversations that are happening at the big table? So, at the big table, at the top of the house, strategically, around this topic of digitization, the world of digitization, competition is at the business model level, that's what they're talking about which is, I know I'm in this business today, will I be in this business tomorrow and how do I compete tomorrow? It's less about the assets as we said before, what do you have, but it's the insight that you have and that's opening up a lot of new business opportunities, so at the big table, it's around business model innovation, that's what they're talking about. >> Let me see if I can connect a couple of things you said here, so it used to be that when you thought about industry, you thought about the organization of assets, your organization of assets looks like your organization of assets, how do you handle your balance sheets, but now we're talking about customers and in many respects, the new industry is defined by the things that your customers want to do that are common to your competitor's customers. >> Exactly. >> And sometimes they're the same customers. So, as SAP's ecosystem grows, as it expands, as you're able to attract, through new sources of value, to things like this wonderful Apple partnership that we want to give you guys a chance to talk about, do you see SAP's role moving from a provider of software to actually increasing the provider of a way of thinking about doing business, where SAP, in many respects, becomes an element, almost a core element, of the business model that your customers are using to make things happen. >> That is a great statement and I actually can point you in two directions and I want to get to the Apple relation because it actually expresses our strategy on taking advantage of that. So, I would say, historically, when we were just an application company, the source of innovation came from SAP, we understood business process, we understood industry, we built these remarkable applications, and our ecosystem took 'em, implemented, and customers enjoyed the success. We're in the world now of digitization and massive innovation and there's no way that we can be the single source of innovation, this is why you heard Burn, this is why you heard Robyn Bell talking about the Hana cloud platform. So, we still need to be the catalyst when it comes to defining what is remarkable about our technology and capability to solve business problems, but then we have to enable a massive ecosystem to innovate on top of that, to extend it, to innovate, and that's where the Hana cloud platform comes into play. We are setting the agenda, we are setting the expectation of what great looks like and then tapping into the ecosystems that we have. >> What's interesting about what you just said and Peter brought this up yesterday with the global CTO of Capgemini and your premise was, the old days, you knew the processes, but didn't know the technologies, and you automated those processes, now we know the technology and don't know the processes as their developing. So, you look at IOT, it's an unknown future, but you can kind of guess it's going to be a lot of data, it's going to be an edge of the network, so that reinforces this whole ecosystem point that the innovation will come in an unknown innovation way meaning that you can't say, "I'm going to automate that" 'cause it's not known yet, it's evolving. That to me seems to tie what you just said. Can you expand your thoughts on that because this is what everyone's chasing that's the startup mentality, that's the agile, that's the jump on a grenade, win the beachhead, grow a business, that's going to be the startups and the white space for you guys. >> Look, I'm a lousy dart player, all right, but I could win if I'm throwing a thousand darts at a target and the other guy's throwing three, that's the environment we're in with Hana cloud platform, we got massive darts to throw at the target because it changes so fast you need to have a couple things, you need to have that great ecosystem, you need to be able to innovate, and you need to be able to address volatility. Let me give you a practical example of that. If you take a look at digitization and one of the key dimensions which is how work will be done in this new digital world, we have some pretty good ideas how it's going to be done such as it's not going to be done inside of the enterprise, whether that work is a manufacturing environment or that work is knowledge management in a typical office, it's going to be increasingly mobile and these mobile workers will be connected. And the challenge there is one, how do you understand what the processes will be? We have an idea, but they're going to evolve and second, how do you enable them with real time information 'cause the mobile experience isn't just taking the desktop and putting a different form factor on it, so we take a look at the Apple and SAP announcement, what does this mean? When you hear Tim and you hear Bill discuss it, it's a step change in how these two great companies believe work will be done in the digital world. The way that we execute on that is, again, back to what I said before, we will bring the best of a consumer, user experience, with the best of a business insight experience and bring those together and if you take a look then at what is the standard of a mobile platform, it's iOS which, by the way, is severely underutilized. It's chat, it's phone, it's email. If you take a look at your iPhone and how we're using it as consumers, that's massively underutilized in an enterprise setting, same thing with business information, when you leave the office, you're leaving all that behind, SAP will bring all that, the business process, the business insight, you bring it together and you have these new native applications. >> Interesting, too, on the Apple, by the way, congratulations it's a real phenomenal announcement, super happy to see that. The other nuance there, too, is that swift programming languages is very popular among developers right now and there's also another trend in the developer community what they're calling the non-coding developer, the tools are getting so damn good now that you don't have to go to be a computer science major to write code and there's other, Python, other languages that are good on-ramps, so you have an ecosystem that has the glam of Apple and the sexiness of swift. There's all this monetization opportunities. There's a developer saying, "Hey, I have an ecosystem "I can work with, that I can ride on the back of, "to the marketplace," so it's a great avenue for someone or now business to pick a white space and dominate it, whether it's a tool or a feature, they can come in and be a feature and still be a business, you'll be saying, so could I, was, "Oh, that's a feature not a company." That was the old way, now that's the innovation coming from these entrepreneurs, that, to me, is interesting. Are you guys seeing that kind of excitement from developers and do you see the developers as the core of the ecosystem? Well, what's your thoughts on that, overall? >> We're seeing the developer community becoming a more critical part because it's not just about implementing, remember when I said we're the source of innovation and other people implement it, that the skill set of the ecosystem, now when it's innovation, the source of the innovation needs to come from the ecosystem, and that's the developing community. So, if you take a look again at this Apple announcement, the reference applications and what we're building right now because that's what we and Apple think would look great in specific industries, but then it's this SDK and the Hana cloud platform. If you take 2.5 million SAP developers and you take 12 million iOS developers, you bring 'em together, not only just to work together, but to redefine what this new developing environment is, swift, right, the best of how you design enterprise applications or commercial applications and then the third leg of this is the iOS university because these are new classes of developers and my final point is as much as we think we know how work will be done in this mobile work environment, it's going to change, it's going to change. >> IOT's important, but people are going to work together with people over distance over agendas over boundaries, that's going to change the world. Let me ask you a question. We'd asked a couple of times to some of your folks on The Cube, Is it going to possible at some point in time, I'm going to get an Apple developer who decides to enter into an enterprise space by creating a solution, have an Apple phone customer go up, pull something off the app store because it is SAP complaint, is that going to happen? >> I can envision that happening, I can envision it. It's we are the standard for a trusted enterprise partner. >> Well, think about it, so now you got a situation where you your CIO and your IT organization who wants stable, comply in SAP, and then all the folks out in the field that are doing the work, that are identifying new problems and finding software that they can apply to solve the problem and having SAP and Apple bring both of those sides together, so that the CIO can be certain that what was just grabbed works and is compliant, but also, at the same time, that person knows that this innovative thing is not going to create problems in the backend. Very, very powerful vision, loved to see that notion. >> Yeah, and I think that's what you get when you combine those two brands and those two experiences. As quickly we're innovating and moving forward, you still need to have predictability in the business and a strong core, right? It's the business continuity, so you need to be able to innovate very quickly, rapid innovation, quick failure, fast learning, that's at the edge. So, if we can enable that, but give the predictability and the stability in the business relationships, security, you bring that together, this is the new world that we're creating, calls for new developers, calls for new ecosystems, and new leadership, and that's what we and Apple bring to the equation. >> So, Pat, share the roadmap on the Apple thing, just to kind of just to take the final close, square this out in little bits. Ecosystem, I get the ecosystem, I would evision that's a great outcome. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Certified SAP apps in the Apple, I'm sure that's the plan. On the SAP side, you're going for the low hanging fruit, you mentioned that you're doing a couple of things, what's the roadmap for the sequence and the progression of SAP-Apple relationship? What are you guys bringing to the table from the core software? >> Yeah, so we've identified specific industries where the dynamics play to the favor of the dynamic at work, so they're mobile, they're standardizing already on iOS and they're connected and they need the rich enterprise information and we've identified high-values cases and those where we'll build the applications, but what we want to do-- >> John: That's a low hanging fruit for you guys. >> That's a low hanging fruit. And create that kind of references of what a great mobile experience looks like and then we're going to enable through the SDK, the ecosystem, so that's where the massive innovation is going to come from and then we'll try to figure out where this takes us. This is a series of six month sprints that we're on. >> Business sprints Love that concept. >> You know, this phrase, a couple of years ago, the speed of business, I forget which SAP soft, I remember in 2013, McDermott's phrase was "Running at the speed of business" with the mobile. Final question for you is, on the Industry Cloud, what's your plans, what's your goals, how do you see it evolving, can you share some anecdotal, you don't have to reveal any sensitive information, but the visions for how you see the Industry Cloud group that you're running, evolving over the next 12, 48 months? >> So, I see us, right now, that there's some things your core values and your core competencies shouldn't change, they should sort of leverage the environment that you're in and so, we're caring for our industry in sight, our focus on an end-to-end capability, high-values cases, and integration where it needs to be and that's what we express. So, we're going to take that and we're going to apply it to helping customers digitize on that journey. Here at Sapphire, the focus has been not on what we're announcing because ask any customer here, we have the requisite capabilities, what they want to get is busy on their journey and they want us to help them reduce uncertainty, reduce risk, and realize value. So, all the conversations here on what are we doing, industry, clear road maps, where we going? What capabilities? Second, road map on value, what value? S4, fastest launch in our history, customers, right now, are saying, "How do we double that, how do we triple that? Is by showing the business value associated with it. So that's what we're doing with industry, is showing a clear path of what great looks like, a road map on how to get there, the business values associated with it, and how working our digital business services customers, how we can help them realize that. >> And the road map is key because that clarifies the ecosystem. They understand kind of the rules of engagement. They can see the line. >> Yeah, what their overall is used. You know, it's interesting, Pat, you look around, there's 60,000 people, the amount of activity, the amount of deal making, that's going on here, it's probably the 25th largest economy in the world right here. >> Oh, it is, in Orlando, that's amazing. Yeah, I need to take a knee guys, I was just hearing about that. >> Final question and I'll let you go 'cause we got to go, we know you're tight on time, what's the coolest thing you've seen at Sapphire this week? >> Coolest thing, boy, I've been in so many meetings, I haven't seen cool. >> Peter: Other than this one. >> Oh, yeah, this is definitely a cool meeting. Oh, geez, coolest thing? >> Coolest phrase, sound bite, feedback, hallway conversation. >> What are you going to tell, in your next management meeting, what's the one thing you're going to tell 'em about Sapphire? >> I'd say that there is so much demand for us to help customers. We're not pushing, we're getting pulled. So, it's about prioritization like how do we focus on what's most important for our customers? That's such a lame answer. >> Peter: Well, but the prioritization of-- >> When you're looking for cool, but it's true. >> There's drones somewhere, I saw a beer tap that got IOT on it for-- >> I did see the guy in kind of the transformer outfit, that was pretty cool, but I'll tell you what, as we become more and more of consumer business oriented, my kids start developing a better understanding of what I actually do when I leave home. It's cool, I mean, SAP is cool. Actually, I'll tell you the one thing. The one thing I heard here from customers that either went to original Sapphires and are back after a while or coming for the first time, they can't believe how fast we're moving. They really can believe how fast we're moving. It's that speed, it's not just the pace of this conversation or the pace of the traffic around here, it's the pace of how quickly business is moving and that we're leading it. >> Pat Bakey, president of Industry Cloud, SAP, this is The Cube, I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. Be right back, this is The Cube, SiliconANGLE's flagship program. This is The Cube, you're watching The Cube, we'll be right back. (fun, upbeat melody) >> Voiceover: There'll be millions of people in the near future that aren't allowed to be involved in their own personal well-being and wellness. Nobody wants to.

>> Voiceover: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SapphireNow. 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 SAP Sapphire coverage from SiliconANGLE Media, theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, and extract the signal for the noise. Want to give a shout out to our sponsors, who allow us to get here, SAP Hana Cloud platform, Console, Inc., EMC, Cap Gemini, thanks for supporting us. We appreciate it. Our next guest is Mitch Kick, Global Vice President, Head of Strategy and Programs for SAP Global Ecosystem. We love strategy guys because, they get the chess board. And they look like they're always playing chess, 3-D chess. Been looking at the landscape, looking at the horse on the track. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you very much. Good to be here. >> It's an evolving ecosystem. It's fluid, but yet, active. The Apple announcement, certainly notable news for SAP. Certainly, the Cloud, mobile, social data trend, the confluence of those things, causing massive innovation surge. So you, got a lot going on. >> Absolutely. >> What is the current ecosystem? >> Well, you know, when you think about the way SAP looks at it's ecosystem, I mean certainly we have those traditional types of partners, who resell our product. But, when we talk about our global ecosystem, we're really talking about those partners who are either strategic service partners, technology partners, some emerging partners and names that you mentioned, like Apple, Uber, Facebook, some of these, they're not your grandfathers, SAP partners. And so, we're really moving to partner in new ways. To co-innovate new types of solutions, that take advantage of the trends in the digital landscape. >> John: Like what are you doing with Facebook? >> Well, Facebook is an example, it's something where we said, "Look, there's all this social data," "that's out there. How do we put that together with" "our Hybris, CEC, types of solutions," "our commerce solutions?". To basically allow marketers to do one-to-one marketing, that leverages the power of Facebook data, and your enterprise data, brings it together in a very manageable tool. >> That must've been a very hard deal, because they're very controlled about their data. And also, each person has their profile settings. So, that's awesome. >> Yeah, and it's something that allows for marketers to just do much more targeting, much more insightful targeting. You know, we announced that last year and over the course of the last year had a number of really interesting pilot examples. >> Can developers get involved in that Or is this more of SAP directly, kind of thing? >> Well that, is an example of where we are creating a solution that sort of packages it turnkey. But, you know when you think something like in Apple, the beauty of that one is, not only are we developing these beautiful industry applications, that are going to be in targeted industries, and I don't know if you saw them, they were out on the floor here. >> Yeah, impressive. >> With regard to retail, or with regard to.. >> Well start-ups will come out of the woodwork just in a short time, have hundreds of employees, with this ecosystem. >> Well, exactly. I guess the point I was making with the Apple deal, is not only are we working with to design some really incredible industry apps, but then we're also creating the software developer kit, making that into the Hana Cloud platform, so that if you're developing on Hana Cloud platform, it now becomes another compelling reason you can leverage these beautiful interfaces, and these beautiful tools, that take full advantage of native capabilities on the Apple devices. And so it's a way that our partnership not only delivers, kind of near-term solutions that matter for us, but enables our broader ecosystem of solution partners to capitalize. >> It's fastest to innovation. I mean, you're going to get more R and D, and then real production apps faster that way. >> Absolutely. >> From the developer. So that's Core. David Valente and I always talk about courses for horses, which is, you know, certain things fit certain ways. There seems to be now, with the Cloud platform, an opportunity for developers to come in. So I want you to explain how Hana fits in. 'Cause this, Hana Cloud and then this Hana Cloud platform. What's the difference between the two? Can you just quickly share what that means to the ecosystem? >> Well, Hana as a database, I mean, the thing about the Hana Cloud Platform is that, that creates platform for our solution partners to extend, and integrate, as well as build and develop on it. And you'd say, "Well, as a platform as a service," "are you guys using HCP, to go out there and win" "the past wars?" In the generic sense of the past, that's really not the intention. The intention is, we've got this huge installed base. We've got these service partners, who are working very closely with their customers to innovate on top of, so that once our customers move to that digital core of S4 Hana, they can use HCP as that extension and integration platform, to tie together a number of different things. And a lot of the things that are, you know, when you think about digital transformation, there is so much activity, and discussion around the customer experience, and architecting a beautiful customer experience, with mobile devices, with you know, targeted types of commerce on the front end. But, what people are coming to realize, I think, is the importance of having that end-to-end. Because, you aren't going to be able to deliver the beautiful experience. And so, the example with, you know I was on a panel yesterday with Uber and Tumi. As an example, Tumi, luxury retailer that wants to create, not only a compelling customer experience that embodies the best of its luxury brand, but also is facing the threat of Amazon Prime Same-Day delivery, in metropolitan areas. And the beauty is, by partnering with Uber, and SAP, we are able to incorporate that seamlessly, as an option for Same-Day delivery. They can deliver in 30 minutes, for seven dollars, it's game-changing. That's an example of where we provide, here at this event, an early window into the type of co-innovation that we are doing. It's sort of like, in the past where you'd think, "Well, SAP has a certain solution footprint," "and we're going to partner with other software companies," "who can plug-in to that footprint.". Now you have, in the new world, where there are industry ecosystems like Uber, platforms that you can capitalize on, it's the business network. You can plug-in business networks to, an overall solution to customers, that's really compelling and that delivers opportunities in ways that we couldn't have imagined a few years ago. >> I want to build on that. So, historically, strategy has been three to five years, tied to asset values, mainly fixed asset values, and how are we going to generate a return in those fixed asset, over an extended period of time. You're describing a world where, whereas especially as those assets become more programmable, they can be applied to a broader array of activities, and opportunities, where the horizon starts to shrink pretty dramatically, the strategic horizon. And it becomes more, "What capabilities do we have?", and "How do we improve those capabilities," "and drive them forward?". And that's a crucial way of thinking about partnerships, is partnerships, as capabilities. I think that's where you were going. >> Absolutely. >> Are you thinking now about partnerships in the ecosystem as crucial capabilities, not only for SAP, but for SAP customers? >> They've always been, in many ways, when you think about, customers need a whole solution. In the past, even when the on-prem software world, you didn't get the whole solution by just buying the software package, it required a lot of additional service. With the Cloud model's that are emerging, it's much more easy to consume the software functionality, but there still is a tremendous amount of on-going innovation, differentiation, customization. And that's why when you look at, a lot of where we're going with our solution, you can hear Mike Getlin talking about our success factors product, and the fact that, "Well, how do partners help us?", "Do our service partners help us in the same way" "of just implementing software?". No. There role is really in integrating and extending it, and creating micro-services on top of it, that then say, "This is a really unique capability" "that's essential for delivering value" "to this particular customer or client.". So, you're now finding that because of our ecosystem, that is getting plugged into these new ways of contributing, we can now have a broad array of contribution. People understand how they can plug-in and capitalize on that, and deliver real innovation and benefit to the end customer. >> So you look a lot at industry trends. As you walk the floor here, what trends are starting to emerge, for you, and what is getting you excited, as a strategist? >> From my standpoint, when you think about digital transformation, and honestly, we were joking a lot about this whole term, because when it first game out, it was sort of like, "I'm not familiar with anyone who's actually" "doing analogue transformation.". All IT is digital. We've been doing digital things for years. And transformation, I mean, I was involved in the early '90s and the big re-engineering wave. Right? Where you're re-engineering, using technology and what not, so what is really different here? And I think what we see, is that, through all these trends, there's sort of confluence of them, and people map out a dozen, two dozen different trends that are going to change the world, they speak breathlessly about all these things. But in the end, what difference does it really make? From my standpoint, it's really three. One is you're starting to see all these things change the customer experience, fundamentally. Right? To the real-time, mobile devices, one-to-one. That's being enabled now. You're also seeing the difference in how value is delivered, in terms of IOT, instrumenting the broader landscape, etc. And you're seeing a difference in business models, in terms of how value is captured. You can think about it as, "Well, how is value consumed?", "How is value being delivered?", "How is value being captured?". The real, so what, is that all these different individual technology trends are combining to make those differences happen, that enable completely different ways of making money, of growing of opportunity. >> It changes the analogue, where, the analogue piece used to be the transactional, digital then hands off to analogue, or vice versa. That whole thing, end-to-end you just talked about, is an end-to-end digital. But the analogue role of the person, is augmented differently. So what you said is interesting because, I think people look at it differently and say, "Hey, if it's digital end-to-end," "where does analogue fit in?". Well still, people walking around here at the show, we're face-to-face, so I think it's interesting when you look at the optimization of digital. I'll take sales leads, for instance or marketing automation. You know, get the form, pass the leads to the sales people, they go knock on the door, call, email, that's analogue transaction. That's now digital. >> Mitch: Right. >> But the still, analogue components. What's your thoughts on that? How do you look at it? 'Cause you still got to do business, the people still are going to be involved. >> That really hit home when we were talking about this Uber example, because everybody talks about Tumi, they were talking about, "Well, its a beautiful experience." for somebody to be able to then say, "I got a one-hour delivery.". We can all identify with going to a retail outlet and they say, "Oh, I'm sorry, we don't have any more" "of those in the store, but we've got one" "that's 40 minutes away, if you want to go drive there.". Well, what if now all of the sudden you can get the product in to this store, in the next 30 minutes? Or, deliver it to wherever you happen to be, in 30 minutes? That changes the game. >> John: And that's user experience. >> Yeah. But, the thing is, so that's nifty, that's great, it's really compelling. But, when you start thinking about what it would take to work this, okay? Well now, you're going to have to have an implication for those retail store people. And so, this notion of, "How are we making this" "a beautiful experience for the retail clerk?", who now, instead of just serving the store, is going to get pinged because, "Hey, wait a minute," "we've got some deliveries that you're going to have to" "pick and pack, to get ready for some Uber driver" "to come in." That's a change to them. So, when you talk about implication, that highlights all of the, "change management", all of the, "how does it make a difference" "in individuals work?", and there's always going to be that last mile engagement that is needed. And that's really when you start talking about trends, how do we see things changing, I think about our service partners, I see their role changing to enable the real business change. >> Well that's it, that's it. The impact is clear. Totally agree, 100%. It's the confluence that magnifies that change, and its massive. It's frickin' awesome. Everyone can look at it and say, "Damn, its going to be big!". My final question to you is, given that impact, what advice are you sharing with your ecosystem, in terms of how to prepare for it? How to be ready not to go out of business, or help your customers not go out of business? And enable them to actually compete, digitally, in the transformation. >> Well, when we look at it, part of the challenge is that the ecosystem is so diverse, that you know, often your guidelines are speaking to specific people. The one thing I would say is, everybody is going out and talking a digital message, we need to be on the same song sheet. So when your solution partner, or service partner, and you've got your own offerings, your own reference architecture's, et cetera, let's work together to make sure that we are all singing from the same sheet. Second thing is, it's really imperative that we, basically migrate our installed base, to the digital core. So, S4 Hana, getting enabled around that, making that change happen, that enables all sorts of other benefits. And the third thing would be, the importance of then leveraging Hana Cloud platform. Because, the integrations that were hard coded, from yesterday, are no longer valid. So, if you leverage Hana Cloud platform from integration standpoint, you're really allowing for this much more agile, and fluid, innovation cycle to happen, in a much faster clip. And that's really what our customers are going to need, and it's going to take all of us working together to deliver that promise, of digital transformation. >> Well the Apple deal puts you guys front and center, on the user experience side, consumerization of IT. The chess board, multiple dimensions of chess, going on at the SAP ecosystem. Mitch, thanks for coming on. >> Absolutely. >> Welcome to The Cube Alumni Club. This is The Cube here live at Sapphire, we'll be right back. You're watching, The Cube.

>> 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: From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. (upbeat music) 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's your host, Peter Burris. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Peter Burris, and theCUBE is, once again, our flagship platform for bringing what's happening in big events to the community. Today, we're here at SAP Sapphire and I'm being joined by Tom Roberts, who's the Global Vice President of Third-Party Software Solutions. Tom, we're going to spend some time talkin' about how you're working with the ecosystem at SAP to fill in some of those crucial gaps that customers face as they try to create those new outcomes with SAP-related technologies. Tell us a little bit about what your team does. >> Great, Peter, and thanks, appreciate you havin' us here. You know, Peter, one of the key things that Third-Party Solutions does, and what my team does, is we really help complete the solution. Right? So, it's a complex world. We've got customers out there trying to solve some very challenging problems and, of course, SAP brings the bulk of the solution there, but there's going to be some gaps. We've created unique relationships in our ecosystems in order to help fill that and deliver a complete solution. So, for example, you'll hear the name out in the marketplace, Solution Extensions, and that's our external branding. These are solutions that SAP sells on its paper, that have been tested and are supported by SAP, same as our own products, so the customer can buy with confidence and help get that total solution in place. >> So, it's your almost SAP-compliant additional software. >> Yeah, that's right. >> Excellent. That's a really interesting perspective. You know, it's interesting. Over the course of our two days here at Sapphire, and we'll be here tomorrow as well, two things have popped out that are a little bit different from SAP. First off, the tension between whether or not SAP was an applications company or platform company seems to have totally gone away. >> Yes. >> You're a platform company. >> That's correct. >> The second thing that I find very interesting is that SAP has always been the company that kind of, was a little bit more neutral, stood back. When a customer needed us, we'll show up and we'll do it. You're now being a little bit more aggressive about going after business, after some other companies' customers. How are you utilizing this extensions approach to more rapidly create a solutions fabric that can bring, that can rapidly grab new customers for SAP, and your partners? >> Well, Peter, you're right on the money. You know, it's no doubt that the industry has moved rapidly to the cloud. In fact, everybody said it would happen faster and it's happened even faster than they said it would. Everyone is, when they see results, they're always surprised, and cloud growth was even faster than we thought it would be. Now, what a lot of people haven't figured out, but I think SAP has, is that, in a cloud-based solution world, the expectation is that, one, it's seamlessly integrated, and, two, the experience of buying it is seamlessly integrated, and, three, it's supported in a seamlessly integrated way and that's what Solution Extensions delivers in the cloud. So, you take an example of the success we've had with the acquisition of SuccessFactors, growing great, growin' well in the industry, but they have a lot of needs in order to mature the solution and meet the customer's entire wishlist. One example that we use is we've got a relationship with WorkForce Software for time and attendance, so it wasn't something that SAP developed, but it's something that the customers needed and provides high ROI. But, if you go and you look at that solution, you'll look and see that it's directly embedded inside employee central, right on the drop down, so, for the customers, a completely seamless experience, and they can buy that from their SAP account executive. >> So, SAP is installed in a lot of companies, 300 thousand across all industries. >> Right. >> As we move to a digital world, a lot of your customers, a lot of your SAP customers themselves, are starting to envision how software becomes part of their delivery mechanism. >> Right. >> And they're looking at the customers that they serve and saying, I wonder if I can use this software better. Are you startin' to see non-traditional software companies starting to come to you and saying, how can we be part of this program so that we can plug into, or we can enhance, that broad set of solutions for our customers. >> Right. So, look at, everyone likes to talk about Internet of Things, right? So you take a historical business that's asset heavy and, by that I mean, think of like an oil and gas company. You know, traditionally the guys would work out in the field and they didn't carry devices with them. They carried wrenches, (giggles), right? They didn't carry mobile devices that were digitally connected. >> And flasks. (laughter) >> Sometimes. I hope not too often. That's a dangerous line of work. But, if you think about it, now that's changed. Right? They now use the Internet of Things not only to get information back from the field, but they also use it so that when they have to go out and do those repairs, they're getting digital assets that they can see. Now, we have created some relationships, and I'll give you two examples. You'll hear about a relationship that SAP has with OSIsoft, right. They have a well-known reputation for being able to draw that information off Internet of Things, and we've created a link between that and the HANA platform. So that now, you can do that analysis in real-time, because, as you know, HANA is made for the real-time and, if you're going to do Internet of Things, that's the only platform you can really go with. You can't go with, it's not the old batch then analyze later; you need that information happening in real time. That's one example. The other example that I'll give you is you'll see here a Sapphire, you'll see a company called, Utopia. You say, well, alright, I've never heard of this company but they do a unique thing. It's a direct add in into he SAP platform, a solution extension, that allows you to do master data governance around your enterprise assets. And you say, wow, that sounds really complicated. Okay, what is that? This is the ability to look at those documents in a digital way while you're out in the field to understand hey, that bolt there, that needs to be made out of steel, not aluminum, or you're going to have a chemical reaction, for example. That's the kind of thing that can safe lives, save time, and also make the job out in the field easier. And you can't do that just with SAP's software by itself, we need the partners to contribute into that ecosystem and bring that richness there. >> You talked about the rapid adoption of the cloud, in many respects, almost surprising adoption of the cloud. 'Cause you're right, we all knew it was going to happen, many of us didn't necessarily know how fast it was going to be. SAP has a very on-premise and a lot of the programs that SAP put together were initially optimized for that on-premise orientation. >> That's right. >> Are your clients today, when they become part of the SAP extension, or the Solutions Extension program, are they automatically part of both worlds? First off, let me start there. >> Yeah, I mean, it's true that we live in a hybrid world already today. Hybrid happens so quickly. You saw SAP move aggressively forward and acquire some leading cloud companies. >> Yep. >> Right. (mumbles) >> And you did a great job of integrating them, by the way. >> Thank you. I think we did. And I'm really impressed with these properties. I think you saw in the keynote yesterday, a really great representation of some of the leaders of those businesses up there and how tightly they've become part of the SAP family. Now, when you look at Solution Extensions, it mirrors that. We have solutions across all five of the major pillars of the business which, of course, include these cloud properties, and the areas we're seeing the fastest growth, or the most rapid adoption, are in these cloud properties. Because we all went through the era of the best-of-breed became the suite, and then we had the era of the cloud. And if you noticed, when the cloud companies were launched, they were best-of-breed companies and now we're in that period where people want things to move back to the suite because they want integration. >> Or a least at a platform level. >> Sure, because they want efficiency. Efficiency comes from that integration and they get the first round of benefits by moving to the new application in the cloud and they get out of the business of having to operate it themselves. But, then, they want to get back to the business of having that seamlessly integrated with their core operations. So, we live in a hybrid world today but it's clear that the pendulum is moving directly to cloud. >> So are you suggesting to companies that want to be part of the extensions program, that they focus on the cloud first and then everything else second? >> Yes, I would, and here's why. All conversations with customers start with cloud. And they'll look to see if they can do something in the cloud first and it's the default. So, we've really moved past that world where the first conversation's around on-prem and then look to cloud. That changed maybe two to three years ago and today, every conversation starts with the cloud. >> So, I want to go back to that notion of non-traditional software companies creating solutions within the SAP ecosystem for their customers. Do you have companies like that in the extensions program today? >> Well, I think many of these companies are evolving, just like SAP. Now, I tend to deal with the ISVs, so I tend to deal with companies that are in the business of that. But, I will tell you this, what we're seeing with HANA Cloud Platform is exactly what you're talking about. It's that intersection of SAP, our ISV ecosystem, and those non-traditional customers that are, themselves, moving into the digital, and it's that intersection, and you'll see that happen on HCP, where they'll develop applications unique to their own business. I like to remind people this, when we first rolled out our three and then we went to the business suite, companies wrote billions of lines of custom ABAP code to get that system the way they wanted it, in each of these individual companies. Well, as we move to S4, companies are going to revisit what they did to make those systems special and perform just the way they want it to. But they're not going to do that in ABAP, likely. They're likely they're going to do that on HCP, and they're going to build in that platform because that's where they're going to get the integration, that's where they're going to get the benefit of where our ISV ecosystem is headed and tap into the richness of that. So, I think this is why you hear this rebirth of innovation at SAP and it's because it's driven by the customers. That's why we have so many people turn out at Sapphire this week, so much so that even the SAP employees are like, wow, this is really an impressive turnout. >> It's 60,000 plus people, it's one of the most, without question, this is one of most energetic and packed trade shows that I've ever been to. Or customer shows I've ever been to. >> Yes, it's impressive. We're lookin' around here right now and you just, all these, just, bodies. It's incredible. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, if I envision the next couple of years for you, every, we had a partner on yesterday, in fact, and we asked him a couple of pointed questions, as we're asking you, and we asked him, what do you want to see from SAP, as a partner? What would make SAP an even better partner so that you would be that much more willing to tie into the ecosystem? And what they said was, we want to see better road maps to, so that we can see how, where our responsibilities and SAP's responsibilities, our roles and SAP's roles, end. We're still concerned about the platform mentality rolling us. How are you assuaging those ISV concerns about your roadmap as you try to bring even more integrated value into the platform? >> You know, SAP has a brand of trust. And, when you get to road maps, you have to have trust with your partners- who's going to do what. Very clear and transparent conversations. I've seen a lot of maturity from SAP really in the last six to eight months being much more diligent in how they're planning their road maps and how they're involving partners in those road maps. I'll give you an example. You know, Wieland Schriener, who really leads some of the development around S4, in particular, as it relates to initiative that we work on with open text. That's one of our largest partners inside Solution Extensions. We have, right now, about 19 million users who have purchased that through SAP so, really, an incredible relationship, unique in the industry, that we have with them. As they, as we launch S4 and as we push it out into the marketplace, we've seamlessly integrated the open-text capabilities around unstructured content into S4. And, that's happened through the leadership of our development team. By making commitments like that. Weiland presented that on the partner summit on Monday to all the partners in there, really as a message out to them to say, this is how SAP is going to do business in the future with our ISVs and our partners. And it, and we're moving at such a pace it requires that level of coordination. Right? We can't just let it to chance. Or, we can't let it be ambiguous. We have to be clear about we're going to build this and we're expecting our partners to step up here, so that that dance happens the way it should happen. I do respect though, that the partners have that concern, 'cause it's a legacy. >> They're always going to have the concern, but a big piece of it is going to be how well do you share and how well do you work together. >> Yeah. >> Hey, Tom, thank you very much. Tom Roberts, Global Vice President, SAP Solutions Extension program. Thank you very much for being here as part of this great show, talkin' about partnerships and the evolution of the SAP platform and SAP the company. This is theCUBE, we're going to be back shortly with more from Sapphire. (upbeat music) (slow tempo music) >> Voiceover: There'll be millions of people in the near future that are, want to be involved in their own personal well-being and in wellness. Nobody--