>> Voiceover: From Berlin, Germany, it's theCUBE, covering DataWorks Summit Europe 2018, brought to you by Hortonworks. >> Hi, hello, welcome to theCUBE, I'm James Kobielus. I'm the lead analyst for Big Data Analytics at the Wikibon, which is the team inside of SiliconANGLE Media that focuses on emerging trends and technologies. We are here, on theCUBE at DataWorks Summit 2018 in Berlin, Germany. And I have a guest here. This is, Muggie, and if I get it wrong, Muggie Van Staden >> That's good enough, yep. >> Who is with Obsidian, which is a South Africa-based partner of Hortonworks. And I'm not familiar with Obsidian, so I'm going to ask Muggie to tell us a little bit about your company, what you do, your focus on open source, and really the opportunities you see for big data, for Hadoop, in South Africa, really the African continent as a whole. So, Muggie? >> Yeah, James great to be here. Yes, Obsidian, we started it 23 years ago, focusing mostly on open source technologies, and as you can imagine that has changed a lot over the last 23 years when we started the concept of selling Linux was basically a box with a hat and maybe a T-shirt in it. Today that's changed. >> James: Hopefully there's a stuffed penguin in there, too. (laughing) I could use that right now. >> Maybe a manual. So our business has evolved a lot over the last 23 years. And one of the technologies that has come around is Hadoop. And we actually started with some of the other Hadoop vendors out there as our first partnerships, and probably three or four years ago we decided to take on Hortonworks as one of our vendors. We found them an amazing company to work with. And together with them we've now worked in four of the big banks in South Africa. One of them is actually here at DataWorks Summit. They won an award last night. So it's fantastic to be part of all of that. And yes, South Africa being so far removed from the rest of the world. They have different challenges. Everybody's nervous of Cloud. We have the joys that we don't really have any Cloud players locally yet. The two big players are in Microsoft and Amazon are planning some data centers soon. So the guys have different challenges to Europe and to the States. But big data, the big banks are looking at it, starting to deploy nice Hadoop clusters, starting to ingest data, starting to get real business value out of it, and we're there to help, and hopefully the four is the start for us and we can help lots of customers on this journey. >> Are South African-based companies, because you are so distant in terms of miles on the planet from Europe, from the EU, is any company in South Africa, or many companies, concerned at all about the global, or say the general data protection regulation, GDPR? US-based companies certainly are 'cause they operate in Europe. So is that a growing focus for them? And we have five weeks until GDPR kicks in. So tell me about it. >> Yeah, so from a South African point of view, some of the banks and some of the companies would have subsidiaries in Europe. So for them it's a very real thing. But we have our own Act called PoPI, which is the protection of private information, so very similar. So everybody's keeping an eye on it. Everybody's worried. I think everybody's worried for the first company to be fined. And then they will all make sure that they get their things right. But, I think not just because of a legislation, I think it's something that everybody should worry about. How do we protect data? How do we make sure the right people have access to the correct data when they should and nobody violates that because I mean, in this day and age, you know, Google and Amazon and those guys probably know more about me than my family does. So it's a challenge for everybody. And I think it's just the right thing for companies to do is to make sure that the data that they do have that they really do take good care of it. We trust them with our money and now we're trusting them with our data. So it's a real challenge for everybody. >> So how long has Obsidian been a partner of Hortonworks and how has your role, or partnership I should say, evolved over that time, and how do you see it evolving going forward. >> We've been a partner about three or four years now. And started off as a value added reseller. We also a training partner in South Africa for them. And as they as company have evolved, we've had to evolve with them. You know, so they started with HTTP as the Hadoop platform. Now they're doing NiFi and HDF, so we have to learn all of those technologies as well. But very, very excited where they're going with DataPlane service just managing a customer's data across multiple clusters, multiple clouds, because that's realistically where we see all the customers going, is you know clusters, on-premise clusters in typically multiple Clouds and how do you manage that? And we are very excited to walk this road together with Hortonworks and all the South African customers that we have. >> So you say your customers are deploying multiple Clouds. Public Clouds or hybrid private-public Clouds? Give us a sense, for South Africa, whether public Cloud is a major, or is a major deployment option or choice for financial services firms that you work with. >> Not necessarily financial services, so most of them are kicking tires at this stage, nobody's really put major work loads in there. As I mentioned, both Amazon and Microsoft are planning to put data centers down in South Africa very soon, and I think that will spur a big movement towards Cloud, but we do have some customers, unfortunately not Hortonworks customers, that are actually mostly in the Cloud. And they are now starting to look at a multi-Cloud strategy. So to ideally be in the three or four major Cloud providers and spinning up the right workloads in the right Cloud, and we're there to help. >> One of the most predominant workloads that your customers are running in the Cloud, is it backend in terms of data ingest and transformation? Is it a bit of maybe data warehousing with unstructured data? Is it a bit of things like queriable archiving. I want to get a sense for, what is predominant right now in workloads? >> Yeah I think most of them start with (mumble) environments. (mumbles) one customer that's heavily into Cloud from a data point of view. Literally it's their data warehouse. They put everything in there. I think from the banking customers, most of them are considering DR of their existing Hadoop clusters, maybe a subset of their data and not necessarily everything. And I think some of them are also considering putting their unstructured data outside on the Cloud because that's where most of it's coming from. I mean, if you have Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn data, it's a bit silly to pull all of that into your environment, why not just put it in the Cloud, that's where it's coming from, and analyze that and connect it back to your data where relevant. So I think a lot of the customers would love to get there, and now Hortonworks makes it so much easier to do that. I think a lot of them will start moving in that direction. Now, excuse me, so are any or many of your customers doing development and training of machine learning algorithms and models in their Clouds? And to the extent that they are, are they using tools like the IBM Data Science Experience that Hortonworks resells for that? >> I think it's definitely on the radar for a lot of them. I'm not aware of anybody using it yet, but lots of people are looking at it and excited about the partnership between IBM and Hortonworks. And IBM has been a longstanding player in the South African market, and it's exciting for us as well to bring them into the whole Hortonworks ecosystem, and together solve real world problems. >> Give us a sense for how built out the big data infrastructure is in neighboring countries like Botswana or Angola or Mozambique and so forth. Is that an area that your company, are those regions that your company operates in? Sells into? >> We don't have offices, but we don't have a problem going in and helping customers there, so we've had projects in the past, not data related, that we've flown in and helped people. Most of the banks from a South African point of view, have branches into Africa. So it's on the roadmap, some are a little bit ahead of others, but definitely on the roadmap to actually put down Hadoop clusters in some of the major countries all throughout Africa. There's a big debate, do you put it down there, do you leave the data in South Africa? So they're all going through their own legislation, but it's definitely on the roadmap for all of them to actually take their data, knowledge in data science, up into Africa. >> Now you say that in South Africa Proper, there are privacy regulations, you know, maybe not the same as GDPR, but equivalent. Throughout Africa, at least throughout Southern Africa, how is privacy regulation lacking or is it emerging? >> I think it's emerging. A lot of the countries do have the basic rule that their data shouldn't leave the country. So everybody wants that data sovereignty and that's why a lot of them will not go to Cloud, and that's part of the challenges for the banks, that if they have banks up in Botswana, etc. And Botswana rules are our data has to stay in country. They have to figure out a way how do they connect that data to get the value for all of their customers. So real world challenges for everybody. >> When you're going into and selling into an emerging, or developing nation, of you need to provide upfront consulting to help the customer bootstrap their own understanding of the technology and making the business case and so forth. And how consultative is the selling process... >> Absolutely, and what we see with the banks, most of them even have a consultative approach within their own environment, so you would have the South African team maybe flying into the team at (mumbles) Botswana, and share some of the learnings that they've had. And then help those guys get up to speed. The reality is the skills are not necessarily in country. So there's a lot of training, a lot of help to go and say, we've done this, let us upscale you. And be a part of that process. So we sometimes send in teams to come and do two, three day training, basics, etc., so that ultimately the guys can operationalize in each country by themselves. >> So, that's very interesting, so what do you want to take away from this event? What do you find most interesting in terms of the sessions you've been in around the community showcase that you can take back to Obsidian, back in your country and apply? Like the announcement this morning of the Data Steward Studio. Do you see a possible, that your customers might be eager to use that for curation of their data in their clusters? >> Definitely, and one of the key messages for me was Scott, the CTO's message about your data strategy, your Cloud strategy, and your business strategy. It is effectively the same thing. And I think that's the biggest message that I would like to take back to the South African customers is to go and say, you need to start thinking about this. You know, as Cloud becomes a bigger reality for us, we have to align, we have to go and say, how do we get your data where it belongs? So you know, we like to say to our customers, we help the teams get the right code to the right computer and the right data, and I think it's absolutely critical for all of the customers to go and say, well, where is that data going to sit? Where is the right compute for that piece of data? And can we get it then, can we manage it, etc.? And align to business strategy. Everybody's trying to do digital transformation, and those three things go very much hand-in-hand. >> Well, Muggie, thank you very much. We're at the end of our slot. This has been great. It's been excellent to learn more about Obsidian and the work you're doing in South Africa, providing big data solutions or working with customers to build the big data infrastructure in the financial industry down there. So this has been theCUBE. We've been speaking with Muggie Van Staden of Obsidian Systems, and here at DataWorks Summit 2018 in Berlin. Thank you very much.

>> Voiceover: The Cube, covering SAPPHIRE NOW. Headlines sponsored by SAP HANA Cloud, the leader in platform as a service. With support from Console, Inc., the cloud internet company. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. >> Okay, welcome back. We are here live in Orlando winding down day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage, of live coverage of SAPPHIRE NOW. This is The Cube, SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract and sift through the noise. I want to give a shout-out to our sponsors who allow us to get here and do all this massive programming, SAP HANA Cloud platform, Console, Inc., Capgemini, and EMC. Thanks to our sponsors, we really appreciate it. Our next guest is Roger Quinlan, Senior Vice-President, global head of the partner-managed cloud at SAP Thanks for joining us, welcome to The Cube. >> Thanks for having me, this is great. >> We love it, so explain what is the partner, partner managed cloud, just to kind of make sure we get the definition out there because you get the partner ecosystem, but this is the managed cloud, the partner managed cloud. >> Right. >> John: Explain what that is. >> So basically it allows, it allows our partners to create cloud offerings, private cloud offerings that they can offer to their clients as software as a service. And obviously SAP technology enables the inside of that, the guts of it. And we typically structure the agreements in, you know, anywhere from two to seven year. Most of them are five year agreements so it's a long-term agreement, good for the partners, helps our clients get into the cloud quickly and easily. >> Explain who those partners are and give an example of how that works because SAP, you had partners, many, many years delivering the apps. But now this platform game with the cloud changes the business models. Who are some of the people that are implementing this? >> Yes, so Capgemini is a great example of one, NTT, Accenture, you know the players that you might think of right there. And there's even some smaller ones, some smaller SIs that are maybe not household names but are doing very good work. >> Specialty boutique kind of, domain expertise. >> Yeah, and even some that are fairly large but are not maybe household names in the US but are big names in Europe, like T-Systems as an example. >> Great, and the vision around this was just to get simplified on the delivery cycle, so with cloud, the goodness of SAP now can be tailored for the end client 'cause these guys are smart, they have data scientists, they have a lot of programming capabilities, they have a cloud knowledge. But they have to deliver a solution to the customers 'cause they are a trusted advisor to your customers. Is that the main reason? What's the push behind all this? >> Yeah, their main reason for us is really to allow us to get into market niches that we don't serve today. So if you think, I'll give you a great example. There was a niche with hospitals, smaller hospitals in southern Africa. And they needed infrastructure to manage the operations of a hospital. They wanted to modernize. They wanted to do the digital transformation, to use the modern buzz-word. And so one of our partners had a very good relationship with a couple of these hospitals and went out and said, hey, you know, if we built a solution, would you use it? And they said sure, so they went out and built it, and you know they started off with one, two, by the time they had it all built they had three. Quickly, they had seven. They're now up to 16 hospitals. It allows us to provide great technology to these hospitals. They can provide better healthcare to their constituents in a market that we otherwise would not be able to serve. So that's one good example of accessing a market that maybe SAP would not have access to. But the integrator, which was T-Systems in this case, that, you know, has great relationships in that community, so it really is leveraging a relationship they already have. >> So I can see the benefits to the customers and the partners 'cause it's clear. Partners can make more money, can have great differentiation to their customers. What's the impact of the SAP sales force? Do they get comped on it? Is there a channel conflict? Because that's going to probably come up. >> It's funny, so you know our market space well enough to know if that's an issue now, right? And it always is, right? So what we've decided to do is, basically the sales organization that has the end customer, they get, basically they get compensated on it. >> So they're incented to play ball. >> Absolutely, there's no disincentive. It's kind of the same if they sold it directly themselves. >> How does the partner managed cloud support the new S/4HANA 'cause that's the big story here. You're talking about ERP, modernized up. It's a big, all the discussions around that, everyone's jazzed up about it. All the hardcore SAP customers are all like, okay, wow. How does that impact this? >> Yeah, so S/4 becomes the technology that most of our partner-managed cloud offerings are utilizing. So what we find a lot is customers out there want, they want to do something new. Maybe they're a Hybris customer today, or they're an Ariba customer today, but now they need to modernize their core. They need to do an ERP. Maybe they didn't have one, or maybe they had an old one and they want to modernize it. S/4 is a perfect way to go deliver that in the cloud to the end client. And so I would say you know maybe a third or 40% of the transactions that we're doin' in the partner-managed cloud space are S/4. >> A lot of your partners, especially some of these big guys, are trying to evolve their business models away from ours-- >> Roger: Yes. >> To IP, so I presume a big part of this is to try to get them to build that IP, proximate to the SAP platform. >> Roger: Yes >> How are you encouraging them to do that? Are you underwriting? Are you financing it in any way? Are you sharing it? How are you getting them, other than just the raw business opportunity, what kind of new business models are you putting in place so the value accretes to your platform from these guys faster? >> Yeah, we're really focusing on verticals and on geographies, so that we don't have overlap. That way it creates a unique differentiator for that particular systems integrator. I talked about the example in southern Africa, but another example would be in Japan in the real estate market. We did a similar thing with a totally different systems integrator, and that allows them to have a unique approach to the real estate market inside of, primarily inside of Tokyo. So what we try and do is try and make sure that we don't have a lot of overlap in geographies and overlap in solution areas, so they get some sort of a competitive advantage and get some runway to run with this for awhile. >> And at what point in time do you find yourself, John asked the question about at least channel conflict with your sales guys but the goal is to have the entire ecosystem work really well together without being encumbered with enormous transaction costs of how these different parts come together. At what point in time does SAP start to have a direct relationship with some of these folks? For example, are you taking responsibility for sending down updates? Are you working to bring new extended or extending the ecosystem into a customer? Or is all that going through the partners that you're working with. >> So I'll answer that in a couple of different ways. So first of all the primary relationship is really between the partner and the end-client. It is their kind of SaaS offering to the client. We provide the technology underneath. So that's one way we do it. The other part of it that kind of keeps this close to SAP is the backend, the maintenance and support. Level one, Level two is still handled by the partner, but we handle level three. So there's still a relationship, when they get stuck and things go wrong or something needs to be fixed, we end up getting involved. But the primary support happens between, with the partner and most of them are very well skilled at being able to handle that level of support. >> But are you also then bringing your ecosystem and your set of partners to them as well? >> Absolutely, yeah, so it's not just the SI world right? So some of these partners really want to be in this game, but they don't have hosting capabilities so we'll do Azure or we'll bring in AWS, and that's a mechanism that's already in a good place for us. >> Well and also, they have a multi-vendor view anyways so they're going to broker the different clouds and intercloud them together. I think, to your point there, I think it's worth double-down on because that was important. Virtustream came out of that concept, so when Virtustream was sold to EMC for billions of dollars, a billion dollars, that ultimately filled the same gap that you guys are doing with this program. They essentially did SAP Cloud and did some tooling up. Now, you're offering, essentially, SAP tech to everybody. Okay, that's cool, so that's just for the folks out there just want to make sure they catch it 'cause that's how big it is in my opinion. >> Can I follow up with one quick point though, John? So let's say the extension, the partner extension programs that you guys have that allow your sales force to sell third-party software from the SAP ecosystem into customers. If a large customer, or if a large partner is a partner of yours and you're standing them up, are they also able to piggyback in those arrangements and start bringing, or do they all have to have separate business arrangements with everybody in the ecosystem, or is there kind of a master agreement that you're bringing to bear so that everybody plays better together because you're kind of overriding the whole thing? >> Yeah, so we like to make this as easy as possible, so we take into the 4,000 items or whatever on our price list, we enable that through this partner managed cloud, that way they don't have to go get individual agreements if they want to, maybe they want to do OpenText or something like that. >> So you're bringing the whole portfolio to their cloud? >> Roger: Yes. >> Tell how the IoT, how this plays in 'cause that's a real sexy market everybody's going after. We heard that's going to be on the second-half of the year. You mentioned some things around that. That's a big focus and a lot of people are using the, I say hype cycle now, which it's legitimate hype, but the apps are coming on a couple of years down the road so the architecture's going on now so people are setting the table for IoT today. Does that fit into this? >> Absolutely, it does, and you heard a little bit about when you talked to Mark right before I came on. He talked a lot about the platform, on a cloud platform that his group is responsible for and really that becomes a leverage point. So on a cloud platform can be a part of this, and oftentimes they want to do the enablement on top of that kind of cloud platform because they want to be able to extend. The great part about S/4 is that it's standard, and it's industry specific, and it's simple to operate. But that also means that some companies have a lot of customizations that need to be part of their solution to their end-clients. And so how do you do that? You do that with HANA cloud platform, and sometimes that becomes an IoT play as well. >> Yeah, that enable them to at least have some headroom. >> Yes. >> (laughs) Future proofing, whatever term they want to use. Okay, tell about the vision of digital transformation because this really becomes an interesting business model question. How does a digital transformation vision that SAP as a company is going down relate specifically to your area, and how does that relate to the business model of the customers? What are you guys doing? Is there any kind of new things? Is it an incentive comp, obviously the sales gets comped but options to the customer? Where's the margins? Is it a discounted sliding scale? All of these are the questions that are popping through my head right now. I'm the partner, what's in it for me? I got to make some cash so-- >> Yeah, so what's in it for the partner is they get a long-term relationship with the end-client, and oftentimes they bring a relationship with that client already, and now they're extending it, and it's a very sticky relationship because when you start on an SAP program, that's not something you switch in and out every couple of years. So that's one of the benefits to the partner. And I will say the part about digital transformation, everyone wants to transform their business. Not everyone is able to, but most companies want to do that. This becomes the digital core, right? You use S/4 as the digital core, and you can get into it quickly. And if it's an industry based solution that this partner is now providing to multiple clients, they can implement it quicker. >> They can standardize on it. >> Yeah, they can standardize on it, and then they can do hospital one, hospital two, all the way to hospital 16 a lot quicker, right? One or two maybe take you some time, but by the time you get to the 16th or 17th, it's going really fast, so it enables a faster time to market for the end-client, and you know that digital is all about speed. >> Yeah, if they're building Lego blocks, and they build their own, they cast it out and they build more of them and just ship them out. >> You mentioned another item. You know there are some customers that have been using SAP Solutions for a long time, and maybe they're not using all of them any more or maybe they've gone off maintenance, that's a topic. We've been able to use this tool as a way to bring the customers back. So maybe they ran ERP way back when it was release four or 4.5 back, you know, back in the 90's. They got away from it for whatever reason, but now they're really excited about S/4 and they want to come back. This is a mechanism to allow us to do it and do it quickly. >> And also they get basically rebooted or reset on the new platform. >> Yep. >> But also you get net new customers out of this. >> Absolutely. >> So it's not like you're recycling the same SAP customers, certainly the churn might be helped a little bit. Now, that's the thing that I'm going to look at is those new customers, and I think they're going to be attracted to things like the Apple announcements. How does that impact you? Are you affected by that? Certainly the glowing afterglow of the announcement will be good. >> It's pretty cool, isn't it? >> John: But does it directly affect your business? >> It will absolutely affect it because the whole concept about that agreement is to develop applications that enhance the user experience and to the extent that we can leverage all of that better user experience, in a faster time to market, get to the cloud quicker, that's all good news for the end client. >> We're finally going to have a remote desktop on the phones that actually works, seamlessly. >> Yeah, real rendering, as opposed to shadow rendering. >> All right, final question, what's your take on SAP this year, thoughts share with the audience who couldn't make it. They might be watching this live or on-demand. What's 2016 SAPPHIRE NOW all about? >> Well 2016 SAPPHIRE NOW, in a lot of the keynotes, was really about kind of exposing a more, you know, a more honest, a more upfront conversation. We saw it in they keynotes. You know, Bill McDermott, our CEO, put his e-mail address out on a keynote with 30,000 people in the crowd and then you know a 100,000 or so watching, right? That's a pretty bold thing to do. And so I think you're trying to see, you're seeing SAP trying to become more human, trying to have more empathy. You know, we're a big company. We do some very cool things. We run a serious business, right? But being able to do that in a very human way is what I'm seeing here on the show floor. >> Final question, final, final question 'cause that was the second final question, what KPIs are you going to look at on the scoreboard to benchmark your success where you say, hey, we hit a grand slam? You know, is it the number of partners? What are the simple metrics that give you an indicator that you're winning, you're achieving your objectives? What are some of the things you look at to kind of get a feel for if it's working or not? >> Yeah, I want to see multi-client agreements that we put together where they have more than one client, where we've established what the multi-client agreement is going to be and we actually are executing against that. That's one. Two, I want to see customers going live and getting productive results out of it. And revenue growth is obviously always something we watch, but that's kind of tertiary to the first two. And if we do the first two, the partners are going to be successful. They'll get sticky with their clients. The clients will be happy because they get a faster time to market and that's how this grows. >> So it's really who stands up what solutions is really going to be the benchmark. >> And focus on, it is all new markets for us I think. >> John: Roger Quinlan, thanks so much for coming on The Cube. Really appreciate the insight. You got a big job, exciting. I think it's going to be a greenfield opportunity with your existing clients in a new way, a new business model innovation, congratulations. >> Great, thanks for having me. >> Okay, we're in The Cube here. You're watching day two coverage of SiliconANGLE Media's The Cube. I'm John Furrie with Peter Burris. Thanks for watching. >> Voiceover: They'll be millions of people in the near future that want to be involved in their own personal well-being and wellness. Nobody wants to age in a way that we're bound to a chair or a bed.