 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018, brought to you by NetApp. Welcome to theCUBE. We are in Orlando at SAP Sapphire 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend as my co-host. We're in the NetApp booth and we are very excited to talk to the VP of the Chief Customer Office at SAP, Mark Marcus. Mark, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, glad to be here, appreciate it. This event is enormous. One of the things that really struck me in Bill McDermott's keynote was, you know, we always hear about, oh, we were expecting 20,000 people. He talked about a million people engaging with SAP Sapphire this week via the in-person and the live and the on-demand video experiences. Massive, 390,000 customers, hundreds of customer sessions. The voice of the customer validating SAP as one of the world's most valuable brands is not only pervasive here, it's palpable. So talk to us about the Chief Customer Office. What is it? What's its mission? Why was it created? Yes, okay, that's a great way. So first of all, thank you. I appreciate you being here. I live in Orlando, so it's great to see this event. People wonder why SAP Sapphire is actually in Orlando. It's because I live here. It's it. You're the reason. I'm the reason SAP Sapphire is in Orlando. Okay, you heard it. Mark Marcus, you're the reason. No, so what happened is when Bill McDermott came to SAP, he was a different type of leader. And what he wanted to do immediately is start meeting with customers. So what he did is he started meeting with customers and he said, if you ever have any questions or problems, give me a call. And so what happened is his phone started ringing. People needed help. And so he needed somebody that could help him with the customers when he ran North America. And so that was the genesis of the Chief Customer Office. So we started off first, we were extremely reactive. And so what I mean by that is if a customer had a problem, we'd have to go in and we'd have to help them. And it's much more difficult when you have a problem than try to prevent a problem. So we've been doing the last several years is trying to be much more proactive. So instead of waiting for the phone during, we've been getting with customers and making sure, as their projects start, being in the steering committee meetings and make sure that things go well. So you've taken that more proactive approach. Tell us how the organizations evolve. What is the focus today? Yes. Well, the focus has always been the customer, but I think it's more of taking the best practices that we've learned and actually sharing those with the customers and helping them explain how other people have done their journey. Because what you'll find is people are in different phases of their journey. And what they like to hear more of is, what did other customers do? What did they do right? What did they do wrong? And how can we be more successful? So we've been able to over the years, if you think about just putting perspective again, there are SAP North America has 158,000 customers. And we're only on, my particular team only has about 100 of those customers that we have. So it's a very, very small amount. There are ones that are strategic SAP that we get involved in, but we're able to do those through social media and other areas is customers want to hear what happened again in the past and how we can learn from that and move forward. So I'm a big social media fan. Twitter handle has 38,000 followers, which is a lot for your focus on 100 customers. I think that you're echoing the theme very well. Talk to us about how it's changed over the past 14 or so years as the shift has focused from on-premises solutions to hybrid cloud, to cloud, analytics, AI, what are customers talking about? I'll tell you what, you're talking my language now. Because what happened is what we did is, actually what I'm a part of is actually the cloud ambassador program. And so what that is, is it's focusing on our cloud customers, so success factors, Arriva, Concur, and those kind of things. And so really what's happened is when SAP, when I came to SAP 14 years ago, it was all on-premise ERP, all right? So it's very contained, very controlled with what people had. Now there's clouds, we're not necessarily sure what customers are doing, how they're interacting with the solutions. And so what we have to do is we're really focusing, again, my group is 100% focused in on that. So what part of our mission has been is we're not necessarily know what customers are doing, so we're helping to understand what they're doing and trying to help educate groups inside SAP to be more responsive and help them. So you mentioned having responsibility for some strategic accounts, about 100. Do those represent kind of a subset of some of the key areas in which you're looking for the voice of the customer and their practice using your technology to influence the direction of some of the key technologies? Yes, because I'd say there's some of the biggest, most strategic customers that we have. And so what we're gonna do a lot of is we're able to, we align directly with the executives at the customer, so one of the things we're teaching off is we're aligned at the C level. So it's the CIO, the CEO, the CFO at that level. So we're able to say, we heard directly from the leaders of the companies of our most important customers, key customers, and we're able to take that back to the other areas of SAP and say, this is what the leadership's demanding and that's where we're able to help them with. So as we're going through this phase of digital transformation through a lot of organizations, that audience is even more important. What, tell me how as digital transformation has become more than just a buzzword, but a imperative from the C-suite, from the CEO to the CIO, CMO, CDO, all the CXOs, how has the conversation between those groups changed from the SAP perspective? Yeah, I'll tell you that is again, I'm not saying that you are, you're hitting exactly what we focus in on because traditionally SAP has been focused more on the CIO level. So it's more the IT groups have implemented ERP and it's been more of a back office type solution. Well now what we're finding is the line of businesses of the people that are actually making the decisions. And so we're finding out is that it's not necessarily so much that technically how they work, it's more of the business processes they have and how we can help actually, you know, basically automate and help them run more smoothly. Yeah, also Plattner actually and some of the guys this morning during the keynote talked about that in terms of customers were saying, you know, I'm getting kind of confused. There's so many different product names, a lot of acquisitions. He was talking about that. We heard from customers that there was confusion there. So when he was talking about it in the context of C4 for example, of making things similar to understand but also to your point, the back office and the front office now have to be connected. So they also talked about that in terms of the integration with SAP Cloud and how they really focused on enabling holistic integration because it's the processes that have to now communicate together. So that whole kind of proactive customer responsiveness that was really apparent this morning. 46 years young SAP, you have a new initiative about the customer for life. Yes. Tell us about that. Okay, so customer for life is a new initiative that we have. So what I told you at the chief customer office we've done and we're able to touch very few customers. But, you know, again, you know, we have 156,000 in SAP North America, you know, multiply that all over the world. I mean, it's many customers, okay. So we've tried to do is take what we've done on a small scale in the chief customer office and make that pervasive throughout the whole company. And so what we're really good at too is actually, you know, understanding what the customers do, finding them a solution. But now we want to do is go through the whole life cycle of what we do. So I mentioned, you know, having a customer executive assigned to every customer, being able to be part of the steering committees that we have and being able to follow them through so we can help guide them. So it's not only selling the solutions but actually helping them through all the way. So the new initiative we set as customer for life is something that we're rolling out right now. And we've had a, again, it's taking what we did in the chief customer office and, you know, propagating that through the rest of SAP. So this facility, you like to say, 16 football fields, American football field, so that's a big facility. I walked the facility this morning, got in about 3000 steps, 100 plus partners on the floor, ranging from system integrators, technology partners and infrastructure space, software, SIs. Help us understand as SAP, 20,000 plus people here at the show, a million people online engaging on Sapphire. SAP is becoming a platform company. How has that changed your role in your conversations? Well, I think what has happened a lot is, especially in the cloud projects, again, I focus more on where I'm at, a lot of is, you know, there's a lot of new partners that come up because what happened is that, you know, we've acquired several companies we did, you know, Concur, Arriva, SuccessFactors, a lot of big companies and a lot of different partners. So really what our role is in the chief customer office is to basically to help these partners kind of understand how to work together. And when we do a lot of things in meetings we have, we do is it's usually I say like the three-legged stool. It is, you know, it's SAP, the partner and the customer together and we all do that together. And what I found is some of the problems that we've had is not necessarily, you know, I always say like, how can you take the exact same solution and it works well in one company and it doesn't work in another company. And what it is, to your point, with all the partners here, is it's communication, are they working together? You know, is the partner at SAP and the customer all working together? And so that's what I'm really focused on today is meeting with all the, you know, do the SAP fires to meet with the partners, make sure we're aligned, you know, talk about our key customers and make sure that we're all working together. We talked to one of the gentlemen yesterday who was running some of the communities around HANA and Leonardo and just the massive amount of content that is being generated to enable and educate customers across 25 plus industries was massive as well as leveraging that peer validation from customers like you're saying, you know, some customers in certain industries have a ton of success with the same thing and other customers struggle depending on a lot of different variables. So that sort of collaboration and communication, even within the SAP communities alone was very apparent yesterday that that's one of the big drivers of I'm sure the customer for life initiative is as you have evolved, so have your customers. One thing that struck me yesterday was, you know, looking at your now number 17 of the world's top most valuable brands up there with Apple, you know, products that we can engage with and I saw on a bus yesterday some of the messaging and ERP you can talk to and hear from. So SAP really set a very lofty ambition of being up there with the Amazons and the Coca-Cola's and the Googles and now you have technology that people can, you know, like at home with their digital assistant talk to and communicate with. I thought that was a really powerful message. Yeah, and I'd say that's a, I'd say too that, you know, I've worked with SAP for 14 years and when I came to SAP nobody had really heard of SAP and what they were. They thought maybe, you know, sometimes on TV when you see SAP when it's translated into other languages or something, that's what they think of SAP. They don't really know what the company is, but yeah, it's been great to see how, you know, people would stop you, you know, whether you're wearing, you know, they'll see something on your laptop, on your shirts or something like that. Yeah, so it's been good and I think that that's just been a big focus of, you know, getting it out because one thing is, is we have 150 million cloud users. It's a lot of people. So a lot of people use SAP. So again, one of the cloud products that we have is called Concur. It's for expense and reporting. And so a lot of times people want not to heard of SAP, but they've heard of Concur because they all do their expenses, that kind of stuff, so exactly right. So it is pretty good, you know, when you have even family members know who SAP is now and they've done a great job, you know, hiring, you know, with the marketing department and the people they've hired, it's been great. It's been good. So can we talk a little bit about analytics and the customer experience as we're looking at the intelligent business? Is that a message that's actually resonating with customers in that top 100 strategic accounts? Are they using analytics to actually power business? What are some of the standout success stories? Yeah, I'll say that. So what I'd say is that what I found a lot of times is that people can get the information in, but they need to be able to get the information out. And so everybody, a process. So I would just say almost every customer we have is basically needed to be able to get that out and do reporting and those kind of things. So part of what we do in the Chief Customer Office is not only help them with the reports that they have, but to be able to run that kind of stuff. You guys also have some really interesting use cases. I'm a Formula One fan. I've worked with Formula One before. I understand it from a fan perspective. You guys are really involved in McLaren Motorsport, for example, from finance to procurement to manufacturing. How are you seeing some of these really big use cases like Formula One or Coca-Cola infused into some of the mid-sized businesses who you say might be using Concur, for example. What are some of the value that a small company can get from one of the massive users? Yeah, I'd say there's a lot of things because what happens is that from those big massive customers we have, what we've been able to put together is we call Model Company. And so what a Model Company is, is it takes the best practice that you have and puts it into more of a, I'd say nothing's out of the box, but makes it much more easier to implement to be able to do it. So what we've been able to do is, with the mass amounts here from like McLaren, I think Hasso mentioned what there's 400 sensors that they're getting on the cars and that kind of stuff. So basically being able to take all the information that we have and then from that distill it down into where it's a very repeatable type instance we can use for other customers. So there's a lot, I mean, that's what we do with a lot of the customers we have, we try to get that back to where other people are going to use it. A Formula One car is basically an IoT device. You said 400 sensors generating a ton of data per race weekend times three days, times 20 events a year. I read from Gartner just the other day that by 2020, which is around the corner, there's expected to be 20 billion IoT devices. What are you hearing from your customer base regarding IoT and being able to synchronize this, modern next-gen data center with myriad devices? Yeah, so that is one of our top initiatives that we have right now. Because one of the things that we've done is we have an offering that we have called Leonardo. And what Leonardo is, it was named after the inventor Leonardo da Vinci, all right? So in his time, he was a great innovator. I actually went and saw his house, I went over to Europe and I've done a lot with Leonardo, you know what I'm saying, to be able to do that, right? But what that is, is that's basically all about getting devices to be able to get that information in. Because what you do is you have thousands of sensors and stuff like that. And you asked me earlier about a good success story on that, is one of the ones I think that resonates the most on that is in Buenos Aires, they have a massive problem with rain. You know, it rains a lot and they have this severe flooding and the architecture is antiquated. Well, what they found is the reason that they were having these flooding problems is because the sewers and the drains were all getting clogged up. So what they did was they found they put a sensor in every one of the drains to be able to make sure that they were unclogged and they were fleeing freely. And so what they did is they were able to, if the water flow started going down, they were able to empty out the drains. And even with an antiquated sewer system because they were keeping it aligned with using Leonardo now, they can go and keep it cleaned out. They've had massive rains and the flooding hasn't really been there where it is. So now, what's interesting is every time I go by and see a gutter, it's all clogged up, I think they need Leonardo to be able to help. I was reading as well about Alicia Tillman, your CMO, who's been at the home for about nine months now. And in the context of this desire to become one of the top global brands with an invisible product, she said that one of the most important things for SAP right now is brand narrative. Messages and campaigns will change quarterly or every six months as they should. But she said to be able to show the value of basically under the hood software, you've got to be able to show how it transforms countries, lives, industries. And that's one of the things that I think is very, very palpable here at the event is how much impact SAP is making. Whether it's rhino conservation in Africa or helping water scarcity in India, the impact, which is really the biggest validation that you can get right from the voice of your customers, is massive. Yeah, and I'd say too that, I'd like to say that, it sounds like, yes, we're a software company and that kind of stuff, but it is really a noble endeavor because we are doing a lot of things that help people's lives and to run their businesses better. And what you realize is that Chief Custer Office, sometimes we see the other side when the systems aren't running properly at times. They usually run right, but sometimes they have problems and when they do, you can just see the impact you have on people's lives and businesses and stuff like that, that it is really running, it is core to what you have. So I'll tell you, one of the interesting things that SAP's involved in is they do a lot with instant messaging. So they have a part of one of the acquisitions we have does instant messaging. Well, you don't think about that, like when you use, let's say Facebook Messenger or something like that, those messages go inside an SAP infrastructure at time, right? So imagine if you can't change messages or doing those kind of things, you know? So you're exactly right. It definitely does, what we're doing does really impact a lot of people's lives, so it's important. Well, Mark, thanks so much for taking some time to stop by theCUBE and chat with us about what SAP is doing with customers, how they're really symbiotically working together with you to evolve and transform this company. I want to say one other thing too, it's great to work with two professionals here. You guys really helped me a lot, do that. I don't do this a lot, but it really made me feel comfortable, so I appreciate your help. Well, our pleasure, thanks so much. And so you're the reason that Sapphire's in Orlando, are you also the reason they got Justin Timberlake tomorrow night? I would like that. But I would like to say real quick, one thing before we cut real quick, I would like to say one thing just about the NetApp partnership that we have. So RJ Bibby is the person that I work with at NetApp and just what he's done to basically, because NetApp really helps run a lot of our infrastructure inside SAP. So it's success factors, some of the high availability and things that we have. And just working with RJ and kind of learning how we work and can help other customers, they really volunteered to help a lot of our customers. And so I just want to thank NetApp again for helping to sponsor this. Great, great closing. We want to thank NetApp for having theCUBE in their booth. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, we are at SAP Sapphire now 2018. Thanks for watching.