 from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Sapphire Now, headline sponsored by SAP HANA Cloud, the leader in platform as a service, with support from 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. This is theCUBE's Silicon Angles flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from noise. And I want to thank our sponsors for allowing us to get here, SAP HANA Cloud Platform and Console Inc. Thanks guys, really appreciate it. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Peter Burris. Our next guest is Prakash Dajari, he's the SVP and GM of SAP's Platform as a Service, the HANA Cloud Platform. He's the man behind the curtain making it all happen. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. So I want to just kind of get it out, straight out because Platform as a Service is a cloud term, which we do a lot of coverage on for the folks watching. HANA Cloud though is out there in a form to customers as other things. So just quickly talk about the difference how people see the brand HANA Cloud and then HANA Cloud Platform because there's a big distinction. Yeah, there's a huge difference. One is we've got HANA, it's an in-memory database. We want it to run everywhere in anyone's cloud. That could be, it's already in AWS. We made an announcement with Microsoft and Azure for support of production workloads in Azure today. And with HANA Cloud Platform, we've actually leveraged HANA within our own data centers and built up a set of capabilities above and beyond HANA in our full Platform as a Service stat. So HANA will be everywhere. We're always going to take an open stance of HANA running anywhere in any cloud environment, but HCP is SAP's own Platform as a Service, provides HANA as well as other application development capability. HCP, HANA Cloud Platform, that's the acronym for short. Let's talk about what this means in this evolution as we go through this always on digital reinvention, digital transformation going on for real as we heard in the keynote. It's about the app builders and that's what you guys focus in on. So it is a stack approach. So you have to have certain elements in the Platform to enable developers. And then things might be different in the stack. So you mentioned Azure partnerships. So there's some partnerships going on in different parts of the stack, but in the Cloud Platform, you have to do the things to enable apps. What are those key things in the Platform that you guys are providing? If I take a look at where people are starting, you started with that digital transformation journey. It's an overloaded term, but fundamentally, I would say that there's two examples. There's companies that are building modern applications. Uber's always the overused example of just building something that makes an experience easy. And all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes you don't have to worry about. It's a characteristic of what I would call a modern application. Now, if people grew up- Or Cloud Native. Cloud Native, right? Now if you were to say there are companies that can do that today, but a lot of our companies have been around 30, 40 years. Was the technology around 30, 40 years ago to be kind of Cloud Native in that type of experience? No, so you're going to have some companies that are like building new things. That's the key trend. They're moving from 30 years ago or not Cloud Native to modern Cloud Native. Yeah, and the question is, if you've got all this stuff, are you going to rewrite? Probably not. And what we're doing with HANA Cloud Platform is we said, how do we allow people to create and leverage the assets that they have? Whether it be back office assets or existing application assets, and modernize them. So you guys care about Kubernetes, Docker, microservices. Is that something that you guys do a lot of work on? Or is that above the stack for you guys? So it's actually below the stack more. Below the stack, yeah. So we actually have built on a foundation that we're leveraging OpenStack APIs. We are leveraging VM and container frameworks for our security models. We're leveraging Cloud Foundry runtimes. We actually just made available our Cloud Foundry with Node.js and Spring projects here with Cloud Foundry build packs for customers here. But that's not where the value comes from. Because like your question about, hey, what's different versus Bluemix and us, everyone's doing that. If you're going ahead and needing to modernize, let's say, let me give you an example. You want to build an application that's focused on a sales rep. And that sales rep, what are the things he needs to do in his life? He needs to probably deal with a CRM system with putting in order quotes and that type of thing. He's got configure price quote, but guess what? He's got to order IT equipment at laptops too. He's got to go ahead and log vacation. He's got to log travel and expense. And previously, the world was decoupled around, OK, what is your back office horizontal application stack? And that gets in the way of the efficiency of the sales rep. I'd love to get to the point where, you know what? Here's a mobile app for the sales rep. And he doesn't need to know what system he's working with. How do you enable that? That happens far above and beyond just the layer of, I've got a VM or I've got Cloud Foundry. You need business process APIs and a security model, any UX paradigm at the user experience layer to enable that. So most of the development we're doing is we're leveraging most of the open source stuff like everybody else, but our value add is going to be providing these business APIs, these security models in a single way that allow people to build that. That's modernizing. It's leveraging what you got. It's not saying throw away and build a new T&E system and throw away, you know, how you do it. Just reduce the complexities, abstract the complexities away. You know, part of it's hiding, right? You're hiding a lot of, part of it's hiding, right? You're hiding a lot of the stuff you have in the enterprise to create this consumer-grade experience. Now it's not just the experience, analytics as well. So, you know, I'd like to say you want to change analytics like you change your shirt, right? When you outgrow it, if you build kind of, hey, here's the dashboard, right? And this is the way you look at the business. I know when I'm running and operating the business, I'm always like, okay, what's going on in Japan? How many reps did we hire? You know, what's the change in the pipeline impact from this sales promotion? I'm always thinking of these types of things. So, if that's the case, you know, is it always me calling my ops guy saying, hey, build me another analytic? And then by the way, once you've built it and I've looked at it, I mean, never use it again, right? So, how do you go ahead and enable that? And this dashboard overload too, another dynamic that customers are, we hear, is I don't want another dashboard because the dashboards are being built for them, not by them. So, it's interesting that you mentioned that. And it's also the timeliness. Let me build upon that, because the first thing a sales guy has to do is serve the customer, is engage the customer. And the processes associated with engaging the customer are hardly as well-formed and well-defined as the processes for, say, posting a transaction or posting an order. Absolutely. SAP, in many respects, was the final statement on, let's call it the era of process-driven applications where the processes are largely defined externally to the corporation, accounting, HR, those came from laws about how the business is supposed to operate. Now, in the world of the customer, it's not so much the processes that we're looking at, we're looking at the things that customers do, the patterns that they exhibit, the journeys that they take. That's a different orientation. Developers now have to think differently, and I presume SAP has to think differently about that. As you pivot to simpler, making the older stuff simpler, but also identifying the new things that need to be built with these new technologies, how are you taking a look at the process of revealing customer insights, customer directions, so that gets translated into great software for your customers? Yeah, it's an interesting one, and part of it is a difference between whether we take a look at, are we doing this as a pre-packaged app and how much is repeatable for a customer? And I'll give you an example. There's a company that you may know of, they sell washing machines. I don't know if I'm at liberty to disclose their name, but you may be able to guess who they are, a US-based company. They came to us with a solution that they said, look, we want to build the smart washing machine, right? We're selling these washing machines, we use SAP as our back office, fine, but we're building these smart washing machines, and I'm like, okay, why do you want to engage with us around the smart washing machine? And they're like, well, the first thing we have to do is if something breaks in the washing machine, we have to check whether it's under warranty. That warranty information's in your SAP system. So we need a way to securely connect from this registered washing machine in someone's house. Let's say it's connected and it's smart, right? It's internet connected. It can go ahead and check whether it's under warranty. And by the way, the washing machine, the sensors are cheap enough where we know what part's broken, and we're using Ariba as our procurement system. So we should be able to check if it's under warranty. If it's under warranty, we should be able to do a part reorder. And by the way, then we should be able to create a customer service order ticket that says let's call the customer and say, hey, by the way, we'll have the part and we can schedule a contract worker, probably through our field-class contract worker system to come out and fix it. Now, is that an app or is that, you know, what is that, right? Is that something that we're selling? It's an IoT platform. Well, kind of, right? It's an app, right? So we could say that's the predictive maintenance self-service app. We could do that. But there are a lot of companies other than that one that's probably in the American, Northern Midwest that would be interested in being able to do something like that. And a lot of them are looking for a company to do some of the research and development, discover how customers and how those types of actions actually take place, and then start translating that into software constructs that are a little bit higher in the stacks that developers can have at it. Because it's not, you know, developers are not going at building software for this new way of doing things like they did, say, 20 years ago. Absolutely. So does SAP, I presume you intend SAP to be at the vanguard of showing developers how to build applications for this new era? Yeah, part of, there's three ways where we'll showcase that. One is we are building those types of applications ourselves, right? As an app vendor, we're picking industry vertical applications in the IoT space and actually building them out. Why have we built some of the services we've built in HANA Cloud Platform as a reference architecture to do that? We're saying, hey, here's our reference stack on how you handle APIs, how you handle OpenOff 2.0, how you handle application development. Is it heavyweight app dev with Java, or is it lightweight web development? You know what I mean? We've kind of built that reference architecture internally. We're like, okay, if that's good, let's allow other people to do it. So one of the big partnerships, which I know I can talk about is Siemens. So Siemens is that kind of linchpin example of they've OEMed HANA Cloud Platform and rebranded it, their Siemens Mindshare Platform largely. And they've said, look, at the sensor level, we've already got the instrumentation from all of our machines. We're now going to recruit an application development community that can actually build these apps connecting to the Siemens device data that we're going to make available on this platform. So that's another business model where we see, okay, we can do it. Now we've found maybe a big device manufacturer, like Siemens, that can actually do it. That's net new functionality. Is that, and again, they're going to build their own ecosystem. It'll be the Siemens ecosystem that deals with the Siemens data, right? We're just some enabling technology thereof. But they're like, hey, part of that is more than the device data. We're going to make APIs available from our back office related to some of these devices as well and surface that up to the application. That's the key connection. You're enabling platform for people to do things differently and new and also connect to systems of record or whatnot that are traditional apps. That's the modernization paradigm for you guys is, hey, you want to go modern, you can go clean sheet of paper and come in from that vector, or if you've got pre-existing, abstract away complexities and do a HANA Cloud layer on top of it. Yeah, so now if you're kind of trying to choose between vendors, right? I would say if you're going clean sheet of paper, a lot of stuff looks the same. Everyone's kind of doing the Cloud Foundry thing. Everyone's doing a little bit of the Docker thing. Everyone's doing a little bit of the, you know, whether you're Bluemix or whether you're Azure. They'll all cost the same kind of. Everyone's building kind of the same stuff. But what I'm saying is, I'm like, okay. Amazon's pretty good. Amazon's pretty good. Amazon's pretty good, right? What we're doing is we're saying, okay, look, if we can create this ability to ease the integration workload and the modernization workload and allow you to build new, right? Then you got one thing that could do both. So why not use it to extend and modernize as well as build new? The skill sets are the same, right? Largely. And that's largely where the focus of a lot of our investment is. I'll give you an example. One of the new services we're working on in HCP is we had some of these companies that we've acquired, right? SuccessFactor, Zareba and Kerr. And we had situations where some of these solutions couldn't sell in China. Why? Oh, we don't deal with compliance and tax in China. And I'm like, well, we've got IP that deals with compliance and tax in China and other areas of our portfolio. So what did we do? We took that application IP. We put it in the platform. We call it tax as a service, right? We can calculate that tax sales tax. We said, guess what? Now you, other development teams, right? If you want to get into these markets, you can use it. It's a standalone microservice. Pass it A, you get B, right in the tax world. And you can do that. So we're not coming at it from a, hey, what's the next Cloud Foundry build pack we can put in, right? Which is great. You're modernizing your own SAP. We're saying, how can we take this application IP and we can make that available in a decomposed way? You guys as much as any other company on the planet have established a process and data model for how the business works. And now you can marry it to the unknown, uncertain what's being discovered and developed model of how the business engages. And bring those two things together through technology that diminishes the impact of, or the chances or the challenges of the infrastructure. Yeah, and I'll give you another one on a business. It's just another example. Sometimes we're not even building apps. Like we always talk about, hey, a platform's there to build apps. We've actually done something interesting around creating new business networks. So we have this thing called SAP Vehicles Insight. It's basically, we're assuming that eventually cars are smart enough to drive themselves, right? We're hoping that someday that gets there. What do you do with all your time? What are the other things you deal with in your car? Well, you've got to refuel your car. You've got to park your car. You've got to do some Snapchat, check your email. Do some shopping, right? You've got all these other things. Hopefully not look at ads. Yeah, hopefully. Well, depends on who's doing the smart car, right? Let's say if Google's building a smart car, I think there's going to be an ad in that car. Ad sense built into the dashboard. So, but what we did is we put together what we call this business network around Vehicles Insight, where we're partnering with people that can give us parking garage information, state and local governments, as well as private parking garages. We've got relationships with a lot of state and local governments as already, which we're leveraging to do that. We're partnering with oil and gas providers around the refueling side, around what we can do to go ahead and have refueling API services around what's available there. We're also then partnering with, some of the food and beverage kind of distribution side of it around the quickie-marts of the world, so to speak, around how you can get fast food and what's available, where and when and how. So what we said is, look, if we bring this together and we work with most of the automotive providers or SAP customers already, whether it's BMW or Volkswagen or, you name the Ford, they're all SAP customers, if we can bring this together as a business network of information that they can tap into, they can build it into the car, right? Not to make a smart car, but to make the lives of every human being easier, and we're in a unique position, given that we work in all those verticals and have pre-established relationships with those customers to bring that together. And Vehicles Network is a business network that we've built on HANA Cloud Platform. We do that. So let's touch upon that for a second, because 20 years ago, the question was, are enterprise applications going to be funded by ads? And now we're entering into conversation, will some of these new services be transactional? So we only got a couple seconds, but how do you think? Is SAP going to go after ads? Do you think the world's going to come more to the SAP business model and people are going to pay for these services? I think it's going to be a hybrid. I think you can't ignore the freemium trend and how do you deal with freemium ads is the de facto model to do that. So I think there will always be this freemium and ad tier, but I think as you get upscale, we're starting to see people pay by the transaction. Now, it should be utility, should be flexible, pays you go, scale up, scale down. So if you used it this month, you pay your cents on the nickel, and if you didn't, you don't. You start seeing that in some of what's going on with in some industries around utility billing, versus fixed contract. So I think that trend will happen, and I think both will be around. All right, Prakash, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate it. Great to get the insights. It'll give you a chance to end the segment with for the folks that may not be familiar with HANA Cloud Platform as we discussed some of the unique things you offer and some of the opportunities. Describe what is the HANA Cloud Platform and what should they know about the HANA Cloud Platform? The HANA Cloud Platform allows you to do one of three things, build new apps, extend or modernize your existing applications, and it actually provides integration to integrate multiple apps. It provides a full stack platform as a service, all the way from database services to integration services, security services, API services, user experience services, even design services around design guidelines and user experience to do that. Based on open standards and modern technology, leveraging things like Java skills, Cloud Foundry skills, those types of things, but that's what HANA Cloud Platform is and customers can use it to build or modernize. Partners can use it to build or modernize. All right, well thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate it. Building and modernize, that's HANA Cloud Platform as a service. Again, it's an API economy. It's all about the developers. It's all about building those apps. This is theCUBE, this is the app. We are live here at Sapphire. You're watching theCUBE. There'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.