 Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Sapphire Now. Headlines sponsored by SAP HANA Cloud, the leader in platform as a service. With support from Consolink, the cloud internet company. Now here's your host, Peter Burris. Welcome back to SAP Sapphire. My name is Peter Burris. We're part of theCUBE and we're bringing you the signal from the noise here at Sapphire and I've got a great guest, an absolutely fantastic guest. Akash Agarwal who runs the mobility at SAP, but specifically you own that crucial Apple relationship that everybody's talking about here in the show floor. So we're going to get a chance to talk about the Apple relationship. Why don't you tell us a little bit about what you do first? Yeah, so I've been at SAP for a few years. I came in from a mobile startup. Focus here at SAP is to take our great products into our customer base and new customers and help them with the mobile journey. And mobility as you know is front and center of any digital transformation message that's out there. And SAP is helping take our customers and the solutions that we have and make them more digestible, consumable on mobile. Digestible, consumable on mobile. Sounds like Apple. So one of the most important things we've heard this week is we heard new relationships with Microsoft and some others, but a lot of the buzz has been about this Apple relationship. Tell us a little bit about it. Yeah, so the Apple announcement was in my humble opinion, one of the biggest announcements that happened in the history of SAP. And it's an iconic company. It was two icons that got together. And I think the partnership was about 20 months in the making behind the scenes. 20 months. Yes, I mean it takes a long time to get two large companies to work together. But the output and the end result, I think was fantastic. As you saw, it was a very big announcement. And Bill McDermott quoted on Monday that we got something in the order of four billion press hits between when the announcement was done and the Friday. So the announcement was done on a Thursday, Thursday and Friday of last week. We were just swamped by the media covering this announcement. And I think the most powerful thing about this announcement is it's two great technologies, two great solutions coming together. SAP bringing their leadership in the enterprise space and Apple bringing their beautiful iOS platform. And basically the output of that should benefit our customers, our partners, and the whole world. Make it run better, run simple, and run beautiful. Well, I was actually going to say, taking all those things, but you kind of mentioned it. Also taking Apple's customers and SAP's customers, which are sometimes very difficult to separate when you think about how many employees are under management of SAP software, 300,000 corporations on a global basis. What should we expect to be some of the first milestone outcomes of this partnership? So the first few things that you're going to start to see, they have a big presence here at Sapphire as well. But some of the big things that you're going to see out of this partnership is a new way, a next generation of applications. Apple is bringing their design expertise, they're bringing their expertise of beautiful UI, coupling it with our design concepts from Fury, and helping us build beautiful and magical output that will manifest itself in native iOS applications. And these applications are going to be centered around four major industries in the next six to 12 months. They're in the retail industry, they're in the asset maintenance industry, in the service industry with an application around project management, and last but not least, in the healthcare industry. You heard big announcements today from Steve Singh on the Connected Health platform, and we want to create next generation applications that help you interact with your doctor, help you interact with your own health, so you can capture all the post medical output that you've gotten, and then interact with that using beautiful iOS applications. So those are some of the components that you'll see, and we're also building an SDK, which is the best of our HANA Cloud platform, the best of iOS, coupled that together into an SDK that you can take out into the ecosystem from which they can develop net new applications. So that's really important, so it's not just a partnership that allows SAP to evolve its platform for mobile, it's also an SDK that allows SAP's ecosystem to evolve its platform in the context of how Apple has shown us mobile works. Absolutely, I mean 90% of this show floor is SAP ecosystem. So every single partner can benefit from this partnership. People who build solutions on SAP, people who extend solutions, and people who help integrate and implement solutions, they can all benefit from this partnership. That's one, number two, we have 2.5 million developers right now in our HANA Cloud platform, immediately all those developers will have access to this SDK from which they can build out beautiful iOS experiences. So that's one set of the ecosystem, then the other set of the ecosystem is there are 11 million Apple developers out there that have been primarily focused on building consumer applications, and now they will have an opportunity to build applications in and around the SAP ecosystem. SAP has been traditionally a difficult platform to build around, and now with this partnership, with this SDK, those developers can build native rich experiences in the industry, in verticals, in horizontals that are leveraging mobility. So it opens up a huge gamut of possibilities for both us and for the developers that Apple has fostered over the years. So I think it's good for the industry because one of the things that we haven't seen and one of the reasons this partnership came about was we haven't seen the total consumerization of at the enterprise. You today are using these applications to interact with social media, with other applications for your own daily lives, but business and enterprise still has a long way to go. And hopefully this partnership will help bridge that gap in simplicity, in efficiency and in design of making those applications seamless. So when you leave the office and you get home, or when you leave the home and you come to the office, there's really no difference in the way you interact with an application on a mobile phone. So the SAP ecosystem that's currently familiar with SAP and the development tooling and is now learning the HANA cloud platform stack, got a pretty good idea how you're going to get to them and bring them along. How are you going to get those 11 million Apple developers excited about now entering into and set of new enterprise relationships by utilizing what SAP can bring to them from a business opportunity and from, as you said, change the world kind of perspective. Yeah, look, I think developers are inherently, difficult to kind of change. They're set in their ways. However, there are two ways we're going to be doing that. One, I think is we're building a joint iOS SAP Academy. And that will take the best learnings from what we do jointly with Apple and how we build these applications. Apple's going to co-author this Academy, which will provide best practices on using this SDK, on building enterprise applications that incorporate the best design philosophies that we have from the enterprise and best design capabilities that Apple has. So I think this Academy will be kind of chartered to make the message simple, digestible, and consumable by all developers. Let me stop right there. So when you say Academy, you're really talking about a connected and coherent body of knowledge. You're not talking about just a place. So this will be online? You're going to teach taught in schools? Absolutely. So there's going to be, Apple has innovation and design centers. SAP has design centers and design thinking capabilities. We will bring this into physical locations. We will bring this into virtual locations. And we will market this at large in developer forums, in developer communities. There'll be people that, you know, for example, our SIs, they have armies of people that know SAP today, that we want to create an army of people that know both SAP mobility and they also know on a cloud platform and they know iOS. Bring them all together so they can kind of build the applications. And I think, look, there's a lot of money to be made. If you build great applications that drive transformation, that drive value, I think the developers will find a great way to monetize. Now, if you look on the App Store, if you're a consumer app developer today, you know, the chances of getting that hit app are small. But the chance of building an enterprise app that creates value for, you know, a dozen customers in a certain industry could be very, very valuable. And so I think there are two attractions, as I mentioned before. One is obviously being able to make the technology easy, make the technology consumable by developers so they can kind of start using it, take the friction out of the process. And number two, they've got to then see an economic incentive to do that. And I think the economic incentive is pretty clear. Apple is very, very serious about the enterprise. They've got a 25 billion. I was going to ask you about that. Yeah, they have a $25 billion business right now and it's something that they've taken very seriously. They realize that iPads and iOS devices today have sort of creeped in from the BYOD movement, but they want to see, you know, IT buy these devices, give them to their employees for running their business, for making decisions. And I think application vendors like SAP can help, you know, be a catalyst towards that kind of mission. And you know, it's very hard to bet against Apple. It's a company that sort of came from nowhere and became the leading mobile brand in the world. I think the same opportunity awaits them in the enterprise. And I think they're taking a very deliberate approach in the enterprise of not trying to go out there alone. Enterprise is a complex market and there are certain vendors like SAP that have been in the market for 40 years, understand the customer problems, understand how business is running and using software, but the transformation is upon us. And you know, we go to market across 25 verticals. Each vertical is getting transformed in a major way by technology, by mobility, by the advent of the cloud, by mobility. And I think this application, the application that we developed together and this partnership will help catalyze that transformation. Yeah, especially since Apple, as you said, there are going to be a couple of different SDKs that will be able to become together for developers. But Apple's also shown historically that or revealed new ways to create great software and what the software should look like and how it should behave and the new gestures that are possible. And you're going to be able to bring all that into the ecosystem. Yeah, the partnership is a very, very deep one and it is to share joint roadmaps with what they're doing in iOS, how we're looking at the world. So let me give you an example. So Apple has many APIs that they exposed today to various developers, health kit, car kit. They have the 3D touch system for basically being able to put your thumb on to the, you know, the on and on device on the home screen on the Apple device, iOS devices and that takes you in into the application and authenticates you. Think about that authentication, not only just authenticating you right on the device but authenticating you inside the enterprise, knowing that when Akash comes in, he has authority for signing an expense report up to $10,000 or $20,000. So it's not just him getting into the device but it then picks up his role and then gives him the opportunity to look at all the purchase orders, all the expenses that he can do. So that's just an example of an integration that can go much deeper than just the device. So Apple has a number of technologies, I think, that will become very relevant as we integrate with them in our applications for the enterprise. So the camera, the maps, you know, you want to schedule, you know, someone delivering, you know, Cokes to various bottlers and various suppliers, they can kind of optimize that route, leveraging the mapping technology, leveraging the GPS technology. The signals that are coming in on a real-time basis into the application. So let's talk about how your customers may be able to behave. Not your IT customers narrowly but your over your aggregate businesses. And let me test this on you. So historically, IT has wanted a very stable SAP platform. Adding, you've done a phenomenal job of adding new functionality to it, capability, success factors and others. Meanwhile, your employee, the customers of those IT organizations, the employees and increasingly external folks want to be able to translate their expertise and the knowledge that they have of a problem into software as fast as they possibly can because they want to be able to solve the problems that are proximate to the actual specifics of an event. Follow me? Yeah, yeah. All right, so is this, am I going to be in a position where I can get an SAP compliant application in the app store that someone with the main knowledge of a problem can go down and say, this will solve the problem and it's going to keep my IT organization happy because it's SAP compliant? Is that what we're talking about? You know, I think that will depend on company by company. I can't make a generic statement on behalf of all the CIOs out there. But certainly, we're taking the friction away from the process. And one of the major elements of the friction has been the ability to get data out of SAP. So with this SDK, I think the cloud is helping the fact that we're putting our HANA services in the cloud with HANA Cloud Platform, our objective is to make it easier to get at that data. And Apple's objective is to interact with that data on a mobile device, on a disconnected device that's running on a 3G or a 4G or an internet connected device. And the ability to be able to do that will definitely create a lot more interactions. It will create the ability for either IT to develop those applications much faster or for some third parties to do that. So the end result is if the customer wants to have access to some data this way or that way, they'll be able to ask for it and they'll be able to get it much faster. So what it does, it creates, from an SAP perspective, it creates a tremendous more amount of value for our customers and also increases the engagement. Because data, just being data is no good. Data needs to be consumed. Data is the new oil. You've heard that term. So the applications and interactions that are available with that data on iOS, either it's just going to be a catalyst for enabling that. Well, one of the needs of digitization is to be able to take expertise and knowledge and practice and translate it into software as fast as possible. And this relationship, we can see how this can accelerate that whole process and great software gets created. So one last question. What's the buzz other than the Apple SAP relationship? What's the buzz that you're getting from the show forth? I think the buzz every year is that SAP is transforming itself. Every year people feel it's a company that they really want to do business with even more than they did last year. That's kind of what I take away. I've been here about three and a half years and every year I'm seeing SAP becoming a nimbler SAP appreciating that the world around them is changing, helping the customers get on that change management story very quickly with the solutions, with the partnerships and with the agility. And I think that it's not your old grandmother's SAP anymore. It's a company that's becoming nimble. It's a company that's becoming flexible. It's a company that's demonstrating that people want value, people want ROI fast and people want to see empathy across the board. And I think that is something that, I feel that it's not something you get to straight away and there's definitely an incremental change. I think that's sort of the major takeaway here and I think there's a lot of solutions here that can really help any kind of business. I mean, we're sitting amongst the SME sort of stand here. A lot of people don't associate SAP with small business, but there's a lot of good initiatives going on in that area and you can find customers that are fortune 10 companies here and you can also find the fortune 5,000 and then startups as well. I think it's a cross-section of companies. Super, Akash Agarwal, thank you very, very much. This is the gentleman who owns the Apple relationship at SAP, phenomenal advance in technology and in the technology industry that's going to point to a lot of good change on the horizon. Thank you very much for joining us here at theCUBE. My name is Peter Burris. theCUBE here at SAP Sapphire. We're going to be back for even more of Sapphire and theCUBE in a few moments. There'll be millions of people in the near future that want to be involved in their own personal wellbeing and wellness. Nobody wants to age in a way that we're bound to a chair or a bed.