 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. 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, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live at Sapphire Now, SAP's big user conference. This is theCUBE, Silicon Angles. Flagship program, we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. Day three, wall-to-wall coverage. This is day three. We had awesome interviews. Go to youtube.com slash siliconangle and look for the playlist of Sapphire Now. It'll be great videos out there. We would not be here if it wasn't for our sponsors. So shout out to SAP HANA Cloud Platform, Console Inc, Console Cloud, the interconnect companies for interconnecting the clouds and of course EMC, Capgemini, thanks for your support. Our next guest is Udav Gupta who's the global vice president for the SAP platform as a service. Great to see you. We'll shake hands. So we have been so excited about platform as a service going back, man, almost when the cloud of Roddy started, you know, almost seven years ago when we started Silicon Angle, we saw pre-open stack. Amazon was already on a trajectory. Open stack kind of rack space kind of bootstraps that and then the rest is history. Now you have cloud foundry, all this stuff is coming together. So you guys have a big part of that developer ecosystem. Yes, we do. What do you do for the platform as a service for SAP? And what are some of the things you're working on and what should the audience know about what you're working on? Absolutely. So first of all, thank you for having me on the show. We, at HANA Cloud Platform, it's basically an idea that we came up with to help our customers solve the biggest problem of complicated application development, right? And when we spoke to the customers, the typical thing that came back to us is I want to actually integrate applications, right? I have SAP backend systems, I have non-SAP backend systems. How do I bring these two systems together? I typically build an application, a mashup for the audience. The second scenario that we basically saw is a lot of customers came back and said, we want to just extend certain business processes that are running on the backend and build applications that actually sit and extend these processes. So we started looking at all of that, we said, okay, it's very clear that we want to simplify the core. But we also wanted to go ahead and provide a simplified application development stack so that people can actually go ahead and build these applications. And that's what HANA Cloud Platform is all about. So the approach has not so much come from the infrastructure as a service, but come down from the app. Okay, well Larry Ellison at Oracle, he says, well, we come up from the hardware that gets sun and then he comes down from the top and their middleware is Oracle. Similar approach, it's a great message because that's his focus, it's obviously the app. But they got sun, so they can kind of claim they can bookend the middleware, if you will, or pass layer. How do you guys compare vis-a-vis that because you don't have any hardware? Correct. You got partners? Correct. Like EMC, and you got the VBlock going back to the days, virtualization. How do you answer to that? So we've always been agnostic in terms of hardware, agnostic in terms of infrastructure, right? So the angle that we're going with us, just like how we did with HANA, we said we'll build the HANA software and we'll have it available on multiple different platforms. We are doing the same thing with the HANA Cloud Platform. Today, we offered it off our own SAP Data Center. The road map is to basically partner with a number of infrastructure providers, like Amazon, like Azure, like other third-party hosting providers. You don't care where the computer is. Yeah, completely, right? So we are actually looking at going ahead and deploying our software on Cloud Foundry, enabling it on open stack, so we can actually now take it to all of our infrastructure partners and use them as suppliers. That way, we can actually concentrate on building a business platform as a service layer, concentrate on building the mechanics, building the intelligence and the platform as a service, and leave the infrastructure game to the guys who are really good at that, which is Amazon, Azure, and a few others. So you guys have HANA, okay, HANA Database as well, Platform as HANA Cloud Platform. So back to the Oracle thing, I bring up Oracle, everyone can relate to that. They claim performance advantage, so Oracle on Oracle with Sun has been optimized. It's almost end-to-end stack. You guys worried about performance at all? Can you share your thoughts on how you answer that? Of course, I mean, if you look at the whole team of Sapphire here, it's been about running a business life. You can't run a business life without having performance, right? So performance is the core of everything that we're doing, whether it's running a database at high speed, whether it's simplifying the entire application stack, the S4 HANA, running at high speed, but it's also about an innovation cycle around it that needs to also be high speed, right? And when we're building the HANA Cloud Platform, we're actually looking into those elements continuously and saying, how can we help application development also run at high performance? This is around the compute, this is around the database, this is around the toolset that we're actually providing our partner ecosystem, as well as the customers to build custom applications at really high speeds. Okay, talk about the HANA Cloud Platform. Expand, I take a minute to explain, because I think that, you know, seeing on the opening day, you guys aren't getting the kind of credit in the press and in the market, although you're being successful as the cloud. Some people say, oh, they have nothing, platform to service, it's just SAPware. Answer that, explain, take a minute to explain what you guys have done in the market, how it's different, and then it does work for non-SAP customers. Kind of dice that out for us, share that. Take a minute to explain that. So, absolutely, going to Sapphire, a lot of our customers and a lot of the press media also thought the HANA Cloud Platform was just for SAP. Now, after two days of conversations with customers, they quickly realized that we're not just like for SAP, we could actually be the force.com or the application platform for merging data from SAP and non-SAP, right? So that's the first revelation a lot of the customers have got. If by many of the customers I had this aha moment when I was talking to them and they're like, oh, I can actually solve a number of issues with us, I can actually go ahead and provide a single application development layer across my entire backend system, which is SAP and non-SAP, right? So we've seen a lot of that. So that's an integration game too. And the thing I would share with the folks in my observation on theCUBE, and I'd love to get your thoughts on this, is that it's not trying to win SAP end to end. SAP plays well wherever the customer desires it, right? So if you have ERP or not ERP, if you want to come in and do, say, HR stuff, with success factors, you're still going to have a little bit of SAP, but this is application layer with the HANA Cloud Platform is for the rest of the enterprise. It's not to lock in for future SAP, right? It's not a lock-in story here, right? I'll give you an example. We're doing some really crazy stuff on HANA Cloud Platform, right? You know the Super Bowl that took place in San Francisco, right? Yeah, of course, to both 50. SAP had a whole fan energy zone set up there where people were actually playing games and we're continuously streaming data from those games into the HANA Cloud Platform, right? Now, nothing to do with SAP, nothing to do with anything that even closely SAP is associated with. It's fan data coming into the HANA Cloud Platform and people see analytics on top of it, right? We're having other partners also do similar stuff, right? I'm talking to partners that are basically going ahead and serving the utility companies, but more on the utility to the consumer space where they're allowing customers to basically go ahead and create an aggregated view of their consumptions, right? And this is something not what SAP is used to do, right? Again, the HANA Cloud Platform is allowing them to do such things. All right, so my final question really is around Apple. So how does the Apple deal affect you guys in particular? Because you guys can't hide in the shadows anymore. You got to go for, go big or go home with HANA Cloud Platform. So does that change your game in terms of your go-to-market, is your budget increased? I mean, you got, the game is on. The Apple deal puts the pressure on you guys to take that relationship and use it as a way to get into, obviously mainstream development. Swift is a great programming language, it's got a lot of traction. So tell me, I mean, is it all in now? I mean, Apple, is Apple that, hey, you got to go for it, go big or go home? Yes, so it's definitely go big. The other thing that we have with this whole Apple relationship that we announced has also made a very beautiful point if you think about it, right? There's certain applications that can be web applications that you can still render on a mobile device, sure. You can make it extremely responsive, you can do all of that kind of stuff. But the beauty of the iOS and the relationship that we build with Apple, it allows you to start now building native applications that run on the mobile, but consume all the technical services that we have made available in the HANA Cloud Platform. And the data is critical there. I mean, SAP's got, you know, ARP data, systems of record data. Now you're spending out the other engagement data, non-SAP data, by the way. Exactly, and all the other technology services that we're basically providing in the HANA Cloud Platform with its content, with its data, with its integration, a whole bunch of stuff, right? So has your budget doubled? Well, the budget has not doubled, definitely, right? Well, you've got to really remember, but you have to run now, so it's pretty clear for you guys. I mean, explain, is that the mandate? I mean, because you guys have been kind of like, silent run, I say silent run, not stealth, but I mean, you've been chipping away at, it's been a ground game for SAP HANA Cloud. I haven't seen a lot of stuff out there in the market. It seems to me that now the pressure's on, so you go knock it out of the park, right? Absolutely, the focus on basically building mobile applications, specific mobile applications for certain industries is definitely coming back, right? So a lot of investment is happening in that space, for sure, from SAP, from Apple, also from our partners. So that investment is definitely happening. There's also a lot of traction that we're basically putting on marketing that's concept out, so that our partners, our customers, also get a true path forward on where and how they should actually invest their resources. What's your priorities this year? Education, onboarding new? Our priorities this year is getting a whole bunch of developers to actually start using the HANA Cloud platform. To that extent, what we've actually done is we've gone ahead and created open SAP courses that allows anybody to access education on a HANA Cloud platform absolutely free. With the iOS relationship, we've gone ahead and basically created the iOS Academy that allows people to understand how to build iOS apps with the HANA Cloud platform, thereby bridging the 150,000 developers that are already on the HANA Cloud platform, the two million developers of the SAP network, and the 30 million developers of the Apple world all coming together to start building stuff on the HANA Cloud platform. I'm sure you guys have internal debates, like percentage of penetration within that 35 million. I mean, not everyone's going to be interested in enterprise programming, but a good slice will look to build white spaces. Absolutely, because guess what? You can only earn that much money by building consumer apps. The moment you are a developer and you really want to earn serious money, you basically start looking at building enterprise apps. Final, final questions. I have one more. This is a good conversation. Where are the white spaces? So the developers that are watching are people that are interested in innovating on SAP. Where do you guys see the white spaces that are low hanging fruit right now that someone can get a position in here and work? So, the number of those. The very first one around building industry specific apps, right? To a large part of the industry, UX was our SAP GUI. But now, everybody wants to actually start digitizing those processes. Nobody wants to actually go into a static screen or a predefined screen. They want it to be very responsive to what they're doing at the moment. So, live, right? So, building those apps is definitely a white space, right? The second big white space is around building industry content. What I mean by industry content is, a platform can basically provide you all the platform capabilities that are required. But you need a lot more of the content and the technology services. These could be machine learning algorithms. This could be actually predictive algorithms. This could be data content that's coming in. Building and providing that as a microservice within the platform is something that is very, very interesting for us. And that would be shareable. Exactly. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I'll give you the final word. A dub, gupta, global vice president of SAP, platform as a service. What's the vibe of the show? You mentioned, what's the hallway conversations that you're hearing? You know, what's going on tonight? Certainly at night is all those events going on. Last night, I went to bed early, watched the Warriors game, win by 30 points. Night before, I was out till 1.30, doing some networking to Lloyd party, Accenture, EY, seeing all the SAP people. A lot of chatter. What are you hearing? What are you hearing in the hallways? The vibe is very, very positive. People are starting to finally understand how we are bringing all the cloud acquisitions that we made together. People are starting to understand that they have to move to the cloud. So the whole thing about the myth, whether we move or do not move to the cloud, it's not kind of settled down. People are understanding where SAP is with integration, where SAP is with moving to the cloud. But the beauty is, last year, same time, the question I was getting was, is any of this real? The question that we're getting now is, how do I engage into it? How do I start doing it? So that transition has happened really beautifully. Whether you think about S4HANA, whether you think about HANA Cloud Platform, just in general, what's happening in the past world is helping that quite a lot. You guys have done a good job and you've been kind of transitioning. Now it's real, you've got a straight and narrow for developers. I'm looking forward to tracking you guys and seeing the progress. Great hallway conversations. Of course, the biggest conversation was that Reggie Jackson was on theCUBE on day one and he was awesome. Also, the great executives come on. It was a great conversation. Thanks so much for sharing your insight on theCUBE. Thank you so much. On a cloud platform as a service, we are live here in Orlando. You're watching theCUBE.