 Live from New York, it's theCUBE. Covering Big Data New York City 2016. Brought to you by headline sponsors, Cisco, IBM, NVIDIA, and our ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Peter Burris. Welcome back to New York City, everybody. This is theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Ken Sy is here. He's the vice president of data management and cloud platform at SAP CUBE alum. Ken, thanks for coming back. Thank you so much for inviting me. So big news this week. Many say it was kept secret, but the secret's out. So congratulations on the announcement, the acquisition of AltaScale. Tell us about that. So we're very excited about AltaScale acquisition. Yeah, I mean, I think the news leaked somehow. It wasn't our intent. But AltaScale is, I would say, one of the predominant Hadoop asset services offering in the cloud, right? Really, the company has been founded by really early thought leaders in Hadoop space coming out of the Yahoo with Remy Stata and the rest of the leadership team who had to operationalize, I say, thousands of nodes of Hadoop clusters directly in Hadoop, where the birthplace of Hadoop actually started it. You saw a lot of different thinking in terms of how to operationalize Hadoop by multiple different Hadoop digital vendors. But ultimately, I think where it comes down to SAP and our product strategy is we saw the need to really simplify and to ease the whole Hadoop consumption experience and Hadoop-based innovation to the customer and cloud is the way to go, right? And we saw very strong, not only the leadership team, but the technology and the software IP they built in terms of operationalizing Hadoop asset service for 24 by seven directly in the cloud in a very high performance, but economical manner, right? So this is kind of the kind of fit very well into our vision in terms of how you introduce and operationalize Hadoop-based innovation directly in an enterprise context. What's your perspective on big data and Hadoop equals big data? I mean, we've been here now seven years at Hadoop World. I was not only was I the only person with a tie back then, I probably still am, but even with a suit jacket back in the day, it was just really a technical crowd and Hadoop was associated with big data, but you do more than just Hadoop. So why the focus on Hadoop and what's beyond Hadoop? Right, so I think that's a great question. And I think all of us technologists have kind of come through that realization, right? I don't think in the early days because the hype of the Hadoop and the big data side, you don't get credibility by not mentioning Hadoop or working something along with Hadoop. People have now wised up in terms of dealing with data size, volume variety, there's multiple different data processing technology. There are great NoSQL database technologies. There are different ways of dealing with data at scale as they're high performance and different varieties. Even from the classic data warehouse, databases extended to, let's say NoSQL, to distributed transaction databases to Hadoop, HDFS. So spark on top of that. So you can, I think really as company and the world become more mature in terms of the problems of big data, right? What actually remain is the concept of big data, right? The concept of that I store first and process later. I think that is still continue to be the truth. Well, let's build on that so that the, and I think this goes back to all the scale as well, that the process of adopting any technology, you kind of see certain patterns and you start with something and you like Hadoop and you say, oh, this is cool. What can I do with this? And you start doing it and you discover some limits and you end up with specialization and people build new tools and we're kind of very much in the middle of that. And eventually it kind of comes back together and you can kind of see it integrate. But I think we're entering into a period in which the goal is not so much to learn the tools, but the goal is to achieve the outcomes. I think the market is becoming much more focused on the specific outcomes and much less concerned about how they get to those outcomes. Speed to outcomes seems to become increasingly an increasing feature of the conversations we're having. As a company with an application heritage that focuses on the work that the business is trying to conduct, how is that informing your decisions to, certainly by all the scale, but take a look generally on how you want to present SAP to the big data universe? So I think that's a great question. Ultimately, it's about the outcome of business that you can achieve. And I think with any type of technology adoption cycle that you see, it goes down from the hype cycle to the real truth or dislusionment into the reality. It's all value driven. And SAP is one of you. And when we look at the big data technology investment, as I share in our previous conversations, we kind of got into the whole big data distributed computing framework with the introduction of SAP Hanabora March this year. Sure, six months we're seeing great growth in product and customer adoptions in this area. But ultimately, it's beyond just a set of software. What actually is the outcome? So our point of view is there are specific, I think, gap on both technology and also business cement that gap on preventing the enterprise from fully embracing big data as a whole. Technology gap could be not just the faster deployment of whether you're using HTFS, Hadoop-based open source technology or whatever other open source technology that makes sense. To the business cement tech understanding between the different data that are now dealing with the data variety that necessarily have a structure of enterprise application or data warehouses, how do you bring that together? How do you bring the understanding of, let's say, a time series data you collected from sensor to that hasn't to be a stock tick data that has a currency element to it. So these are very practical things that SAP has a lot of understanding in terms of how to bring it together. And that's certainly where evolving the software and at the next level up is about really building that next level application. How do you have these big data and rich application really has a different business model outcome or this is transformation you can have. Taking all that experience and then turning it into software that then can go out to broader, broader use cases and customers. And I think as you deliver just like any other industries, as you up the value of the solution and you really lower the adoptions of the technology to the masses. So I think we have already seen the adoption. Even at Strata event, there's a lot of discussion and focus on the use case here. Representing really the sophistication of enterprise customer now looking not necessarily just at the technology itself, but really the outcome that you want to do. And when I have the outcome already and how package is it, or is it how customized and bespoke it will have to be. So I think that transition is already happening. And SAP from the product strategy wise, from our business strategy wise, we do believe that you actually will continue to see SAP making very bold move in this area. Well, and that's kind of your route. I remember the second Sapphire I was ever at, I think it was 2011, and we were fresh off my first Hadoop world, it was the second Hadoop world ever. So we were star struck with big data. And I was listening to Bill McDermott speak, he was a very good speaker, really smooth and insightful individual. But he wasn't talking about big data. And John Furrier and I commented in our narrative, SAP is about big, fast data to drive, increase the time to value for business outcomes. And that goes way back to before anybody was really talking about big data. So it's your roots, is it not? Yeah, absolutely. Our roots is always about business outcome. And that really has been the DNA of our, as the whole company, no matter, I represent the platform side of the SAP business. But you look at the entire SAP business portfolio, it is about business outcome. And we never let ourselves forget that, even though we're driving the technology layer of that business unit. Yeah, but it is the people who figure out how to drive the business outcome in the most simplified manner, in the easier to consume manner, in the one that actually does some business model transformation will win. As I said, kind of going back to the topic here, at big data strata of the world here, out of skill is certainly, I believe, is a very important missing piece of the solution delivery for SAP, for our customers perspective. But it's also a growth catalyst. I think, as I mentioned before, whoever helped lower the threshold of adoption of the big data, either application or technology, will be the one who can help the customer transform the business. And sustain that customer's loyalty. And just to make sure that I got it right, what Altascale ultimately does is, and again, we've seen it, a lot of folks download software, a lot of folks going into pilots, they fail, they try again, they fail, they try again. The tech industry is the dominant, many of the success cases for these technologies that are in the tech industry, we have to get outside the tech industry, and what Altascale is helping is to accelerate time to success. Absolutely, and you can see, just like any other software company that focusing on big data, the success has been in internet companies, who actually can invest in developer resources, building the skillset around, let's say, Hadoop ecosystem too. Media company, advertising company, these are all pretty well known, no matter which vendor you are. But when SAP comes in, and then we introduce Vora, we're kind of seeing that whole bridging into the core enterprise. Not necessarily known as, you're talking about the manufacturing company, the financial services banking companies, telecommunication companies, you know, retail, consumer packaged goods, right? You know, oil and gas company, you know? So the industry, I think, can really greatly value, be valued by these infusion of new technology and big data thinking. And that's why we're excited about Altascale, right? We're also excited about the evolution of Vora. I think as I said, there's only about six months since the product GA. We're really on target in terms of number of customers that are coming in. And we're actually doing a product announcement in November. I stay tuned for that, right? In one of our SAP event in Barcelona. You'll see that from even 1.1 to 1.2, 1.3, they really have been kind of evolutionized from the sequel on Hadoop Engine to what we really are calling a distributed computing platform and distributed computing framework, right? The ability to kind of not only process data directly off of Hadoop, HTFS across any type of storage medium. Okay, so without divulging, because it's not announced yet, but the emphasis is on expanding the data types, if you will, that are under management and accessible. Yeah, so I don't want to kind of give out, get the news out too soon, right? But I think everybody understand the way that we're building application today, right? It is going to be a multimodal process. Oh, it sure will. Multimodal data engine, right? Who wants to have five different databases supporting one application? I mean, SAP is in the business building applications, right? We internally go through that pain and we understand on the big data side, how to evolve that. Well, the people who want to do that is the five guys who run those five different databases, but that's not necessarily achieving the outcome. That's not necessarily achieving outcome. You're creating unnecessarily complexity in your architecture. It's not necessarily easily scalable, right? So there are pros and cons. There's obviously very good reason for doing that for whatever customer scenarios, but we do believe that really the evolution of how the modern data, I would say, application architecture needs to be evolved. This has to be dramatically simplified. But your focus remains on the application. You've been, SAP has been clear about that. You're not trying to be an infrastructure provider. You might provide infrastructure part of your cloud offering, but it's not like you're trying to compete with EMC. Right. So we are not going to be in the business of providing infrastructure as a service, right? And that is one thing I want to clarify. The past? Yes, absolutely. Our application platform as a service, no question about that, right? And that is kind of where we believe the value at would be. I also, part of my responsibility representing our Hanukkah platform, right? That's our application platform as a service is offering. And it really has been really so well adopted in our install base. As the platform for building any extension, whether it's on premise in the cloud or integration, right? So this is kind of where this engagement platform makes you well, that whole mobile driven user interface or any type of a solution set that application that you want to build our mini app directly off of extension to what you have already purchased, either it's a SaaS app or on-premise investment. All right, we have to leave it there, Ken. Thanks very much for coming by theCUBE. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. And hopefully we can catch up a little bit later and we'll talk a little bit more about where I want to start. All right, looking forward to it. Thank you. All right, keep it right there. Our next guest is theCUBE, we're live from New York City. We'll be right back.