 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018, brought to you by NetApp. Hey, welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin on the ground at Sapphire Now 2018 in the NetApp booth with Keith Townsend for the day, and Keith and I are joined by Scott Felben, the global head of SAP HANA and Liana in our community. Scott, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, glad to be here. Community's plural. Tell us about the communities at SAP. Why is there specifically an SAP HANA community before we get into Leonardo? Okay, well it's kind of fun because you start one community and then they say, well, go do another community. So you do one and he's like, okay, do one, do another one. So we have at SAP a global community that runs on the SAP.com platform. That's for everybody, that's for all customers, all partners, all analysts, everybody. That's normally called the SAP community. What we realized back in around 2012 or 2013 is that we wanted to have a special place where our SAP HANA early adopter customers could go and join and network with each other in an online presence, right? And then have an opportunity to share their knowledge with each other and get more information from SAP. So we created a separate community on SAP HANA. It's actually a pretty easy URL, it's called SAPHANAcommunity.com. It's pretty simple to remember. And now we're doing this for about five, six years. So talk to us about what's unique about the HANA community outside of the technology. SAP communities in general is already pretty big, very active community. Correct. What was the call out and what was the results of creating the HANA community? Great, and that's a great question. And so what's really interesting about the SAP HANA community is that the topic and coverage of the content is specifically related to SAP HANA, data management, database tools and technologies, analytics and other surrounding areas that are connected to the HANA platform as an anchor. So we have provided over the past five years almost 300 webinars of content on SAP HANA technology. A lot of that content has come from SAP product managers, a lot of it's come from solution experts, partners as well have provided content and they're in the form of webinar frameworks as well as white papers and other content that's on there. Now the people that joined the community, which is what is all free by the way for the customers to join, are mainly our SAP customers. I'm proud to tell you here, also it was Sapphire 2018, we're here, we're over 6,100 or so members globally of the SAP HANA community. And what's really great about that is, relative to some of the millions of numbers that people throw out for other communities, it seems like 6,000 plus is a small number, but you have to keep in mind that it's very targeted, right? So the people that are through the door and are members of the community on the SAP HANA, we have it on our SAP Jam site, which is hosted in the SAP Cloud Platform. These are people that really are interested in that topic and they really want to learn about SAP HANA and the technology surrounding SAP HANA. So they're very, very high-quality people. Very engaged, sounds like it. Absolutely. So speaking of that, so this morning during Bill McDermott's keynote, you mentioned 23,000 HANA customers, you mentioned 6,000 actively engaging in your community. Collaboration was a big theme of this morning, talking about, yeah, this is not grandpa's CRM anymore, what SAP is doing to break that status quo. How influential are those customers engaging in the HANA community to its development and its evolution? That's a fantastic question. So what's happened is the communities, think of almost like a pyramid, so the community of the large, vast number of people who have joined the community for interest in topics to mostly consume information, they're kind of the baseline of the pyramid. Some of those customers have some great stories to tell. So what we did was we started a webinar series in 2013 called Spotlight, and I'll take credit for the name actually, as we call it the SAP HANA Spotlight, and essentially what we're doing is imagine the customer in a spotlight where they're sharing their journey, they're sharing their SAP HANA story and their journey. So we launched that number of years ago and now we've done almost 80 separate HANA Spotlight webinars with customers that are sharing their story. Well, we even took it one step further beyond that. In 2013, some of the executives from our early adopting customers for SAP HANA, they came over to SAP and they said, gee SAP, we're betting our career and our company survival on this new technology called SAP HANA back in 2013. And they basically came to us and said, I want to have a council. So we want to have a council of influence so that we have an opportunity to get together, share stories, share our journeys with each other, get to know who the other customers are that are also early adopters that are embarking on this journey with us together, and then more importantly to answer your question, feed that information back to SAP development so that we can back at SAP, improve the product and come out with some additional features and functions and make it even better. Well, that was 2013. Our very first meeting was up in Canada in suburban Toronto at one of our customer locations. We had 13 people in that meeting. Today, dial up six years. We're at over 750 members of an executive. So these are C-level VP, senior IT and chief architects that are in our community globally. We've done 24 meetings. We're about to schedule a 25th meeting and I've globalized that and the customers, I thought they would have been tired of these kinds of meetings. They love it. They absolutely love it. So again, going back to that analogy, this is kind of the high peak point of the pyramid. We get the executives that are making these decisions and we talk about thought leadership. We don't talk about features and functionality. We do talk about roadmaps. We talk about investments that they need to make and we anchor it again on the SAP HANA platform but we bring in other technologies and components like analytics or SAP Leonardo, right? Or S4 HANA, right? Now that it's announced, we'll bring in C4 HANA. So we'll cover other topics as well and of course the cloud platform. So you set it up, rinse and repeat. Now we're at Leonardo. Rinse and repeat. What is, first off, what is Leonardo? Great name. I love the name, but what is it? So SAP Leonardo is a methodology. It's an opportunity for our customers to co-design, co-invent, get engaged in a design thinking process to understand how data, we talked about this today, how data and how knowledge can enable an intelligent enterprise and it's a process. So what people need to understand and customers work with SAP and they can go to the SAP Leonardo booth areas at the conference and see as many sessions as they wish but essentially it's a foundation. It's an understanding of how do I take where I am today from my understanding of how I operate my business and where do I need to go? What is my next gen process? Where do I need to be in five years to be that thought leader and how do I get there? So how do I take data that I know and data that I don't know? We have, I just ran into one of our customers, we run a program out of our team as well called the SAP Innovation Awards. Started off as the HANA Innovation Awards and now we cover all technologies and all topics for customer innovation. So SAP Leonardo, cloud platforms, solutions, SAP HANA solutions, data management solutions, these are all innovative offerings. We just announced all the winners, we have actually a ceremony tomorrow night where all the winners have been announced and they're going to be receiving their trophies and we've been doing this for many years. What's interesting about that is all the innovative projects that are coming from the customer project, programs, projects, innovations, what are they doing? How are they co-innovating? Are they co-innovating with SAP? Are they doing smart farming? We have one winner that's actually doing smart farming, micro crop planting. To understand soil composition and humidity and moisture composition is different. Even if you go one meter away, almost one meter, which is nothing for the Americans listening, it's three feet. And that's pretty close and they can actually combine different crop plantings based on soil conditions and compositions and this is all being monitored in the SAP HANA cloud. So this is real, this is really phenomenal. We love these kinds of stories and what we're doing now, as you can imagine, you're probably going to ask me, how do you connect the dots? Well, it's pretty easy to connect the dots. We have the customers that have presented these great programs, these great values that they're providing to their industry and the great wins and successes and we're leveraging those customers in the community as thought leaders and we're also doing sessions like that. I'd like to get them on theCUBE. Have them talk about some things that they're doing. We love customer stories. I think it would be phenomenal. So let's talk about the dynamics of running a community program that's featured around a product in HANA, very straightforward, it's about to detect a lot of speeds and fees, transitions and solutions. When you start out with something as ambitious as Leonardo's framework, are the dynamics different? Like, what is the community like? A little bit because SAP HANA is the foundation and we saw this today, the keynotes today and Bill's keynote was phenomenal and we saw that he was positioning this and it's all about the intelligent enterprise and SAP HANA as a foundation, it's fantastic and we've been doing this for a lot of years. But what do we do to build upon that? When we established a foundational community for SAP HANA and people started coming in and wanna understand everything about the HANA community, we did a couple of fundamental things. Number one, we connected with the SAP HANA Academy and I'll give a shout out to my friends at the Academy. I love them to death and we've been partnering with them for five plus years. SAP HANA Academy is a YouTube site of thousands of videos on how to do anything. It could be data management, it could be data hub, it could be Vora, which is the connector to Hadoop, it could be SAP HANA, it could be analytics and there's thousands, literally thousands of videos on how to just about do anything that you want connected to the community. So the people and the SAP HANA Academy team has presented content and webinars on our community broadcasting, at least for the last, this year they did one, they do like two or three every year for the last number of years. What we did with SAP Leonardo was Leonardo can be thought of as a combination of the technology. So we have, as you know, we've machine learning, IoT, blockchain, right, analytics and a whole bunch of other things, time thinking, methodologies that are in Leonardo. So what we did is we took a lot of that and created a series of webinars and content. We just finished something called the SAP Digital Transformation Series featuring SAP Leonardo in conjunction with ASOD, the American User Group, that's our co-conference sponsor here. We love them to death and what we did was do the 14 part webinar series. We had thousands of people come onto these calls and each call covered, for example, Mala, the president, she did, what is the overview of Leonardo, how do we do this? We covered analytics for Mike Flanagan, Maricel covered design thinking and we went from there. Then we covered the solutions themselves, what is IoT, what is blockchain, what is machine learning, how do you understand what these things do and how they impact your organization. Then we took it one step further, we went into the industry solutions. So the partners are developing industry solutions, the industry accelerates. We talked a little bit earlier, there's a press release that just came out on that, on some of the, the partner, the medallion initiative. The first medallion initiative, right, that my friend Mike is running from Leonardo team and that is certifying partners for specific solutions that they're building around the industry, the deliverables that they have around the SAP Leonardo, we feature that as well. So all of that content was in this series and we continue to build upon that. What we really want though now is we want to do what we did this time last year, which was we want the customer stories. So we've done, I've told you we've done a lot of webinars in the community, there's a lot of content going to the members of the community from the experts that understand that content. Next step, second half of the year is we want those customer stories out there. So those 80 or so webinars that I mentioned that we did with our customer spotlights, we want those spotlights now. So we're focused on it. So anybody watching, give me those spotlights. We want those stories. We want the customers to really articulate their story, their challenges, their successes, their wins. What are they doing with the SAP technology best? You're preaching to the choir about customer marketing person so that there's no better value brand validation than the voice of the customer. Speaking of brand validation, I heard this morning that Bill McDermott announced that you guys are now 17 on the top 100 most valuable brands. Absolutely. Once we're in the top 10. We're proud of that, part of that team. Four, you're doing this with a tremendous amount of partners as well you mentioned partners. We're in the NetApp booth. Talk to us about what SAP and NetApp are doing in the community to enable this amazing amount of education. So that's a great time. I mean, SAP wouldn't be where it is today. And I've been with SAP for, I don't want to say the number of years, but people watch me, they know I've been at SAP a long time. So I can't say Scott Bellman without SAP. So it's been kind of anchored in for a long time. Sort of the blood, the blue blood runs in the DNA. It was just kind of fun. But some of the partners that we've worked with in the communities have taken it to another step. NetApp is one of those. And I love working with NetApp. They're a strategic technology provider and a fantastic global partner with SAP. I know you just heard from RJ who did an interview who worked a lot with him and his team as well, Roland and the rest of the team. And what NetApp has done is they've made another strategic investment with us in the communities for the HANA community and the Leonardo community such that they're a name-sponsored partner. And what's really nice about that is we have a special spot and if you go to the SAP HANA community.com site or if you're already a member or the other one is you can guess SAP Leonardo community.com, it's very similar, right? If you go to either of those sites, you'll find that there is a spot for partners that are specific to that community that have taken the next step to add additional value. NetApp is there, there's a page, and what we've done is we've created a page with all of the NetApp content on what is NetApp's contribution on SAP HANA and Leonardo? Where's the value proposition? Why NetApp? What are they doing with SAP? Where are the links that we can go for all of the content that NetApp has provided to us to post in that community? And not only that, NetApp is also an outstanding member, an outstanding member of the SAP HANA CL Council community because they also run SAP. And in addition to that, NetApp is a strategic partner that provides webinar content for SAP, for the community. So about once a quarter, there'll be a webinar that is sponsored by NetApp. And now I'm bugging them a little bit to get the customers in front of the webinar. So we can have these little- NetApp SAP customer spotlights just waved through the service, right? And we're doing them in small snippets. So it's really great about that. It's kind of like this discussion that we're having is small chunks. Because I think the new wave of doing things, and I can certainly tell you from the generation that's just maybe a little bit younger, is that they don't have time to sit down and watch a webinar for one hour. But they'll take it in 20-minute doses. They'll just be like, man, give me all the 20-minute webinars you want. It's like, I'll just give me a chunk and I'll take it and boom, I really want that. So that's been a lot of fun. So now that's been a fantastic strategic partner and we'll continue to partner with them a little bit forward. So I'm hearing a lot of collaboration, a lot of participation, energy, it's just radiating, I think, off of the main stage. Oh, I don't like the community. You do like it. I just love it. From the main stage to what you're talking about, what you guys are doing. And I'd love to hear that the customers are being recognized for their innovation. Not just transforming their businesses, new revenue streams, new business models, but leveraging their partners like SAP, like that app to become the intelligent enterprise and change industries. Absolutely. And they're becoming the fault leaders of their own industry. So if you want to become a leader or a fault leader in your own specific industry, join the SAP HANA community, make the investments in SAP Leonardo, work with SAP, work with that app. And like Bill says, let's get it done. Let's get it done. Scott, thanks so much for stopping by and chatting with Keith and me this morning. Thank you for your time. And enjoy the rest of the event. I look forward to it. All right. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend on theCUBE from the NetApp booth at SAP Staffire now 2018. Thanks for watching.