 From New York, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit New York 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. Over and welcome back. We're live here in New York, it's theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Amazon Web Services, Summit 2018, AWS, taken over the cloud. I'm Jeff Frick, our next guest is Ben Lingwood, CTO of Lemongrass, doing SAP on AWS exclusively. That's part of your company, thanks for joining us. My pleasure, thank you for having me. So I heard rumors many, many years ago is that SAP Sapphire, that SAP had the cloud going at that time, trying to get it going. That a lot of their pre-sales were being done on Amazon. And one of the internal SAP guys said to me, it's like, damn, this Amazon thing is pretty damn good for SAP sales. And it really was an organic shadow IT pre-sales thing. So now there's a lot of business, SAP's multi-cloud, you handle the AWS, how has the cloud changed SAP? And it's been a real revolution in the way that SAP is run and operate. And if you traditionally look at SAP, it's normally been quite a monolithic system. It's been the system that's been always on. It's a system that you don't touch because it's running your core financial core system. So what the cloud has enabled is really agility into that system. The world of DevOps, so not maintaining huge amounts of infrastructure that you don't need all the time for projects and for sandboxes and for those type of environments, gives you the flexibility to use what you need, when you need, give that utility modeling experience with both billing and compute. And then lastly, it gives you that flexibility so that you can adopt new SAP technology that much quicker as well. Can you give some examples of some customers that have been successful with the cloud and what's been the secret formula? What's been the success linkage to make SAP more agile, more versatile, more performant? Yeah, let me give you a couple of examples. So we've just done one project for a very large bear company that have gone live. And that was really around the DevOps experience. So this was an organization that had significant footprint of non-production systems, sandboxes and project systems and all the other systems that you collect through running large projects for large businesses and keeping those on all the time. So what happened with this project in particular was we got rid of them. Why do you need to maintain all of those systems when you're only using them for a few months of a year or you're not using them over the weekend or your project team are going home at five o'clock and you don't need them overnight? So by bringing in that DevOps culture, putting in the technology and what we do is we bring in the best of AWS automation technology with SAP best practice and SAP architecture and that allows the customer to build systems when they need them on demand, within hours of actually when they need to use them. And then when they're not using, turn them off. So Ben, it sounds so oil and waterier to people that are familiar with what to do, right? You think of SAP, the long implementation cycles, a lot of integration and then like you said, you build it, you lock it down and the thing just runs. So I'm curious from your client's point of view, what is the kind of twinkle in their eye to see that they can both use this hardcore, super important production system but still start to get some agility out of this AWS cloud. They must be like, Ben, how the heck are we going to put these two things together? So how do they start generally? They're obviously not lifting, shifting their whole manufacturing system sticking in AWS. Are there kind of pieces and best practices that enable them to use the two together well? So absolutely, so the first part of your question is absolutely designed to be a hybrid cloud, right? So what runs in Amazon is an extension of what's on premise. No problem at all. And you tend to find there's a big ecosystem of connections, of interfaces. So the good news is those can continue to run exactly the same way they do today. So great disruption perspective. Well, you tend to find where customers are looking at Amazon, it's a compelling reason. So I need to buy a new hardware. I need to get out of a data center. I've heard about this cloud organization. My cost of running my SEP system is significant. I'm spending, it's not uncommon for them to be spending 60, 70% of their budget on keeping the lights on, right? Patching and maintaining and all those back office things that just consume huge amounts of time, huge amounts of money and stops companies from being able to do agile developments. So bring it into as Amazon, what we specialize in is automation first. So we can automate patching the system. We can automate operating system patchings. We can do disaster recovery with a mouse click. I can extend a system in a mouse click. So those sorts of things that we're typically taking weeks and weeks and weeks and slowing organization standard result. That tends to be the golden bullet that really drives the discussion there. What's the engagement lifecycle look like? I mean, obviously speed is critical. We're hearing projects, whether it's, I've heard public sector projects that AMS is running for years to weeks. We heard earlier today, financial services three months, 18 months previously, years before that. So years, months, weeks. What are some of the deployments look like for you guys in these large SAP environments? Are they scoping in time wise? It all depends on the size of the ship. What we like to do is put our money where I'm at this. So we like to run a proof of concept to go, right, what concerns you? What hurts you? What are your problems in your IT estate to go? Okay, let's take that and let's do a proof of concept. And what we want to do is we want to do that inside a month. We want to prove that point inside a month. They must be just rolling their eyes when you say that for an SAP project. Exactly, because when you think of the world of Amazon, a server is a line of code, right? I don't have to buy a system, rack it, stack it, install it, get the specialist guys in, get the security, it's automated, right? So a line of code. Years ago it was like we're going to milk you for like tons of cash over multi, we're going to take eight weeks to do an audit. Yeah, and you know what, that's a very important point because actually the cultural change is as much of a challenge as everything because it's the thing that was the slowest moving component in the ecosystem is now the fastest moving, and you know what, customers not ready for that. So the governance change of, hang on, I don't need to buy a server and depreciate it for five years, I can be billed by the minute. How do I do that? What's the biggest learnings that you've learned as an individual in the industry? Not so much as with lemongrass, maybe that could help give some color commentary. If you look back at the past five, 10 years, maybe just the past five, what's the big learnings that you personally walked away with the cloud? What's the big impact? What's the aha? Where have you seen surprises, unexpected, expected things? What's your big takeaway? I think that the big takeaway is not viewing the cloud as infrastructure as a service, not viewing it just as another way of getting effectively dumbed in, right? The cloud is way more than that. So yes, it fixes the problem of instant infrastructure, but for God's sake, don't treat it just as just dumb infrastructure and comparing that with how much is it cost to buy a server? Yeah, you're missing the point completely. What a company should be looking at is what agility does an Amazon-based system, a cloud-based system, give me it on top that allows me then to drive efficiencies across the ecosystem. Because like I said, the main cost of running these systems tends to be the maintenance, the operations, the patching, the infrastructure. So that's the key thing I would say is, why should customers work with you? What attracts people to your business? Obviously SAP on Amazon, obviously agility. Is it because they want to actually create a developer capability? Is it serve existing developers? Is it more functional? What are the main reasons that you're engaged by these big companies? We're very simple people. And I mean that in a very good way in that we only do one thing and we do one thing well, which is we do SAP on Amazon. So most of us in the organization, myself included, we have over 20 years working in the SAP ecosystem. And you're taking that dark art, that it's a very complex set of applications and infrastructures and a lot of moving innovation within SAP, and you're taking that with Amazon, which again, as we all know, every time you blink, Amazon is thinking something new. I mean, look behind me, there's a huge ecosystem, a huge dynamo of things that are just being released as behind us right now. So new capabilities to bring those together. So the customer's benefit really in their mind's eye is, okay, I don't want to throw away SAP because I have so much invested in it. It's like plumbing, it's like pipes in the ground, right? They want to take advantage of new cloud native things. Is that the real, the goal? It's bringing those two dark arts together. So Lemongrass brings together those two best practices and forms that together into automated, repeatable architecture, best practices, and then really, where we see things that customers are doing repetitively over and over again. We automate first, that's our strategy. We automate first, that's what we do. And what's the business outlook look like in terms of trend data? Is it like more faster accelerated clients are moving over? How would you look at the growth of that SAP on AWS? It's happening more or less often, more often? Growth, what do you share, specifically? I mean, I had a major goal of this weekend right in the US. So just an example, and that happened comfortably under the time that we estimated before. So I think the ice is broken. People are now not scared of using what they see as public cloud services to run their crown jewels, their enterprise applications. So the confidence is in the marketplace. People are now realizing it's probably more secure and more sophisticated than anything they could do on premise. Okay, so don't try and keep up with it. Adopt it and embrace it. And then the third thing I think when you're focusing on the Y-Amazon on the agenda there is the speed of innovation. So only a few months ago in Sapphire, they released the new X2 series. So looking at those very large capabilities as well. So the 9, 12, 20 terabyte maybe in the future type system, so the enterprise scale is also there. Right, I'm just curious as you looked around at the ecosystem here, and the Amazon shows are amazing. I mean, not only is there a lot of boost, there's a lot of people at every booth. Is that a way, is what you do a way for to leverage this ecosystem? Obviously Sapphire is a huge show been around forever, very successful. SAP's got a great ecosystem, but this is a different ecosystem. Different vibe, different speed, different applications. Are you being able to blend kind of this AWS ecosystem and innovation into this core infrastructure SAP? Great question, great question. So you tend to find with SAP that it comes, it's the hub maybe, but there's a whole peripheral set of IT solutions out there. So absolutely right, so let me give you an example of that. So Data Lakes. SAP typically runs very large data systems, right? What Amazon gives you capability to do is potentially that space, take that data out into S3, looking at Lambda, looking at SageMaker, other automated technologies like that where you can actually natively run big data transformation for SAP data and non-SAP data. So if you're a betting man and you want to put your enterprise into an innovative space that covers not only SAP, but any other IT area that you could possibly think of, there's a whole disruptive technology boot set behind us that are churning out some really amazing things. Yeah, that's great. What's the biggest success that you could point to that you're most proud of with deployments you've done? I think that the things that we're most proud of is what we bring with automation. So basically what we're doing now in the company was my job. What I used to do only 10 years ago, right? I've made myself redundant from 10 years ago. So bringing that level of automation now where you can build an SAP system in a mouse click or I can ask Alexa to build it for me. You know, we've got RAP running over the booth, right? Who would've thought that? So I can ask Alexa. I don't know if I want Alexa. That's like, you know, go give me something if the grocery store and it buys whole foods. I don't know if I... Alexa, buy SAP. Yeah, yeah, don't ask that one. Extreme example, but that level of automation now, that's working, that's a lot of customers are using that sort of functionality, which only five, six years ago would have been a hand crank solution. So it's a huge, huge acceleration. Well, we have covered SAP in the past. We really haven't been engaging with the core, corporate team much recently. I think we were at Sapphire through NetApp recently, but I can tell you that one group that we do like at SAP is Dan Lawls group and they're managing the SAP Cloud Platform. So they had some HANA Cloud Platform, weird, bad naming going on and confusing, but there's a multi-cloud initiative that I think is quite brilliant for SAP and I think that they're not trying to be Oracle. Oracle saying, we have the cloud coming here. I think Oracle will see how that turns out. I think SAP is playing it smart. They're going to be embedded as a service layer across all clouds and let their ecosystem take advantage of it. Do you see it the same way? Is that kind of the strategy? Absolutely right, yeah. So I mean, to survive and SAP are super smart on that is there was a race to see who could do the best and fastest infrastructure on the planet and there's the big three players and Amazon are absolutely upfront on that that can provide those sorts of services. So absolutely, it allows SAP to focus on what they do best which is world-class enterprise software. And give their customers headroom. VMware did a deal with AWS. I thought that was a great tell sign. So your point about this lot of cloud goodness out there, if you try to cube a monolithic. Exactly right. Dying strategy. And it's symbiotic. So you mentioned SAP earlier. Guess what? They're deploying that in Amazon as well. So the ecosystem is revolving around these hyperscaler platforms. And the speed and benefits again, off the charts. Economics are just driving prices down. Functionality up, new roles of data. Just cost conversion, just massive benefits. You touched on a good point there, so economy. So what we do is we sit with every customer every month and I can pretty much guarantee every month I can find an efficiency. So something news come out. There's a cheaper way of doing it. You've bought out a new range of service from Amazon that we can adopt. So every month we're seeing that innovation and we can pass that straight back to the customer. So the curve is always going down. And blockchains right around the corner. It is in there. You know you're doing well when AI and blockchain are in the conversation. It's going to be a big, big migration. That's a little bit hyped up right now, as you know. Ben, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Cube coverage here on the ground, talking on all the Amazon. Web Services Partners, Cube doing our part, broadcasting live. We're on twitch.tv slash SiliconANGLE as well as the cube.net. Our site, look for our community. Join the conversation. I'm John Furrier. Jeff Frick, stay with us for more live coverage here in New York City. We'll be right back.