 Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here in Palo Alto for the special CUBE coverage of Mobile World Congress 2017 in our studio, breaking down all the action happening in Barcelona for the next two days, wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, and our next guest is Michael Forne, who's a product manager at SAP, formerly HANA Cloud, now called SAP Cloud. They renamed it part of the big news at Mobile World Congress. Michael, thanks for stopping in and sharing your thoughts on SAP Cloud and impact at Mobile World Congress. Thank you for having me. So you guys have, we've been following out this obviously your cloud game since the initiative started, the announcement. And then kind of like the slow start, but you know, last Sapphire, SAP Sapphire in Orlando, which we had the CUBE there live, really was the release of the cloud. The announcement of the Apple deal, now that's going to be the big news here at Mobile World Congress this week, is the shipping of that general availability of the iOS developer kit. So, once you guys hit the market with the product, it's just been kind of rolling incrementally getting better, and you changed the name from HANA Cloud to just SAP Cloud. And I interviewed Dan Law earlier about what that means. I don't want to get into that, but it means that SAP is now satisfying all their products. So as the product manager, you got to put the roadmap together with the team. So I'm sure you have to balance really kind of two camps, right? You got the SAP install base, which SAP in my many countries with Bill McDermott, the CEO, is you guys run, you know, the biggest businesses are running on SAP. So you have a huge install base. At the same time, the cloud brings green field developers, cloud native, which don't have any SAP in it. So it's the merging of the best of both worlds. So that's a product challenge. So I want to get your thoughts. What's the key thing for folks to be aware of at Mobile World Congress this year about the aha moment for SAP cloud? What is that key product features that bridges the cloud native with the pre-existing SAP? Well, that's one of the benefits of the having the cloud platform like ours, right, John? Is because we wanted to support this concept of the bimodal IT because we had recognized that a lot of our existing customers really wanted to leverage their existing investments. But at the same time, be able to address a lot of the upcoming innovations and being able to address even their change in workforce, for example, right? They want to be able to utilize and adapt, you know, I guess the keyword that people kind of throw around there is being agile, right? And being agile means helping the customer and be able to adapt efficiently and economically to the changes, whether it's, you know, new user expectations. I've read somewhere like some of the workforce by 2020 is going to be 75% millennials and their expectations of their product experiences can be much different than what traditional users have been, right? And at the same time, you have a business that you've kept running for a long time and you don't want to just change the way that they've been doing things. You want to have those things there, but at the same time bring new innovations. And with the hot cloud platform, you're going to be given a set of tools and services as you've probably heard from Dan already, that's going to enable you to do that, bringing you innovations like IoT and machine learning and so forth. And you've got the use cases, you've got people who actually have building apps and, you know, just last Friday on my Silicon Valley Friday show, interviewed Paul Martino, who had probably one of the best quotes he's also an investor in bullpen capital, does a lot of startup action. There's been a democratization of entrepreneurship because it's so easy to build apps, could be a 16 year old in the basement to the dorm room to the old age home where guys my age are building apps. So I mean, this is kind of like an app tsunami happening. So that's cool. That's cloud native, great market for that. But then there's integration that's really big because now apps are great by themselves. But if you look at Mobile World of Congress, the key theme is 5G and N10. So apps got to start playing well with others. You hear microservices, talking about machine learning. These are now the new tools of the trade to bring that building block approach. Do you guys agree with that? And what are you guys doing specifically to facilitate that seamless integration, the building blocks, is it microservices? Is it serverless architecture? Can you share some thoughts on that? Yeah, and you're absolutely right. And this is where businesses have come, right? And whether, you know, in helping enterprises grow, and you mentioned starting with small companies and so forth. But as they grow, we recognize from customers is that their landscape becomes really heterogeneous. You know, they're trying to integrate best of breed software and so forth. And having a platform like ours that's able to integrate into those things is the perfect utility and the perfect platform for doing that in the essence that we are able to, you know, so I guess let's look at it from the end consumer experience, right? Or the end business user. If we do technology right, the technology that's underlying it should be almost invisible, right? It doesn't matter that they're accessing five, six different systems in order to their job. With the cloud platform, we have a way being able to integrate all those systems and be able to present it as a, you know, as a one experience, one UI, friendly, user-friendly UI and using like for example our Fiori user experience and paradigm. What's the integration point? Because I think this is something that the, I mean developers are fickle, right? I mean, developers are great, but also they have a lot of power and they're moving the front lines with their apps. But at the end of the day, the business outcomes are really where the holy grail is and that's where the developer's getting close to. They're getting close to the outcomes and they're part of that process. So they're out developing, they're slinging their code around, slinging APIs around, doing all this great stuff with microservices. But they sometimes, they don't really think about the integration. That's why DevOps was so good. They let the infrastructures be programmable. Sometimes it's not that easy to program in integration. Sometimes you have to really understand that. Are we going to have programmable integration, playbooks and templates? How is that evolving? Because it seems to be the hot area where, okay, infrastructure is code, I can see that. That's working great. How do you connect down and make it work so that the integration works better? So kind of the approach we've kind of taken is that when you're doing integration between systems and so forth, it's best to do it through well-defined APIs. That way there's a decoupling of the system. That way the systems that you're interacting with are not so dependent upon each other. So if one piece changes, the others can still run. As long as that API or that handshake, if you will, doesn't change. And you brought up another good point as far as having the developers and business people work in a more collaborative fashion. Because at the end of the day, this is what we want to target. We want to enable the business user to be able to have applications that they're comfortable with, that they're able to be efficient with. And the way we're doing that is we're putting services on top of the platform that's going to allow them to be really the guys who are actually designing the applications at the end of the day that they're the ones that they're going to be using. Because we in the past have made some bad compromises, when you're designing software, because you got the business person saying, hey, this is what I want to see. And then you got the developer saying, this is actually what I can achieve. But through the platform, we offer this service called our build service, which basically allows the business analysts to essentially be the ones to become the application. They're composing, they're not saying coding. Yeah, they're composing. But at the end of that composing, they're able to get that user feedback and go through the rounds and saying, hey, is this the software that I really want to use? And when they're done with that, they're able to pass that along to developers and say, okay, great, I know exactly what you're using for now. Let me be the ones that help you tie into the various systems that perhaps I actually need to integrate with. Okay, Michael, tell us the big things that people should pay attention to this week during Mobile World Congress from McLeod. Is it the updates? What are the key news that gets your attention that you want people to look at and take notice of? I'm sorry, how did you? Okay, well, you guys had the, well, there's been some good proof points. You guys had the new capabilities, you got the iOS native kit. Is there any machine learning in going on in the cloud? Can you share some insights to how you can, because AI is certainly the height factor right now, but machine learning and IoT, that kind of connects the dots on some of the cool features of what's going on now. That's absolutely right, John, in terms of machine learning. So here's the thing, right? Once we start integrating all these systems, we have a lot of information that's rolling into the system essentially, right? How do you actually make use of that information? And part of it is we're only human, and what we would like to do with the technology is give you some superpowers with the technology. The technology that we work with is not meant to replace you, but meant to augment what you're able to do. And machine learning is a great vehicle to do that in. This is one of the areas that I think you should be paying attention to. There's gonna be a lot of stuff coming out on the platform in terms of services that's meant to aid you, meant to aid the developer in seeing how they can actually do their task a lot better. For example, some of the stuff that is gonna be coming down in the future on top of our platform is we have this service called the Co-Pilot, which if you can imagine, it's a digital assistance. So if you're performing a task that you have somebody, having somebody sitting there next to you, reminding you perhaps things to be cognizant of, for example, if you're trying to actually create a purchase requisition and whatnot, and the system already knows that, hey, perhaps you're low on budget. These are the things you need to be wary of. That's something that you can enact on right away without having to wait for that process of submitting the purchase requisition, getting it back and saying, hey, we can't approve this because of budgetary reasons. Well, that's the speed of big data. You actually get the software working on new workflows. So I want to get your take on, anecdotally speaking, you're the product guy, so you get to see what's going on with the requirements, the roadmap, this is kind of the keys to the kingdom. I love talking about product guys because I used to be a product guy myself back in the old days, but you got to think holistic. You got to look 20 miles down the road and think about those trade-offs you mentioned earlier. What anecdotal things can you point to from customers that you see that seem to pop out as a trend that you guys are doubling down on? What's the key customer requirements that's the focus? Well, a lot of the things that we tend to see from customers these days is a trend actually back towards being able to use standard products, right? They don't want to do these hyper-customizations on the products themselves because we've seen where it's taken them, and that is that... I mean one-offs, basically. Yeah, one-offs and just changes to their system where they're so dependent on the customizations, they're afraid to do these upgrades so it makes them really slow to react and be agile in their business. So this is where having the SAP Cloud Platform, they're able to keep those things running and then being able to do the new innovation. So it's really, from the customer's perspective, they're really asking us to be able to scale. Is it scalability? It is scale. Okay, so scale seems to be... Okay, so talk about the Google Next coming up. I know you guys got some announcements. I'm trying to get the news, although it's under a lot of confidentiality. You got Google, you got Amazon, you got Microsoft out there, Oracle has a cloud. I mean, we're living in a multi-cloud world and it's pretty clear from our reporting and our analysis, Amazon is obviously doing very well, but it's not going to be a winner-take-all. Customers want to have multi-cloud. How do you guys view that conceptually and philosophically from a customer's standpoint? The SAP Cloud Platform is a very open platform and we recognize this from the customer's perspective as well as that they don't want to be tied into any one vendor. They want to be able to do what they need to do without being tied to any specific one. And certainly with SAP Cloud Platform, we're adopting that. I mean, you're going to see, you've heard the announcements of the availability of us using Cloud Foundry on top of our platform as well as being able to bring in those community source and open source type products into the platform. And that also leverages existing investments from the customer's developer workforce. So you guys are open cloud, basically. You support open all the way. Okay, my final question for you, what's the most exciting thing that gets you jazzed up about the SAP Cloud? I think the most exciting thing about my work and being able to do this stuff is really enabling and empowering people to do their jobs more efficiently. Because at the end of the day, none of us are really the people that want to just be administrators, right? And some of the applications, some of the things that we do make us administrators versus being a recruiter versus being an interviewer or whatnot, right? And we want to make software that really fits your needs and really helps you be what you're supposed to be doing and not an administrator versus. The best software is invisible, as I always say. Megan, it happened. Michael, thanks so much for spending the time here and that you appreciate it. You watched in two days of wall-to-wall coverage at theCUBE covering Barcelona, Spain, coming Mobile World Congress 2017 from Palo Alto, analyzing and opining on all the news and commentary. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.