 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Sapphire Now, headline 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, Peter Burris. Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Peter Burris and theCUBE is once again our flagship platform for bringing what's happening in big events to the community and today we're here at SAP Sapphire and I'm being joined by Tom Roberts, the global vice president of third party software solutions and Tom, we're going to spend some time talking about how you're working with the user ecosystem at SAP to fill in some of those crucial gaps that customers face as they try to create those new outcomes with SAP related technologies. Tell us a little bit about what your team does. Oh, great Peter and thanks, appreciate you having us here. You know, Peter, one of the key things that third party solutions does and what my team does is we really help complete the solution, right? So it's a complex world, got customers out there trying to solve some very challenging problems and of course SAP brings the bulk of the solution there but there's going to be some gaps and we've created unique relationships in our ecosystems in order to help fill that and deliver a complete solution. So for example, you'll hear the name out in the marketplace, Solution Extensions and that's our external branding. These are solutions that SAP sells on its paper that have been tested and are supported by SAP same as our own products. So the customer can buy with confidence and help get that total solution in place. So it's almost SAP compliant additional software. Yeah, that's right. Excellent, that's a really interesting perspective. We've, you know, it's interesting over the course of our two days here at Sapphire and we'll be here tomorrow as well, two things have popped out that are a little bit different from SAP. First off, the tension between whether or not SAP was an applications company or platform company seems to have totally gone away. You're a platform company. That's correct. The second thing that I find very interesting is that SAP has always been the company that kind of was a little bit more neutral, stood back when a customer needed us will show up and we'll do it. You're now being a little bit more aggressive about going after business, after some other company's customers. How are you utilizing this extension's approach to more rapidly create a solutions fabric that can bring, you know, can rapidly grab new customers for SAP and your partners? Well, Peter, you're right on the money. You know, it's no doubt that the industry has moved rapidly to the cloud. In fact, everybody said it would happen faster and it's happened even faster than they said it would. And everyone is, when they see results, they're always surprised. And cloud growth was even faster than we thought it would be. Now, what a lot of people haven't figured out, but I think SAP has, is that in a cloud-based solution world, the expectation is that one, it's seamlessly integrated. And two, the experience of buying it is seamlessly integrated. And three, it's supported in a seamlessly integrated way. And that's what solution extensions delivers in the cloud. So, you take an example of the success we've had with the acquisition of success factors. It's growing great, growing well in the industry, but they have a lot of needs in order to mature the solution and meet the customer's entire wish list. And one example that we use is we've got a relationship with workforce software for time and attendance. So it wasn't something that SAP developed, but it's something that the customer's needed and provides high ROI. But if you go and you look at that solution, you'll look and see that it's directly embedded inside Employee Central, right on the dropdown. So for the customers, a completely seamless experience, and they can buy that from their SAP account executive. So SAP is installed in a lot of companies, 300,000 across all industries. Right. As we move to a digital world, a lot of your customers, a lot of your SAP customers themselves are starting to envision how software becomes part of their delivery mechanism. Right. And they are looking at the customers that they serve and saying, I wonder if I can use software better. Are you starting to see non-traditional software companies starting to come to you and saying, how can we be part of this program so that we can plug into, or we can enhance that broad set of solutions for our customers? Right, so look at, everyone likes to talk about internet of things. Right, so you take a historical business that's asset heavy, and by that I mean, think of like an oil and gas company. You know, traditionally the guys would work out in the field, and they didn't carry devices with them. They carried wrenches, right? They didn't carry mobile devices that were digitally connected. And flasks. Sometimes, not too often, the dangerous line of work. But if you think about it, now that's changed, right? They now use the internet of things, not only to get information back from the field, but they also use it so that when they have to go out and do those repairs, they're getting digital assets that they can see. Now, we have created some relationships, and I'll give you two examples, right? So you'll hear about a relationship that SAP has with OSIsoft, right? They have a well-known reputation for being able to draw that information off internet of things, and we've created a link between that and the HANA platform so that now you can do that analysis in real time, because as you know, HANA is made for the real time. And if you're going to do internet of things, that's the only platform you can really go with. It's not the old batch, and then analyze later, you need that information happening in real time. That's one example, and then the other example that I'll give you is you'll see here at Sapphire, you'll see a company called Utopia. You say, all right, I've never heard of this company, but they do a unique thing. It's a direct add-in into the SAP platform, a solution extension that allows you to do master data governance around your enterprise assets, and you say, well, that sounds really complicated. Okay, what is that? This is the ability to look at those documents in a digital way while you're out in the field to understand, hey, that bolt there, that needs to be made out of steel, not aluminum, or you're going to have a chemical reaction, for example. That's the kind of thing that can save lives, save time, and also make the job out in the field easier. And you can't do that just with SAP's software by itself, we need the partners to contribute into that ecosystem and bring that richness there. You talked about the rapid adoption of the cloud, many respects, almost surprising adoption of the cloud, because you're right, we all knew it was going to happen. Many of us didn't necessarily know how fast it was going to be. SAP has a very large on-premise, and a lot of the programs that SAP put together were initially optimized for that on-premise orientation. Are your clients today, when they become part of the SAP extension or the Solutions Extension Program, are they automatically part of both worlds? First off, let me start there. Yeah, I mean, it's true that we live in a hybrid world already today. Hybrid happened so quickly, you saw SAP move aggressively forward and acquire some leading cloud companies, right? You see this- And you did a great job of integrating them, by the way. Thank you, I think we did, and I'm really impressed with these properties. I think you saw on the keynote yesterday, a really great representation of some of the leaders of those businesses up there, and how tightly they've become part of the SAP family. Now, when you look at Solutions Extensions, it mirrors that. We have solutions across all five of the major pillars of the business, which of course include these cloud properties, and the areas we're seeing the fastest growth of the most rapid adoption are in these cloud properties, because we all went through the era of the best of breed became the suite, and then we had the era of the cloud, and if you noticed, when the cloud companies were launched, they were best of breed companies, and now we're in that period where people want things to move back to the suite because they want integration. Or at least at a platform level. Sure, because they want efficiency. Efficiency comes from that integration, and they get the first round of benefits by moving to the new application in the cloud, and they get out of the business of having to operate it themselves, but then they want to get back to the business of having that seamlessly integrated with their core operations. So we live in a hybrid world today, but it's clear that the pendulum is moving directly to cloud. So are you suggesting to companies that want to be part of the extensions program that they focus on the cloud first and then everything else second? Yes, I would, and here's why. All conversations with customers start with cloud, and they'll look to see if they can do something in the cloud first, and it's the default. So we've really moved past that world where the first conversations around on-prem and then look to cloud, that changed maybe two to three years ago, and today every conversation starts with the cloud. So I want to go back to that notion of non-traditional software companies creating solutions within the SAP ecosystem for their customers. Do you have companies like that in the extensions program today? Well, I think many of these companies are evolving, just like SAP now. I tend to deal with the ISVs, right? So I tend to deal with companies that are in the business of that, but I will tell you this, what we're seeing with HANA Cloud Platform is exactly what you're talking about. It's that intersection of SAP, our ISV ecosystem, and those non-traditional customers that are themselves moving into the digital. And it's that intersection, and you'll see that happen on HCP, where they'll develop applications unique to their own business. I like to remind people this, when we first rolled out R3, and then we went to the business suite, companies wrote billions of lines of custom ABAP code to get that system the way they wanted it in each of these individual companies. Well, as we move to S4, companies are going to revisit what they did to make those systems special and perform just the way they wanted to, but they're not going to do that in ABAP, likely. They're likely, they're going to do that on HCP, and they're going to build in that platform because that's where they're going to get the integration, that's where they're going to get the benefit of where our ISV ecosystem is headed and tap into the richness of that. So I think this is why you hear this re-birth of innovation at SAP, and it's because it's driven by the customers. That's why we have so many people turn out at Sapphire this week, so much so that even the SAP employees are like, wow, this is really an impressive turnout. Oh, it's 60,000 plus people. This is one of the most, without question, this is one of the most energetic and packed trade shows that I've ever been to, or customer shows I've ever been to. It's impressive. We're looking around here right now, and you just, all these bodies, it's incredible. Yeah, absolutely. So if I envision the next couple of years for you, every, we had a partner on yesterday, in fact, and we asked him a couple of pointed questions as we're asking you, and we asked him, what do you want to see from SAP as a partner? What would make SAP an even better partner so that you would be that much more willing to tie into the ecosystem? And what they said was, we want to see better roadmaps so that we can see how where our responsibilities and SAP's responsibilities, our roles and SAP's roles, and we're still concerned about the platform mentality rolling us. How are you assuaging those ISV concerns about your roadmap as you try to bring even more integrated value into the platform? I think SAP has a brand of trust, and when you get to roadmaps, you have to have trust with your partners who's going to do what? Very clear and transparent conversations. I've seen a lot of maturity from SAP, really in the last six to eight months, being much more diligent in how they're planning their roadmaps and how they're involving partners in those roadmaps. I'll give you an example. Vylin Shreiner, who really leads some of the development around S4, in particular as it relates to initiative that we work on with OpenText. That's one of our largest partners inside Solution Extensions. We have right now about 19 million users who have purchased that through SAP. It's really an incredible relationship unique in the industry that we have with them. As we launch S4 and as we push it out into the marketplace, we've seamlessly integrated the OpenText capabilities around unstructured content into S4. And that's happened through the leadership of our development team by making commitments like that. Vylin presented that on the partner summit on Monday to all the partners in there, really as a message out to them to say, this is how SAP is going to do business in the future with our ISVs and our partners. And we're moving at such a pace, it requires that level of coordination. We can't just let it to chance or we can't let it be ambiguous. We have to be clear about we're going to build this and we're expecting our partners to step up here so that that dance happens the way it should happen. I do respect though that the partners have that concern because it's a legacy. They're always going to have the concern, but a big piece of it is going to be how well do you share and how well do you work together? Hey, Tom, thank you very much. Tom Roberts, Global Vice President, SAP Solutions Extensions Program. Thank you very much for being here as part of this great show talking about partnerships and the evolution of the SAP platform and SAP the company. This is theCUBE. We're going to be back shortly with more from Sapphire. There'll be millions of people in the near future that want to be involved in their own personal well-being and wellness. Nobody.