 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS re-invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS 19. To re-invent Las Vegas, where else would it be? Why? Because there are about 65,000 people here with Stu Miniman and myself, Lisa Martin. And we're pleased to welcome the guests from SAP Germany. Joining us is Glenn Gonzalez, the Chief Technology Officer in Germany. Glenn, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, nice place to be. Isn't it nice? Yeah. We think so. So this is day three of all the action. There is not a lull in the attendance and the expo hall, so much going on, so much news. But give us a little bit of an insight. SAP is a customer of AWS. AWS is a customer of SAP. Talk to us about all that you guys do together. Yeah, that's interesting about our partnership because it has so many dimensions. In the first hand, actually SAP is a big customer of AWS. We have huge workloads running on AWS or even our software as a service applications, like Concur, maybe the coolest travel software you can have. For me as a traveler, I use it every day. And on the other hand, it's like AWS is a big customer of SAP using Concur themselves. And yeah, I don't know. Maybe a lot of people around us, they will know what I'm talking about. And then adding to this, we are also competitors, which is great because competition drives innovation. Everybody knows this. So that brings me actually to maybe the last part is like innovation is that maybe the center of our partnership is that we together can do so much more than each of us could do. And if we bring these two parts together, then it's a real value for the customers and that's maybe the most exciting part about this. Yeah, Glenn, it's interesting. SAP Sapphire was actually the second show we ever did as theCUBE way back in 2010 before AWS re-invent existed. But even back then, we started talking about transformation. I think of SAP and SAP is like the global ERP company. You started talking about all the different pieces. How should we be thinking about SAP in today's modern transform cloud environment? Well, that's a topic I have every week because a lot of people perceive SAP as the ERP company and it's so much more due to the changes that are happening around the world. We stand for business processes end-to-end, safe and secure and business can run only if you have a software that can do this. But these processes are changing. They're expanding and they are technically changing. For example, IoT brings actually that not a human being starts the process. It's a sensor, but it's still an end-to-end process or technologies like blockchain or machine learning are changing the process itself. So some people think machine learning is only fancy if it's an autonomous driving, but put it into a process and it gets autonomous. And that's a real value for customers. You can even calculate a business cost. So it's so much more than ERP today. When we were at a Sapphire last year, so summer of 2018, one of the things that was interesting was a lot of messaging around ERP you can talk to. Of course, here we are at AWS, lots of people know Alexa. Talk to us about some of the innovations and the emerging technologies that SAP is bringing into your flagship products and your other technologies that are really helping to transform way beyond ERP. Yeah, that's interesting because we're doing a lot of this innovation together with AWS. Many of our biggest strategic customers are already running their workloads on AWS. And so many more are evaluating to do this. It's really exciting times. And as I mentioned earlier, new technologies kick in. So our business technology platform based on SAP Cloud Platform is that where the customers need this connection from these new technologies into the businesses. And we are developing so many softwares together now. Like Data Intelligence or Data Warehouse Cloud and even the SAP custodian that we are now brought out last two months ago on our tech head. Yeah, so Glenn, SAP's always had a great viewpoint into the productivity of the worker. And there's so many technologies you brought up, the autonomous bees. So it brought to mind one of the hottest areas in tech beyond just cloud is RPA, robotic process automation. Help us bring inside the SAPs positioning there and even broader about just how workforce can be more efficient, not just get cool new tools. That's maybe one of the main topics of the IT designers around the world is how can I make things more simple? How can I reduce the complexity of my IT? And it always starts at the user. It should at least, not always, but it should. And if you can make the work of a user a lot more simple and that's what these technologies bring in. Automize or partially-automize processes. The user of the software can do different things or you can only confront them with the difficult stuff and the rest can be done, can't buy the system. And that's why these things are really important. But main topic and you can put this new technology in with not such a big effort as others maybe. So to make the end user more productive is critical, right? Because we're all end users at the end of the day and sometimes it's very challenging to get worked on if you have so many processes or so many different applications that you have to work with. But to get the end user that productive, to really streamline the enterprise software space, a lot of things we're hearing about and Andy Jassy talked about this and his keynote Tuesday is organizations to truly transform a business all the way down to that end user level. You have to start at that senior executive level. As the CTO of SAP in Germany, are you starting to see conversations shift up from that more end user space to that C-suite is enterprise transformation really at that level in your experience? Definitely, definitely. It's a big topic, but you have to see there is, there are two versions of this. The one is to talk about it and the other one is the execution on it. So we see a lot of companies that talk about and start the execution and it's a real transformational part and it's really hard for many companies because the change is drastic. And what we really see it only works top down. So if the C-level is not in, it basically will not happen and that's something we've really learned within the last years. Glen, I always want to get to talk to a CTO, the changing role of technology in business today. You used to be able to say there are certain industries, well, they might use some technology but they're not technology companies. Now, the meme is everyone is a software company and everyone's becoming technology. So bring us inside your viewpoint as a CTO about how important this moment in time is in the technology industry. I think it's the master key for many companies and even the role of the CTO changes. For example, my role, I'm really customer centric. I spend time with many customers a week. So I'm not in the machine room fixing things. I'm listening to customers because if you don't understand what they actually have for expectations, you will never fit there actually the expectations or even putting one on top. Some of our customers need help to understand the expectations of their customers. And that's the part of this digital transformation and these new businesses coming up. And so it's a lot more exciting than maybe a few years ago where we only talked about tech. I spend most of the time about how to use it. And then afterwards, how the tech has to be implemented to make this possible. What are your conversations with respect to people and that cultural change? As to this point, as so many companies today have to be absolutely fueled by technology to be competitive because there are startups right behind a lot of legacy businesses ready to cannibalize a business. But that cultural piece is really difficult. Talk to me about some of the conversations that you have with customers to help them maybe reset expectations but also get them understanding that that cultural transformation is critical to the digital transformation. That's maybe the unfair part. We come in and want to talk about technology and users and then they start about change and they're not talking about technology change their mindset change. It's the critical thing. You can have the best ideas. You can have the best technology behind this. If your own organization will not go with this, you will not stop or you will not start, sorry. So that's why I just earlier said if it doesn't work top down, it will never work. If the decider or let's say the boss, if he's not in, if he doesn't understand the necessity to change this, it'll not happen. And the change is quite heavily. It's not agile. It's a lot more. It's about really thinking a different way or even understanding what the internet is doing to everybody. Some don't even understand that. And it's sometimes it's really surreal. You know, you're sitting there and someone is telling you, oh, you know, my daughter uses a smartphone all day. I don't understand her. And I said, well, let's start understanding it because that's how the world is turning at the moment. Right. And there are five different generations that are in workforce today. So businesses, SAP, your partners, your competitors all have to cater to your point to a really broad level of technology understanding. Yeah. Which can be a big barrier. It is a barrier, but don't make the mistake to only get in the millenials and throw the old ones out because that's the biggest mistake you can do because it's about the mixture. It's about the diversity in a team. I mean, it's even, if you can even ask scientists, yeah, a lot of stuff you can read about this, but if you want to really make it happen, you have to live it. And this is where SAP, we had talked about it upfront, that we have actually five generations within one company. And it's so important because the business process had a beginning. There's a reason why we did it this way. And if the new people don't understand this, they may make big mistakes. So that's the magic, bringing them together and making new kind of teams. Yeah, Glen, I loved a couple of minutes ago, you're talking about the requirement of that top-down leadership to be able to help. And that really echoes what Andy Jassy talked about on the main stage. I wonder if you can give us a little bit of the global viewpoint, especially being from Europe here because very much we talk about that move from the bottoms up to the top-down and coming from both ways here. Is it very similar across the globe? Is there maturity or changes in some of the workforce that might be a little bit different in some GEOs versus others that you're working with? Well, there are big differences, especially in Germany, which is a very mature market. There's a lot of actually, there's a lot more talking about data security and privacy in Europe than we see in other regions of the world. For example, that doesn't say that it doesn't matter, but it's a different talk. Or even cloud. For some people, cloud is like, I don't know, I can't really grab it. So an interesting is a different understanding of cloud of people. So it's regionally totally different how to go in and it's also a difference if you're talking to a big company which is globally on the road or others that are starting to get global. Because for them, it's also a change. In other markets, it's not a problem to do it that way, but in your own markets, there are a lot of sayers like, oh, let's wait, we have to discuss this first. And that's maybe the wrong version, yeah. As we look at how cloud in and of itself as an operating model, but also the technologies that define it, how they've evolved and changed. One of the things too that Andy Jassy talked about with our own John Furrier is that, a lot of the businesses that are going to be successful tomorrow are either going to be born in the cloud companies, or they don't even exist yet. What are some of the things that you're seeing in the existing enterprise? Not just in Germany, but globally. Are you seeing any industries in particular that you think are really right to become reborn in the cloud, for example? Well, for especially in Germany where we have a lot of companies building machines, hardware, it's more difficult to get this vision of being a digital company. You mentioned it earlier, companies are becoming a software company, although they're building machines. And the machine is only there to enable the service. This is a big change. For them, it's of course a lot more complicated to understand how these new technologies can help them. And for them, they are actually in the beginning of understanding. But for others that come from a service side, for them, it's a lot easier. And for them that understand what these technologies can bring them an agility and flexibility and scalability, it opens totally new doors. But there's still a lot of education you have to do for them to understand that it's really the right door to go through. And that's part of my job, explaining these things, yeah. Great. Glenn, would love, you've been, I'm sure, talking to a lot of customers this week. Give us your final takeaways from AWS re-invent 2019. Wow. I'm a little bit overwhelmed by the input you can get here. I really try to go to all sessions. Maybe next time. There's only 2,500 of them. So unless you figured out cloning or time manipulation. Time manipulation is one of my best. I'm CTO, that's maybe, I work on it for next time. Excellent, we'll talk after. So maybe next year. So I need to be invited again and we can talk about that. Now it's a huge input we have here and it's a different stage. If I talk here to customers, it's a different talk because we have more input from many sides and they are also open to talk about things that they may not be open to when they're at home. Because here are things that have so much positive input and so diverse input that it really helps to start different conversations. Well, 2,500 sessions, that cloning thing will really help out not only with that, but also can you imagine how much better ERP would get if we had clones? So you'll have to come back because we have to figure this out. I bet on that, yeah. All right, Glenn, thank you for joining Stu. Thank you for your time. All right. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE and stick around because later today, Andy Giasi stops by. Thanks for watching.