 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018, brought to you by NetApp. Welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we are in Orlando at SAP Sapphire Now 2018. This is a huge event, not just 20,000 people here, but there's about a million people SAP says are going to engage with their live and on-demand video experiences for Sapphire. Amazing. We are excited to welcome, for the first time to theCUBE, Janesh, Jane, the VP of Global Delivery at CenturyLink. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thank you guys for having me here. So the theme in this event is really around what SAP is doing to enable the intelligent enterprise. This is really beyond digital transformation where customers have to have a customer-centric view. It's about infusing and embedding, emerging in advanced technologies, AI machine learning, into business processes. How is CenturyLink helping customers on that transformation journey? I think that's a great question. Let me give you a little bit of background behind what CenturyLink is all about because this is all SAP here in Orlando, right? CenturyLink is all about connecting customers in the digital world. And we recently acquired Level 3. And with that Level 3 acquisition we became now, we provide trusted connections to all the connected world, all the network world. So you can imagine in digital transformation, you need a very strong foundation when it comes to connectivity, network, infrastructure, and the security behind that. And that's what CenturyLink does. That's our core business. And with that journey, as we started that journey, we have 60 plus data centers as part of CenturyLink core strategic assets. We have around 500K miles of fiber optics, which is one of the, we are the second largest in the United States when it comes to network connectivity and redundancy across. And in 60 plus countries, I think all this strategic assets makes, provides us very strong foundation for any customers who is embarking this digital journey. This reminds me of one of those reasons survey done by McKenzie and Global Institute where they said that they figured out the digitization index for Europe was 12% and for North America was a little better than around 18%. But look at the gap, how much of huge, how much of gap is there in terms of exploring the full potential of digitization. So I think our journey in terms of giving that digital transformation starts from our strong foundation of our strategic assets of data centers, network and security. Along with that, as you mentioned about the intelligent enterprise, we have a very strong practice in terms of not just descriptive analytics, but we do prescriptive analytics, we do machine learning, we have IoT, and we do big data analysis as well. So all these things combined together provides a complete end-to-end solution. And of course SAP plays a big play here and we can talk about that in terms of what we do on the SAP side as well. So let's add some more color to that. When I think of CenturyLink, I think about the 60 data centers. Even when I think about SAP, what I normally consider CenturyLink's role traditionally in the SAP relationship is that, you know what, CenturyLink to get me better either close to my customers so that data injection can happen faster with lower latency. When I think of CenturyLink, I think of lower latency to hyperscale cloud providers so that if I have bold on applications, I can get closer to my core SAP data. But what I'm hearing is that CenturyLink has greater SAP capability outside of that. Tell us about the SAP practice at CenturyLink. Glad you asked that because everybody's wondering about CenturyLink and SAP relationship. In fact, let me go back in time here. Few years back, I would say five years back, CenturyLink acquired Cognalytics. Cognalytics was all about deep HANA expertise, deep analytics, and all about BA strategy. And then recently, a couple of years back, they acquired Seal Consulting. So these two organizations which CenturyLink acquired, that gave us a deep roots into SAP ecosystem in terms of what CenturyLink and SAP can work together. Now let's look at Cognalytics. They were all about HANA, core HANA expertise. They co-innovated with SAP in terms of their HANA analytics. They came out with a number of use cases in terms of predictive science. And then when they acquired Seal Consulting, it was all about S4 HANA transformation, which is absolutely the theme across this sapphire and for all SAP customers globally. So from Seal perspective, which is now, of course, part of CenturyLink, but now we can provide infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, OSDB as a service, which is already part of CenturyLink. Now with that, with Seal and Cognalytics coming in play, we are end to end shop in terms of SAP strategy, digital transformation strategy using SAP tools and products, implementation upgrades, application management services, and continual improvement as part of the digital transformation every customer is looking for. So I think that's how we are using the strategic assets of CenturyLink as part of the SAP expertise coming in play. So every customer, digital transformation to any business is just, you got to do it, right? Or you will lose relevance and go out of business and we've seen a lot of incumbent retailers, for example, go away because they haven't been able to transform digitally. I read a stat recently that said 70% of digital siloed, digital transformation projects fail. So how does CenturyLink and your expertise with SAP, S4, with HANA, how do you help customers be successful? Do you come in and see these siloed projects that maybe Shadow IT had evolved and help them to break down those silos so that they can actually facilitate what it is that they need, which is that 360 degree view of their customers, what they want, when they want it, to be able to predict what they're going to want next. How do you help break down those silos? Right, now I think this is a known problem, known challenge across all of the customers who are embarking this journey. I'll tell you what, I'll give you a simple, the way we work, our digital strategy is very much aligned with our customers' business and IT goals. So what we do first and foremost is we want to align ourselves with what the business and IT goals are. Let's double-click on that, right? So if I look at the business goals for most of the customers today, A, they want to make sure they want to protect the revenue stream, right? B, they want to make sure they have real-time position, no latency in terms of their business decision-making, right? And C, they want to make sure that they go into the new markets. They just can't stay siloed in the same market there. Plus, know the unfamiliar competition which comes up many times. So that's the business aspect of the goals. We want to look at that and make sure that we align our implementation, our strategy, those business goals. If I look at IT side of that, and I'll tell you what, these are the things which are being missed out with most of the partners in this ecosystem. So if I look at the IT side of it, first and foremost, we want to make sure that IT goals are, it's all about innovation. They want to be innovative. They want to have minimal shelf-wear so that they can innovate all the time. They want to evolve the resources so they are aligned with the lines of business all the way. That way everybody has a career path and they are evolving to the market needs. And lastly, it's all about making sure that all the mundane tasks, if I look at, they need to focus on core competency and offload all the routine tasks. And we very much aligned as part of the journey to those business and IT goals. So if you look at our mission, just look at our mission in terms of overall central length for SAP customers. We want to provide them a private, managed, secured cloud, which is scalable, which can be commissioned in a week's time with full automation, completely secured, data protected, and an uptime of 99.99%. And take care of all the lights on kind of routine tasks so they can focus on their main core competency about business decision, new business, business process design, and things like that, which have been lagging behind. So that's our key theme in terms of how we drive all the SAP integration. So there's a lot of complexity behind getting this much value out of any platform, whether it's complexity at the data analytics layer, whether it's the networking that needs to be done, the design and deployment of a NetApp stack. We're in a conference where all the hyperscalers are here. Yes. The company's smaller than central length, provided it's larger than central length. How is central length uniquely positioned to basically go to whether it's a Fortune 100 customer or someone down level to basically add value where these other providers potentially will struggle with. All right, now I think it's very true. We need to be nimble. I mean, you know, we can be a big ship, but should not take time to turn. And I completely agree with that. I think what we do is, I tell you, one of the unique positions we have in this market space is, I can, you know, we can proudly say that we are, we don't need to go to any third party when it comes to data center allocations. We have our own 500K lines of fiber optics. So network is where we provide, we can provide minimal latency from network perspective, right? We are all over the, we are 60 plus countries. We are into 350 metros. We can do a metro DR. I think if you look at our network, our hosting capabilities, our infrastructure capabilities, we are uniquely positioned compared, you know, what the customers need today as a one stop shop or a one hand to shake to make things happen for them, right? At the same time, we are very nimble for many customers because that's how central link has grown up. You know, they acquired us and we were 800 people company. So was the other acquisition as well. So we can very easily adapt, innovate, comprehend and adapt to the needs of the customers based on our core competency, our solutions which are available and strategy which is very much fitting most of our customers in the retail space, in CPG space, in manufacturing space, in healthcare and in life sciences. So we have some designated industry solutions as well which can help us to drive those values quicker. At the same time measurable. Being nimble, I think of, you know, being adaptive and being flexible, but adaptive struck up. Actually, Haso Plattner this morning in his keynote talked about SAP being adaptive in the context. I think he was talking about intelligence and everybody wants to paint intelligence all over everything and they talked about SAP being adaptive. That kind of aligns with something I read recently that Bill McDermott said which is where SAP was the last to accept the status quo. I think he was talking about it in relation to CRM specifically but the first to change it. So with that spirit of being nimble, of being adaptive, how are you helping customers adapt to needing to bring on, you know, edge core millions of devices or customers that go, you know what, I want to be able to use advanced technologies like AI to make, you know, my manufacturing smarter or to be able to start connecting my supply chain with demand chain. How are you harnessing that your adaptability to meet their needs on some of those emerging trends? Absolutely, this can be very overwhelming if you really look at what everybody's talking about. Where do you start with? I think we have been doing this for the last six years even before the keynote announcement to be honest to you guys. We have documented 60 to 70 use cases in this case. So what we do is when we approach a customer or a prospect, we come out with some specific use case for their line of business. It can be in a marketing campaign, it can be in a supply chain, it can be in financials, it can be in insurance. So depending on what the needs are, we have those documented use cases. So what we do is for each of these use cases, we break it down in terms of what problem are we going to solve? What is the problem definition? And for that problem definition, what's my use case? How do I solve this? What are the alternatives? And how do I reach to my measurable value of that solution? And then we have built in data models ready to go for each of these use cases behind the scene. So that helps us build something which is nimble because the data is available. We just need to customize to 20% of what the customer needs are and then provide that value right away. And once the pilot goes live for a small segment of user community, then we expand that to the larger audience to see the value of whether this is a predictive science, machine learning or just pure KPI driven analytics. So we do that and then we expand that. This is what we have done with number of Fortune 500 companies and we're really proud of what we do in terms of being big but being nimble. So speaking of being big, talk about customer engagement, not necessarily the actual customer conversations, but how do customers engage with Centrally? You know, one of the simple things that you look at the hyperscalers, I can go to the website and when I have a question, I can type it in and I'll get a script that answers me in an hour or so. What is the engagement model for interacting with Centrally for new customers? I think, actually let me go back on this one. I was reading a survey in a CIO magazine. Actually, there's a recent survey last year it was that around 1,000 plus CIOs who were interviewed and most of the CIOs, all the CIOs had SAP systems in their companies and 40% of them said they want to move from on-premise to cloud. Right there, that's our engagement strategy there, that we come as a one-stop shop for all these customers who are planning to move from on-premise to cloud. Why? Because number one, they want to reduce their capex, upfront reduction in your cost. They want to make sure that their steady-state cost for keeping the lights on is bare minimal. So whatever budget is left out, they can focus more on innovation. We take this sliver line of keeping the lights on and moving them from on-premise to cloud as part of our engagement strategy to start with. As we do that, they realize, customer realize that we are not just hosting partners, we just don't provide scalable private managed security cloud for our customers, but we can also do SAP implementation end-to-end, which is whether this is ACC upgrade to S4HANA or this is a digital strategy for S4HANA going forward or just HANA as a pure analytics tool or the different SAP suite of products, whether this is hybrid, whether this is Ariba or other suite of products which are very much in a SaaS model aspect of SAP. We support that end-to-end and our support model is based out of the United States. We have offshore centers in India. So globally, follow the Sun kind of approach. We do this between our number of units here in US and in India, that's our engagement strategy approach. So last question is, we're in the NetApp booth here at Sapphire now. Tell us about what CenturyLink, NetApp, SAP are doing within the context of automation. Oh, wonderful, yeah, great. That's important actually because I think if you really look at the pace of what customer needs today, the pace is changing so fast, you know. And in a typical SAP landscape, you want to commission a system, a development system or a production system within weeks or within days. Go on other days where you need two months and three months. I mean, you miss the business course for doing all these things. So what we have done is we want to get into the automation mode, you know, and we are heavily investing in that part with the help of Cisco UCS case. NetApp plays a very big role here in terms of providing their data-driven strategy, their hyper-converged infrastructure as part of the storage system, and working with another partner, Gnomec, to make sure that all these guys behind the scene have a very good orchestration layer to automate the whole process of building the infrastructure, building the application, building all the services, and handing it over to our, to the customer team for them to start the journey. So that whole cycle can be reduced by the automation. So I would say NetApp plays a big role there, no doubt about that because most of the IT organizations are data-driven today. The SAP workloads are changing, and you can't wait for those change manually to be operated, you know. So these are all application-driven workloads with changes, you know, which can adapt and, you know, to all these changing workloads. And this is where we are going right now in terms of automation. Well, thanks so much, Janash, for stopping by. I wish we had more time, but talking to us about what CenturyLink is doing with SAP, with NetApp, for example, to help customers on this arduous digital transformation journey. We appreciate your time. Thank you so much. I mean, this was great. Thank you. Enjoy the rest of the day. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAP Sapphire 2018. Thanks for watching.