 It's theCUBE, covering Sapphire Now 2017. Brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform and HANA Enterprise Cloud. Hello everyone, welcome to the special CUBE conversation covering SAP Sapphire 2017 in Orlando. I'm John Furrier here for special coverage. Our next guest is Margaret Anderson, Senior Vice President of the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. Thanks for joining me today, talking about the news and the relationship what's happening around Sapphire. A lot of great things are happening. One of the super exciting things that we're seeing is this notion of multi-cloud and this notion of customer value. Starting to see some visibility into a clear line of sight around how the technology in the cloud can be put into use. You guys have some exciting news around some of your partnerships with Cisco and CenturyLink. Tell us about that. Yeah, we're very excited about that in the sense that customers are always asking us why the cloud and why now? Why don't I just stay with what I have? And we keep telling them that as technology changes, we want to be on top of it for them and they don't have to think about it, they just have to use it. So we're making it easier for them to consume our technology, but for us to be able to do that, we need partners. We need partners that can be the backbone inside the cloud because the cloud is supported by equipment, machinery, systems, all sorts of things that we don't really want the customer to have to worry about that. We want the customer to consume the services. We want them to run their business. So when we formed this partnership with the Cisco and the CenturyLink team, the best thing about it is the fact that we have a partner who creates the engine, who puts together our Hannah Reference architecture, who sets everything up so the customer doesn't have to think about it. And then we have the CenturyLink team who provides all of the services. They make sure everything works. They listen to what the customer needs and they make sure it all runs together. This is important. I want to highlight this and I want to ask another follow-up question on that because I think this really speaks to the cloud transformation we're seeing, the digital transformation, whatever you want to call it. Certainly it's the cloud, it's data. And Bill McDermott's been on this for years. It's our eighth year covering Sapphire and he was showing data dashboards years ago. So he's been Notre Dame's in the whole vision there. But cloud's been a moving train and your customers and CenturyLink customers and Cisco customers are constantly questioning themselves around their relationships that they have and the business that they run. This is important because what you're highlighting is you guys have been no stranger to partnering. But now that the cloud stakes are high the value to the customer at CenturyLink is they can provide no disruption. And so I want to get into that a little bit. What at Sapphire is being announced that's going to help this? Well, I think that customers are always interested in global reach. Okay, they might be starting locally in one country and they want to know that when they partner with us SAP or that when we SAP partner with someone else to help us that when their business grows, we're ready for them and we can grow with them. And in the cloud, customers just assume that somewhere is all the equipment, right? Somewhere the cloud runs, but today security is really important for our customers. They want to know, can we comply with the rules for data sovereignty in various countries around the world? And they want to know if our partners, if we choose one to work with us can also do that for them. Just having a conversation with a group of experts and influencers this morning on our on our crowd chat digital platform. And the question that came up is, what's the biggest misconception of DevOps or cloud in the enterprise? And the number one question that came up was, oh, it's easy, that's the number one misconception. And it's not easy. There's a lot of things going on around compliance, governance, but also SLA performance around latency, little things like moving packets around and making applications bulletproof and security. How does this relationship with CenturyLink and Cisco make that a reality for customers so they can be confident that things are going to be secure and that these implementations going to be reliable? Well, first of all at SAP, we've defined a very specific reference architecture. So the Cisco team bills the environment for the customer according to that architectural standard. Our security team provides guidance on what the security standards have to be and between our CenturyLink team and our Cisco team, they have to make sure that those standards are deployed and that we are completely hack-proof. Because you know what? There is everybody out there trying to get into customer systems. Data is very valuable. Business knowledge could destroy you if a competitor could find something out about you, right? So we want to promise our customers that everything is secure and that we have a team of ace security experts and we all collaborate together to make sure that we can keep their environment safe. You know, cloud-enabled IT infrastructure and application development and all these SLAs that are required in the cloud are going to be interesting. On our next segment, we're going to have Cisco and CenturyLink on. What are they going to be saying? When we ask them about the relationship, what are some of the things that they're going to say about what this all means for SAP, Cisco and CenturyLink? Well, I think, you know, and I won't put words in anybody's mouth, but I know that the Cisco team is looking at the fact that they're doing a lot of business today on premise and customers are getting out of having their own data centers because it's not cost effective for them. So when the customer is thinking about the cloud and they happen to like the environment that they have, they want to know that they can have a similar environment in the cloud because realistically, customers still ask the question, what's under the hood? What am I getting? How do I know that you can provide these SLAs? What are you doing to guarantee me, you know, the 99.9 uptime, right? So customers do ask us those questions. Cisco has excellent answers for those questions and then they also ask the CenturyLink team, what is your expertise in HANA and what is your expertise in running all the other applications that I might want to consume from SAP? So it's the combination of the engine and the people that make the success in the cloud because that's how we deliver the service to the customers. And also to complicate things, I would say that the customers want things faster now. Yes they do. Faster latency and speed of solutions, but performance, but like deployments. I want it yesterday. That's a big factor. The deployments expectations for the customers are pretty high. Well, you know, sometimes the customers think that they can call us up and they can say, I'd like to do a cloud project. And then 24 hours later, magically all sorts of stuff can appear. That's not always the case because every customer has a unique set of things that they'd like to see in the cloud. When they tell us what they need and we recommend, you know, how to set it up for them, we work with them and when to deliver it. And I have worked with customers on some very large implementation complicated projects. It still requires the same amount of thought process from an implementation perspective when you do it on premise, as if you do it in the cloud. Because you still have to think about what you want to use and how you want to use it and when do you want to go live? Lots going on at Sapphire. Just to wrap up, we're going to bring on our guests from Cisco and CenturyLink in our next segment. Talk about this relationship. But just in general, what's your perspective of the things that are happening right now around Sapphire now 2017? What's the big exciting announcements if you could kind of generalize the theme? What's the sentiment? What's the aroma of the buzz? Well, I would think first of all, our new Leonardo announcement is going to generate an awful lot of excitement in the market and I'm not going to steal anybody's thunder by talking to somewhere about what that is. But I also think that customers want to know that we are keeping up and that we're ahead of more importantly, the technology trends. So when we have a big event like Sapphire, we make sure to have announcements keyed up and ready to go and each day we will tease them with releases of what some of this information is going to be so that it generates excitement because post Sapphire, we'll be doing a lot of follow up conversations with our customers. And I think one of the things I observe just as an anecdote to that is I think, I like SAP's always had a good strategy with the data as I mentioned with McDermott earlier, but I think the developer stake in the ground that was put in last year around with the iOS and the Apple kind of set the tone over the course of last year. Hey, we're going outside of the SAP traditional developer and we want to expand the reach of what a developer is. I think that cloud native view is very relevant. I think you're leading the charge on that. So congratulations. And we have converted what used to be the traditional on premise software code lines into cloud code lines. And that means a lot of work internally that people may not realize that you just don't take what you used to have and run one way and throw it into the cloud. You really have to think about and develop for specifically the cloud. Well, super impressive to see the partnership evolution where you're really bringing the big players in partnership delivering real value. Congratulations, Margaret. Thanks for coming on and in our next segment we're going to have Cisco and CenturyLink on to discuss the relationship with SAP, Cisco and CenturyLink. Great combination. Up and down the stack. Great benefit for customers. Again, thanks so much. This is theCUBE. More coverage of Sapphire now after the short break.