 Okay, we're back here live at Sapphire. This is SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage of Sapphire. Now I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm Joe, my co-host on this segment. David Floyer, the co-founder of wikibond.org. Great free research. Sathe Krishnaswamy, he's here, the CEO of a startup, Next Principles. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Obviously, you guys are in the ecosystem of SAP. And one of the stories that the CEOs are talking about is people building on top of SAP. And it's part of the third of their revenue they're projecting currently on top of HANA. New green field, a new use case opportunity. So you guys are in the social analytics, social CRM, hybrid, kind of a new category where real time information is really critical for businesses. And understanding the data and understanding what to do with the data is a really big thing. And making it actionable is always the buzzword you hear. And obviously the future of marketing, as we always talk about in theCUBE, is engagement. Right, so you can't engage, but you don't understand. And that's a big problem. So explain how you see that market. Okay, so I think, as you said before, John, the whole space is noisy. There's a whole lot of confusion in terms of what, whether you're in analytics or engagement and so on. And I think what we've started seeing from Next Principles is from day one, we've designed this to be such a platform in such a way that users can not only do the analysis, but also then take action to your point about being able to take action. So the idea here is that you don't want the users to first of all be confronted with a solution that is so complex to use, that they either decide to ignore it or outsource it. The second thing is once they do the analysis and they understand what they want to take action on, they're able to take the action seamlessly from within that same platform. And the third important point which I would like to add on here is also the point that companies are getting past the hype cycle as far as social is concerned. And realizing that social cannot be treated in a silo, it needs to be a set of touch points that is integrated with all other touch points for their customers. So the integration with backend systems such as CRM also becomes important and that's something that we've also put in place from day one. Coming to your other point around SAP HANA and the ecosystem, we were fortunate to be invited as one of the first group of startups to participate in the SAP HANA startup focus program. And having spent almost 15 years at SAP, I must say there is a very, very innovative program. I'm actually very impressed with the progress they've made and the kind of help and cooperation that starts getting from that program. The way we are using HANA, the way we are participating in this program is that we are using HANA not just in terms of sort of the real-time in-memory portions, but SAP has started putting on a whole lot of other sophisticated capabilities into HANA. And one of the first ones is the text analytics library that they acquired through their business objects deal. So we are using the text analytics library within HANA to enable automated sentiment analysis for our business users, whether they are in marketing or customer service or sales. The startup program, talk a little bit about that for a second. Do they give money or is it more incubation? How does that work? It's more like incubation, so essentially they do not give money. What they do is, startups are invited to participate in the program. They have to pass some initial hurdles in terms of qualification criteria. They have the technical chops wasting their time. Yeah, exactly, technical chops, use cases which are relevant to the entire domain that HANA is playing in. But once they are in the program, and this program continues to evolve, but what happened to us was once we were in the program, not only did we get a whole lot of technical enablement about HANA for our team, because obviously we don't have a huge team, so we needed to make sure that we got our resources. How big is your team? We have a total team of eight based out of the Bay Area. Okay, got it. So they provide the technical training, they provide access to resources as far as the technology is concerned. The second important thing is also that then there is a whole lot of engagement from a marketing perspective. So wherever they get an opportunity to present what the startups are doing, they've been doing that, and I think a very important part there is the fact that Vishal repeatedly talks about the fact that it's not just about HANA being used for SAP's own apps, but how other companies are building innovative use cases on top of HANA, and therefore the startup focus program is very important for them from a marketing perspective. There is a third part where they've started helping and this is important for startups like us, which is also access to their customer install base. Because some of the customers are looking for the kind of solutions that these startups are producing. And in a large complex organization like SAP, it's not always easy to get a direct access back to the customer, but they have now just recently started a program to help us access those customers. And also SAP wants to integrate into their systems because they've been promoting social, I mean, Bill McDermott's on stage always talking about socials, the new dial tone is what he said. What are some of the integration challenges that you see social having? I think the key thing really is, and this is not specific to SAP, but I think the key integration challenges really are firstly around the volume of data that we're capturing. So there's a bunch of data, and we were just talking a few minutes ago about the whole signal to noise ratio. There's a bunch of noise, the signals are very far and few in nature. So how do you pull that out and then make sure that you're able to integrate the right types of data with what exists within the transactional systems, such as within SAP or other back-end transactional systems, including other CRM systems? So I think the volume of data, the ability to identify, for example, information across these channels. So if there's a customer who interacts with you over Twitter and the same customer has interacted with you over the call center or email, how do you go about making sure that you are pulling these two contacts together in the right manner? So those are more of the traditional master data management type of issues that are coming up again within the context of social. So you were talking about your go-to-market strategy as being SaaS software as a service. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Why did you choose that strategy as opposed to the traditional on-premise or download? In fact, frankly, David, I don't think there was even a moment's discussion about that internally, because the way the market is progressing, the way we are looking at enabling these sort of services to be used by the business users themselves, I think the whole concept of having these big monolithic systems that need to be installed on-premise, implemented over a period of a few months or years, and then having IT to handhold these users is not just going to work, especially in a fast-moving area like social business, where the business users need access to the information themselves, when they need it, how they need it. So we decided early on that SaaS was the only way we were going to go. And in fact, interestingly, in the very early stages of HANA, that was one of the challenges, because HANA initially came out as an on-premise software. But what they've done now is based on inputs from many people, including startups like us, we essentially gave feedback to SAP, saying it's great that HANA is on-premise, but we really need it to be on the cloud for it to work for us and for us to come out with innovative use cases. So they heard that feedback, and they've actually now deployed HANA, they call it HANA 1, so they have actually deployed that on the cloud, and that's the instance that startup-like next principles are using to enable the capabilities of HANA. So how have they implemented that? I mean, if you look at SAP's attempts in child, it's been really multiple instances, or one instance per customer, they haven't had much multi-tenant analysis. So this is one of the first forays into Amazon. So they have actually implemented HANA on AWS with the intent of making it available to companies, especially the smaller startups, which need to have that available for consumption as a service. Right, so they're using AWS, but what about the multi-tenant capability? Is it one instance per customer, or how do you? No, it's not one instance per customer, and even from our perspective, our own app is multi-tenant as well, so we don't have to have multiple instances, so therefore we don't need multiple instances of HANA either. So think of it as daisy-chained multi-tenant apps that are working together. Okay, excellent. How are you guys doing the sentiment analysis? I'm just looking at your little Twitter here. I can see Furrier made it. I made it. How do you guys look at the social data when it comes in to get the sentiment analysis? Are you guys automating it about keyword? Is there any technology? Yeah, so essentially the sentiment analysis is a key capability that's being enabled through HANA. So HANA is not just about the database, like I said, they've added on a text analytics library that essentially drives some of the semantic structures and the rules and the definitions of the dictionaries which we're using to derive the sentiment. So you're leaning on HANA for the analytics component on the front end. Just one part of the analytics, which is the sentiment part. One part, the sentiment piece. So HANA is powering that, and also all the benefits of HANA. And then you guys from a development standpoint and growth is to really focus on the integration. Is that the business model? In terms of, no, for us, the business model is not just about the technical model. So the technical model, when you say integration, are you referring to the integration with HANA or to other systems? Okay, so you're ingesting data from the outside. Twitter data, Facebook data, social channels coming in. And by categorizing that, automating it, you're doing any classification or just straight up HANA? Is HANA the only piece there? No, so we have very good questions. So the way it works is the framework is we pull in data from all these public social channels. We have a whole lot of analytics IP that we've built ourselves in the platform. So some of those charts that you're looking at right now are actually built out using our own analytics capabilities. In addition, we've enhanced the analytics capabilities by using HANA for the sentiment portion. So sentiment is a subset of the analytics that we provide, but a lot of the other IP that you see out here in the app has been built by ourselves. And that's what classification is managing the data volume? Well, it's managing the data volume to me is more of an infrastructure issue. Whole lot of dimensions that we actually classify or help our business users navigate through is not just about who is saying something but who they're saying it to, what are they saying, in what context, and so on. And that's why all the different analytics that you see here are meant to help them answer those different questions from different dimensions. Got it. And then so that's one piece of the business. That's one piece of the business. And then the other piece of the technology that you guys are building is the integration piece you mentioned about the actionable. Exactly right. So once you do the analysis, so let's say for example, a person in marketing is looking at a chart like this that you're looking at, what do you do next? You want to take some action. So let's say for example, you want to respond back onto Twitter just to take Twitter as an example channel. You want to respond back to Twitter or you want to create new content because there's something coming up that you're seeing and you want to counter that with new content. You can do the response or both publication of new data using our solution, right? But that is only one part of taking action. The second part of taking action is you might also decide that, hey, this particular tweet actually needs to go to our customer service team because this is something that they need to answer. But the customer service team is using a CRM system to manage all the incoming service tickets and cases. So we enable that integration to seamlessly take place. Got it. Okay, yeah, because this is getting at the heart of kind of what we were talking about on camera. You know, in emerging markets like social, everyone likes to put things into buckets and really there's two buckets that are known now, social analytics and social CRM. And there's some consumer facing buckets for the most part, this is a business value proposition. So, okay, so you don't fit into either one. You're kind of in both or is there a new bucket? What would you call the bucket? I would love to spend some marketing resources coming up with a new category name but as a startup, I don't think, yeah. How do you compare yourself with Radeon 6 and people like that? Well, I would say that today, just like in other parts of enterprise software, the market started out with a whole lot of vendors and essentially creating a huge amount of noise. But just like in the days of traditional CRM, what is essentially coalesced into are two big silos. There's a silo around the listening and analytics and there's a silo around the engagement. Radeon 6, at least what we've seen and what we've heard from the market firmly belongs to the first, which is around the analytics. But like I said, a few key things like the ability to have the business users consume the analytics in a simple self-service manner and the fact that then they can take action and the fact that they integrate this to backend CRM systems are the ways in which we are different from folks in the first generation like Radeon 6. And I think just to add on to that, David, a testament of the whole self-service capability we built in is every one of our customers and we have some complex, large organizations as paying customers, including two of the big pharma companies, each one of these companies has gone live with our solution in two hours or less. And that I think is validation of the fact that we pay a lot of attention to how do we make this as simple as possible for business users to consume. Right, excellent. So on the value proposition, obviously they always say that the business value is a big conversation. So when you talk to a customer, what's the big thing that you talked about? Or what are the big three problems that they have? Okay, so I think the first problem that most companies are facing today is that the good news for us is that the hype cycle is over from a social perspective. So we no longer have just the vanity metrics like likes and impressions that are important. The hard questions are now being asked. So how do we go about actually enabling them? Okay, well we got a break, we got a press conference here. So we're a part of our CUBE thing here. Sorry to interrupt you Satay, but we got to go to the press conference. So we're going to the press conference live now from SAP, next principle is hot start up here in SAP, congratulations. Integrating into the CRM's and bringing social, we'll be right back with more content after this break.