 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018, brought to you by NetApp. Hi, welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, and we are with NetApp in their booth at SAP Sapphire 2018. Welcoming Mike McGivney to theCUBE from SAP, you're the SVP of Success Factor Service, Delivery and Operations. Welcome. Well, thank you. So, Success Factor's largest people cloud in the world. So, you're probably a little bit busy. Just a little bit. Tell us about what you're doing at Success Factor. So, I'm responsible for the delivery and operation of the cloud service. So, we service all of our customers and continue to introduce new capabilities into that cloud. We support them from payroll, all the way through recruitment, basically from hire to retire. So, Mike, not your first cloud, little background history. Me and Mike have been on one of the, probably one of the toughest projects politically I've ever been on. Yes, definitely. So, there's history, but great history. We deliver success. This isn't your first cloud. No. You've built clouds before. What's fundamentally different about the SAP people cloud versus clouds you've built in the past? I think the speed, the way this is accelerating both the breadth of the capabilities that we're offering when you think about the integrations into SAP and the growth. So, this is moving truly at cloud speed. The things that we're shooting for today are already past, right? So, we constantly have to be focused out there on the horizon. We've got to adapt very quickly and we've got to implement very quickly. Our customers need it to accelerate their business and our services need that support underneath them as well. So, you guys, as you said, have this long history, so I'll let you guys chat in a minute, but in terms of customer experience, customer engagement, customer influence, that was kind of a lot of undertone in the keynote this morning. 50 million business users on success factors in 60 industries. How do you, needing to get to the speed that you just mentioned, how do you get that customer feedback to drive evolution of the product as fast as they're demanding it? Well, so that the product and engineering team have a whole system around customer engagements with delivery panels and steering committees. But from the operation side, we felt it was important as well. We have a whole organization that is focused on engaging the customer. We built our operational centers and we do probably about 60 customer tours a year through our operational centers. We also do about 200 customer calls from the operational team a month. So globally, we work with the pre-sales, the CE groups and some of the other SAP support groups to make sure that we have boots on the ground, understanding what our customers want, understanding what their experience is, so we can continue to adjust and reset the bar where it needs to be. So Lisa, I'm not going to dominate the conversation. Me and Mike can probably crack open the beer in a minute and we'll continue. But there's other hero numbers on the stage. Let's talk about the high level first and then me and Mike can geek out. What are some of the other excerpts from Beals? Oh, good question. I think just some of the industries. I always like to see which industries are kind of your leading edge here. So he mentioned 23,000 HANA users and 25 different industries. And I'm curious, that's a lot. And I'm curious to see what some of the key use cases are that you guys are driving with helping some, you know, customers in many industries said hire to retire. What are some of the key use cases that you're helping those customers to drive? Well, I think we have a good presence in about every vertical from both the public and the private sector. The suite of tools that we have kind of service, you know, the entire, each of those use cases. I think when you start to think about the SAP suite and the integration story that they talked about with the intelligence and the analytics on top, that just takes it to another level. I think that's really the underlying important message, I think, and that's what's going to help not only success factors, but SAP continue to drive and lead across the board. So can we talk a little bit about customer interaction? I think traditionally you've served up infrastructures to developers directly, but a lot of cases your direct customer may be an actual business user looking to transform digitally. How, talk about the experience, the difference in the experience of running the cloud that was consumed by other technologies to potentially run in the cloud that's centered on people who are thinking about people and customers. Yeah, that's a great question because these are business critical activities. You think about something like learning, right? That's used to certify pilots before they can take off. So we can actually, the availability and the delivery of that service is critical. Large amusement parks have to certify all the ride handlers. So this thing has to be available 24 by seven, 365 days a week. And that's just something like learning. When you think about some of the other facets, they are entrenched in our customers' modern business processes, and they're all critical. So when we look at these, we have to look at them like we used to, some of the most critical functions in the backend. So we run them like you would from an operational perspective like a bank, right? With that resilience, those practices, that focus. But we also have to do it at the speed of cloud. I was just going to ask that question. Yeah, yeah. You know, you have two competing episodes. You know, I like the, well, people, SAP processes, 70% of the transactors of the world. It has been called the catch register of the cloud. It is the ultimate system of record. Therefore, it should never be touched. However, we have to move fast. We have to digitally transform. There are commercial entities that want to build who new applications on Fiori, et cetera. There's other business integrations. How do you weigh those to what seems like competing interests? I think Burt laid out the data strategy and how we're going to integrate the data across the suite. And that's going to be the key, right? Instead of integrating and pointing to, we're going to have single sources of data where data is going to reside. We're going to use that as a system of record. As the suite evolves, that'll give it the data integrity that it needs. Also the performance and integration perspective. So we're sponsored by the data driven company in NetApp who is powering one of the most powerful data platforms on the planet, SAP. Talk about the relationship and the importance of NetApp. NetApp vision and supporting your vision. So NetApp was here at SAP long before I started, but I have probably a 20 year, or probably 17 to 20 year history with NetApp. And data is critical, right? The storage, the access, the performance. And they've been a critical part of almost every architecture I've worked on today, right? Rock solid performance, rock solid reliability. But more important to me is the partnership with the company and the support that we get, not just on the stuff that we're doing today, but thinking about how we're going to change in the future and supporting us as we evolve and helping us plan and think through that as well. One of the things that Bill talked about this morning as well is getting to this fourth gen of customer experience. With these expectations, we've talked about speed, that everything has to be done yesterday, right? How are you guys working with NetApp delivering that fourth generation customer experience internally and to your 50 million business users? Well, I think you touched on bits and pieces of it. It's a whole suite of, or it's a whole program of plans, right? Between Fury, all those things in the front end where the customer touches. But in the back end, it's about speed and reliability to their data, right? So our architectures are getting simplified, our data's getting condensed, right? We need the compliance pieces and that's where NetApp's going to play a core role in those pieces. So back in traditional infrastructures and operations, we could tout speeds and fees as one of the best features of why you should use one service or another. As you extract the way everyone expects speeds and fees, what are some of the value props or KPIs for your new environment? So we've really shifted, right? So one of the things that we've done is we've actually added operational intelligence. So we have basically a brain that sits on top of our cloud environment. It looks at all of the transactions, it filters out all the noise. So the speeds and feeds are part of now a service or a business function that we're delivering. That metric down by itself is important, but unless you can correlate it to some business impact or something happening, it doesn't really have the weight that it needs. So now what we're looking at is we've ingested and mapped all of the business transactions. We can proactively focus on the ones so we filter out 99 and change percent of the noise and then we pro-rate the things that we need to kind of pivot and focus on. We have three global operational centers around the world, one in Budapest, one in Bangalore and one in Reston. And then we have a global operation center that sits on the top. So the regionals sit in the region and they look at all of that feedback from that intelligence. So getting those key performance indicators out of the system, as I look at LinkedIn, I look at some of the common folks we have, you have a pretty consistent core team that supported you over the past two or three different major iterations you've done. Talks through how collectively, your team has looked at new innovations and operations delivery such as DevOps and you've changed the way that your core team approaches these challenges and the outcomes that you've been able to realize. So for us, it's about the architecture and technology evolves. As it evolves, it makes a few things simpler. It also introduces some usually more complex challenges. But it's mitigating risk, delivering performance and reliability. And maturing your actions. So if we do those basic things as we mature the technology underneath, we can drive that. So the team has been focused on, when we think about DevOps, we think about delivering seamlessly new capabilities features into the cloud. How do we do that and minimize risk and do it through automation and seamless, right? So it's how we segmented the application, how we built the resilience and how our processes understand and validate and be able to stand in if something happens. I'm wondering on that front, maybe a pivot is, we talk about oftentimes different events, whether we're talking about, advanced analytics or data science skills gap. Or, I think Bill even said upskilling, I think I heard that term this morning. I'm curious as you were saying that the folks that you've been working with for a long time on different projects, what are some of the skills that they're able to, you may be able to enable them to learn by being part of SAP. Is it something that helps accelerate their ability to develop even better, more competitive products? Yeah. So SAP has one of the best talent pools I've ever seen across. Some very brilliant people in every business line. So there's best practices that can be learned from everything that we do, right? So all you have to do is be able to have the conversations and look around. When we brought the team in, about two years ago, we did a whole skills analysis, gap analysis of the skills that we had. We re-looked at our operating model, created a new operating model that was enabling us to evolve from an operational perspective and then put plans in place and use the tools that we sell to help deliver development to the team. So basically, we became our own customer. We drove development of upskilling our existing resources, and we supplemented where needed, and we also pulled from the collective knowledge of SAP. So doing those three things helped us really accelerate and execute something that typically would take three years in less than 12 months. Last question, Mike, for you. This morning's energetic keynote, we've talked about it a number of times already today. Really, I think somebody on the show earlier said, like Bill McDermott, too, kind of really an evangelist, which is really refreshing. You don't see a lot of sea levels that are that, where you can feel and kind of see their passion. SAP's been very vocal for a while about really wanting to disrupt the marketplace for CRM. Some big news coming out today. I'm just wondering kind of culturally, to wrap this up, what excites you about this train that you're on at SAP? Well, I think that the message is electrifying, and inside of SAP, you feel that, right? So we've been feeling it as these bits and pieces have been coming out over the last year. So this is just the culmination of all the little pieces that we've known inside, and we're able to share externally. So I'm extremely excited about where we're at and where we're going. And obviously, at any time I get to hear Bill speak, it just amplifies it. Yeah, that energy was really, you could feel it from wherever you are, it was awesome. So, Mike, thanks so much for stopping by and catching up with your old buddy Keith and me, and sharing what you guys are doing with SuccessFactors. Excellent, excellent. Thank you very much. Oh, sorry, and thanks for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAP Sapphire in the NetApp booth, thanks for watching.