 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Reinvent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. Hello everyone, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS Reinvent 2020 with a special focus on the APN partner experience. I'm excited to have two great guests on the program. Fernando Castillo is the head SAP on AWS partner network and SAP Alliance at AWS. And Stephen Jones is the general manager, SAP EC2 Enterprise at AWS. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, great to see you. I'm here. So guys, SAP on AWS, it's a core workload for customers. I call it the poster child for mission critical workloads and applications. Now a lot has happened since we last talked to you guys. So tell us, maybe start with Stephen, what's going on with SAP on AWS? Give us the update. I appreciate the question, Dave. Look, a lot of customers continue to migrate these mission critical workloads to AWS. And a good example is the US Navy, right? Who moved their entire SAP landscape, ERP workload to AWS. This is a very large system that supports over 72,000 users across six different Navy commands. They estimate that 70 billion worth of parts and goods actually transact through the system every year. Just massive, right? And this type of adoption has continued to accelerate a very rapid clip. And today over 5,000 customers now are running SAP workloads on AWS. And they're really trusting us to manage and run these workloads. And another interesting stat here is that more than half of these customers are actually running SAP HANA, which is SAP's flagship in memory database. Right, Fernando, can you add to that? Sure, so that's not only about, you know, the customers are also SAP themselves continue to leverage AWS to run their own offerings, right? So think about Concord, SAP Cloud Platform, SAP Analytics, or even new offerings like HANA Cloud. In addition to that, we continue to see the SAP on AWS partner network to grow at an accelerated pace. So today we have over 60 SAP competent partners all over the world helping SAP customers. So as customers are migrating, their SAP landscape to AWS, they only look for reduced cost and performance, but also to gain access to new capabilities to innovate around their core business systems and transform their businesses. So Fernando, I wonder if we could stay with you for a minute. I mean, the numbers that Steve was putting out there, it's just massive scale. So you obviously have a lot of data. So I'm wondering when you talk to these customers, are you discerning any common patterns that are emerging? What are some of the things that you're hearing or seeing when you analyze the data? Sure. So just to give you a couple of examples, right? Our biggest customers are doing complete SAP transformations and to go with S4HANA, they are going to these new SAP ERP codename. All customers have immediate needs and they're taking their existing assets to AWS. So looking to reduce costs and improve performance, but also to set them on a path for innovation. And this innovation is something that aspirational, not something that they can wait. They need it right now. There's time to innovate this now, right? And some of these customers are saying that, well, SAP HANA is a path to that, it's a multi-year process. And most organizations don't have the luxury of waiting for this just before they start innovating. So instead of that, they focus on bringing what they have and start innovating right away. And Steve has some great stories around here. So maybe Steve can share with us those who does. Yeah, that'd be great, Steve. Yeah, look, I think a good example here, and Fernando touched on it well, right? So customers coming from all kind of different places in their journey to AWS as it relates to this critical workload. And some are looking to really reap the benefits of the investments they've made over the last couple of decades sometimes. And VISTA is a really good example here. They're a subsidiary of Koch Industries. They migrated and moved their existing SAP ERP solution called ECC to AWS. They estimate that this migration alone from an infrastructure cost savings perspective has netted them about 2 million per year. Additionally, you know, they started to bring some of the other issues they were trying to solve from a business perspective together now that they were on the AWS platform. And one thing they recognize is they had different data silos that they had been operating in a non-premises world, right? So massive factories solution and bringing all of that data together on a single platform on AWS and enriching that with the SAP data has allowed them to actually improve their forecasting supply chain processes across multiple data sources. And they estimate that that is saving them additional millions per year. So again, customers are not necessarily waiting to innovate, but actually moving forward now. All right, so I got to ask you, don't hate me for asking this question, but everybody talks about how great they are at supporting SAP. It's one of the top, of course, because SAP is a huge player in the application space. So I want you guys to address how AWS specifically compares to some of your competitors that are the hyperscalers specifically as it relates to supporting SAP workloads. What's the real differentiable value that you guys bring? Maybe Steve, you could start. Sure, you're probably getting to know us a little bit. We don't focus a lot on competition. As mentioned, we continue to see customers adopt AWS for SAP at a really rapid clip. And that alone actually brings a lot of feedback back into how we consider our own service offerings as it relates to this particular workload. And that's an important signal, right? For what we're building. But customers do tell us that security, performance, availability matters, especially for this workload, which, to be honest, is the backbone of many, many organizations, right? And we understand why. And there was a study that was done recently by IDC where they found that even a single hour of unplanned downtime as it relates to this particular workload could cost millions. And so it's super important. And if you look at publicly available data from an average perspective, AWS has considerably less downtime than the other hyperscalers out there. And we take the performance and availability of our entire global footprint. And in this workload in particular, super important. Well, you know, that's a great point, Steve. I mean, if you got mission critical applications like SAP supporting the business, it's driving revenue, it's driving productivity. The higher the value of the application, the greater the impact when it's down. I wonder, Fernando, you know, Steve said, you guys don't focus on the competition. Well, as an analyst, you know, I always focus on the competition. So I wonder if you're going to add anything to that. Sure. So again, as you can imagine, multiple analysts cover the space, right? And everybody shares information. And analysts have agreed that AWS leading infrastructure services includes specific quality for SAP across the globe. So we feel very humble and honor about this recognition and this encourages us to continue to improve ourselves. So if you have a couple of examples, for the 10th year in a row, AWS was evaluated as a leader in the particularly Garner Magic Quadrant, right? As for cloud infrastructure and platform services. And as you know, they measure to access, right? They measure ability to execute and completing sufficient. And we're the highest in both of them. Another third party just to not keep with one is ISG, right? You know all the technology research frameworks you really will, you might know, advice for framework as well. The reason they publish their SAP and infrastructure service provider length reports. Long name, which basically they analyze service providers but they suited to host SAP S for HANA workloads and more broadly SAP HANA landscapes, you know, very large-scale SAP HANA landscapes. So they recognize AWS for the third year in a row and consecutive, right? The best class enterprise-grade infrastructure towards security performance as Steve mentioned, but also making the product community as a key differentiation. And they posted, they mentioned AWS as a legal position in Quadrant for the US, UK, France, Germany, the North, and Brazil. So again, really honor and humble and these continue to encourage us to continue to improve. You know, Steve, I just wrote a piece on cloud 2030 trying to project what the next 10 years is going to look like. And one of the, I listed a lot of things, but one of the things I talked about was some of the technical factors like alternative processors, specialized networks. And you guys have really always done a good job of sort of looking at purpose-built, you know, stuff that can run workloads faster. How relevant is that in the SAP community? Oh, that's a great question, David. It's absolutely relevant. You take a look at what we've done over the years with Nitro and how we've actually brought the ability for customers to run on bare-metal infrastructure but still have that integrated native cloud experience that is absolutely applicable to an SAP workload. And we're actually able to, with that technology, bring the capability to customers to run these mission-critical workloads on instances with up to 24 terabytes of RAM, albeit bare-metal, but fully integrated into the AWS network fabric. Right, I mean, a lot of people, you know, need that bare-metal raw performance. And that makes sense that you've been, you know, prioritized such an important class of workload. It's not a surprise that, I mean, the numbers that you threw out are pretty impressive. So it's clear you're leading the charge here. Maybe you could share a little glimpse of what's coming in the future. Show us a little leg, Steve. Well, look, we know that infrastructure is super important to our customers. And in particular, the customers are running these mission-critical workloads, but there's a lot of heavy lifting that we also want to simplify. And so you've seen some indications of what we've done here over the years. ISG that Fernando mentioned actually called out, AWS is differentiating here, right? So for many years, we've actually been leading in releasing tools for customers to actually orchestrate and automate the deployment of these types of workloads. So SAP in particular, I mean, if you think about it, a customer who's coming to a hyperscale platform like AWS and having to learn what that means, plus understand all the best practices from SAP and AWS to make that thing really shine from a performance and availability perspective, that's a heavy ask, right? So we put a lot of work from a tooling perspective into automating this and making this super simple, not just for customers, but also partners. Anything you want to chime in on that, particularly on the partner side, Fernando? Sure, so this is super important for our partner community, right? As you can imagine, the tooling that we're bringing together to the market is helping these partners to move quicker, right? So they don't have to reinvent the wheel all the time. They will just take this and move and take it and move it forward. You can example, one of our partners in Europe pre-hosts that thanks to our long-tweet service, Steve just referenced, right? They were to create workloads in an automated way, speeding up the delivery time, 75% compression SAP environments. So you just imagine the impact of this. So a thing here that is important is our goal is to help customers and partners move quicker, removing any differentiated heavy lifting, right? And that's kind of the mantra of this group. You know, when you think about like what Doug Young was saying in the keynote, the importance of partners, and I've been on this kick about we've moved in this industry from products to platforms and the next 10 years is going to be about leveraging ecosystems, the power of many versus the resources of a few or even one as large as AWS. So partners are critical and I wonder if you could talk to the role that the network partners are playing and affecting SAP customer outcomes and strategies. Maybe Steve, you could take that first. Yeah, you bet. Look, we recognize that the migration and the management of these systems, it's complex, right? And for years, we've invested in a global community of partners, many partners who have been fundamental to SAP customer success over a couple of decades, right? And so there are some nuances that need to be realized when it comes to running SAP on a hyperscale platform like AWS. And so we've put a lot of work into making sure these partners are equipped to ensure customers have a really good experience. And I mean, in a recent conversation I had with the CIO of a large CPG company, he told me, he reflected that the partners really are the glue that kind of brings it all together for them. And just to share something with you, today our partners, our partner community network for SAP is actually helping over 90% of net new customers who are coming to migrate SAP workloads to AWS. So they're just absolutely critical. So Fernando, there's the M word, the migration, you know, it's, you don't want to unless you have to, but people have to move to the cloud. So what can you add to this conversation? Sure, Dave. So again, just to echo what Steve mentioned, right? Migration is super important. We have a group of partners that are right now specializing in migration projects and they have built migration factories. You may have seen some of them, they have been doing press releases through the whole year, saying that they are part of these and their special thoughts that are bringing to the, to helping customers adopt AWS. So they go through a next, you know, very detailed process. We call them map for SAP partners. So they have this incremental value on top of being SAP competitive partners, which I referred earlier. And this group has, as mentioned, you know, show additional capabilities to safeguard these migrations. And of course, we appreciate and respect and we have put investment programs for them to help them support their own customers in these migrations. But the SAP ecosystem on AWS, it's not about only migrations, right? One important topic that we need to acknowledge is as Steve mentioned, we have this great set of partner of customers that have trusted us or 5,000 through a year. And these customers are asking for innovation, right? They're asking us, how can the ecosystem help us innovate faster? So these partners are using AWS as a platform for innovation, creating new solutions that are relevant for SAP. They're basically helping customers modernize their business processes. So you can take an example like Accenture Data Lake Accelerator, where it's taking SAP information and data lakes to really harness the power of data there. Or Deloitte, you know, Kinetic Finance is helping, you know, deploy Central Finance, which is a key component of SAP. Or customer like, partners like Syntax that has created an industrial IoT offering that connects with the SAP core. So more and more you will see these ecosystem partners innovating on AWS to support SAP customers. You know, I think that's such an important point because for decades have been around for a while. It's the migrations are like this, oftentimes this forced march because maybe a vendor's not going to support it anymore or you're just trying to squeeze more cost out of the lemon. What you guys are talking about is leveraging an ecosystem for innovation. And again, that ties into the themes that we're talking about about, you know, Cloud 2030 in the next decade of innovation. Let's close guys, what can customers, SAP customers, AWS customers expect from reinvent this year? You know, maybe more broadly, what can they expect from AWS in the coming 12 months? Maybe Steve, you could give us a sense and then Fernando can bring us home. Sure, you bet. Look, this year, we've really tried to focus on customer stories, right? So we've optimized, there's a number of sessions here at Reinvent this year. We want customers and partners to learn from other customer experiences. So customers will be able to listen to Bristol Myers Squibb, talk about their performance, their experience, Zolando, Newmont and Volkswagen. And they'll all be talking about kind of different places where they are on this journey to Cloud and this innovation life cycle, right? Because it really is about choice and what's right for their business. And so we're pretty excited about that. Yeah, nice mix of representative industries there. All right, Fernando, bring us home, please. Sure, so again, as we think about 2021 and the future, a rest assured, we'll continue to invest heavily to make sure AWS remains the platform of innovation, right? And choice for SAP customers. Where a customer wants to move their existing investments and continue to add value to what they have already done for years or go to an export transformation. We're here to support their choice, right? And we're committed to that as part of our customer session culture. So we're super excited about the future and we're thankful for you to spend time with us today. Great guys, look at these are the most demanding workloads. We're seeing that rapid movement to the cloud is just going to accelerate over the coming years. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. Our pleasure, thank you. All right, and thank you for watching everyone. Keep it right there for more great content. You're watching theCUBE at AWS re-invent 2020.