 to theCUBE, special coverage of Sapphire Now. We're here in Palo Alto, Sapphire Now, SAP's premier conference in Orlando. We are in Palo Alto, we have folks on the ground in Orlando. Special three days of wall-to-wall coverage, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Taking you through all the action from our new studio in Palo Alto, 4,500 square feet, our chance to cover events when we can't get there in person. We certainly will cover it from here. And that's what we're going to be doing for the next three days. We're going to have stories on the ground. No stories, too small, we're going to chase them all down. We have people calling in, we have folks on the ground and they can be Skyping in, calling in, whatever it takes to get the story out to you we're going to do it. And certainly, expert coverage from inside the studio here. We've got George Gilbert from Wikibon. And a variety of folks who did not make it to Orlando, will be coming into Palo Alto to sit down and talk with us. I'm John Furrier, my co-host is Jeff Frick. Jeff, we'll do whatever it takes. We'll cover it from our studio. We'll go to Orlando virtually with the Twitter hashtag Sapphire Now. We're on that. We have folks on the ground. A lot of great news coming out of Sapphire. What do you think? I mean, you were just at Dell EMC World last week and the story was all about kind of hybrid cloud and customer choice. And it sounds like that's a recurring theme here at SAP where they've got a lot of cloud options based on what their customer wants to do. I mean, this sounds really bad to say for someone who follows the tech industry but I just think this digital transformation thing is just overplayed. But it's the groundhog's day moment. The movie just keeps replaying itself. Digital transformation, digital transformation. And again, just like every other commerce like Dell EMC World and every other one, digitally transforming your business is the theme. A little bit played. I would say business transformation is like I would say the next chapter of what's happening and what you see from these shows specifically at Dell EMC World, US Service Now, OpenStack, all the different events. Red Hat Summit, the ones we've been going to this past couple of weeks is the business impact of the technology. And SAP highlights that with their results and their keynotes and the news that are drops today which is, look it, they have been doing SAP for all the top companies powering with SAP as an Oracle but now the customers want to go beyond the legacy SAP. And this has been a challenge for SAP over the past five years. They've had all the right messaging, digital dashboards, real time for business all there but the problem was they were missing a big piece of it. That is cloud native and really aligning with the explosive growth of cloud computing, cloud native, which is the new application developer. This new class of developers emerging and that's different than the in-house SAP guys by the way which is still a massive market. That's the big trend and of course, machine learning, AI, the kinds of design tooling that you'd expect to see, they're calling that Leonardo. I think it really shows the power of the consumer and the impact that the big public clouds have had on the marketplace with Google and with Amazon especially Microsoft as well coming into play. And I think what's interesting on the SAP tact is they have their own cloud but now they are very aggressively following up on an earlier announcement at Google Cloud Platform Show with more announcements at this show and then they continue to strengthen their relationship with Amazon. So it's a pretty interesting place if you're an SAP customer really having options around what cloud and what cloud deployment is really no longer an argument. You've got a lot of options at the very different than Oracle which is still pretty much exclusively Oracle on the Oracle clouds, very different kind of attack. Yeah and just reading the hard news from hitting the ground today down in Orlando is the key points I'll just summarize it real quick. Expanded SAP Leonardo, digital innovation system. SAP Google expand the strategic partnership. SAP Cloud Platform accelerates adoption, improves choice, advances consumption for customers. That essentially is it and there's a lot of other subtexts going on, Honda Enterprise Cloud, a lot of other massive pockets. But in terms of top level news, it's Leonardo, okay, Leonardo da Vinci, dead creative genius, okay. But that is all about providing the tools for business to be successful in a digital world. But to me, the big story, Jeff, is the transformation of what used to be called the Honda Cloud Platform to SAP Cloud Platform. This is their platform as a service bet around winning the new developers, the cloud native. Last year at Sapphire, we actually had theCUBE on the ground, they announced a deal with Apple Computer around iOS and developers. That now has shipped as a general availability so you're seeing SAP bringing two worlds together. The cloud native world, which they never played in much to the SAP ecosystem, which is flush with cash. There's a ton of money to be made in that world. The install base is massive. Now you have the cloud computing hybrid cloud with the Honda Cloud Platform. I mean, the SAP Cloud Platform to bring that in. Again, I still can't even get it right. Well, so let's just break it down as simply as you can, John, why do they change a name and what exactly do they have today? Well, here's the first of all problem. I'm so used to saying Honda because they've been branding Honda for the decade. It's just like in my brand, I just can't get it out. SAP Honda, and they actually called it Honda Cloud Platform before. Right, right. With Honda is such a massive set of capabilities that they really wanted to break out the platform as a service, which is the cloud native play where all the action is for developers. From Honda, a viable product that they have that everyone's using. So they have two clouds that we can say. SAP Cloud Platform, that's the cloud native, and then Honda Enterprise Cloud. One's a delivery mechanism, one's a developer environment. That's the way I like to think about it. I'm a Honda customer. I'm going to need Enterprise Cloud to take my Honda solution and extend it up with self-service, provisioning, some partnerships with AWS, Google, all the different clouds, getting my legacy Honda Enterprise software to be cloud enabled. That's Honda Enterprise Cloud. SAP Cloud Platform is for folks who don't like DevOps, the cloud native world that we cover it deeply. Okay, then how do you look at the Google partnership, Google Cloud Platform versus AWS partnership? SAP is going dual track. Is it just simply to have choice based on whether they're customers or are they fundamentally different relationships? How do you read that? This is where I think SAP's got genius going on, but if they might screw it up because they can't get out of their own way. Can't use genius anymore if you have enough genius. This could be a brilliant strike of move for SAP. I think it's a brilliant move in the way they're playing it out. But again, like I said, SAP, they might not be able to get out of their own way. That's going to be their issue. But from a functionality standpoint, this multi-cloud opportunity, they've been with Amazon for many, many years. They announced a partnership with Google which is just kind of toe in the water. That's trying to advance pretty quickly, not a lot of meat on the bone there. And Azure relationship. So SAP wants to put their cloud platform, their platform as a service, in all the different major clouds so that their legacy can work on-prem and in whichever cloud the customer chooses. I think that is a multi-cloud strategy that is viable for SAP. Unlike, say, Oracle, which isn't multi-cloud, it's Oracle Cloud. So the SAP Oracle head-to-head thing has been kind of like taking completely different paths. Someone will be right. But I think there's more meat on the bone with the Google thing than maybe we know of or you're aware of or whatever. I mean, Brent did come and get in the keynote with Diane Greene at Google Cloud Platform. And I think it's relatively significant. Well, it'll be interesting to see how it shapes out. And again, what are the customer choices that are going to drive them to Amazon or to the SAP Cloud or to the Google Cloud? I guess at the end of the day, it's about choice. And I know that was a big theme at Dell EMC World is that everyone has to cater to the choice of the customer or else it's just too easy for them to flip a lot of these other clouds. I mean, when I say not ready for primetime, I mean, Google's got a lot of work to do. SAP as a company is not for as far down the road with Google as they are with Amazon and Azure, just to make my point clear. But they are announcing additional certifications of the co-innovation between SAP and Google between SAP Cloud Platform and Google Cloud Platform, IoT, machine learning, they certified SAP Netweaver and a variety of S4 HANA business warehousing, essentially more marketplace to accelerate the digital transformation. And again, this is all about SAP co-locating in Google. And if a customer wants to take advantage of TensorFlow and all the goodness of say Google, that's a good move for SAP. And again, I think this is a billion strategy for SAP if they don't screw it up. Right, right. And potentially that's the bridge to, like you said, it's been a little bit of a groundhog day with Cloud Cloud Cloud, but what's really the theme of 2017 is AI and machine learning. And it's an interesting bridge with Google Cloud to their TensorFlow as another way to bring AI and machine learning into the applications. Pretty interesting way to attack it. So Jeff, we've been covering a lot of events. One comment I will say is that SAP always has great messaging. And I got to say, this has been covering our eighth year covering Sapphire now. We've only missed it like two years over that time span. It's a lot like Oracle in the sense that it's a very business-oriented event, but they have good pulse. Bill McDermott, great communicator. He, great customer-focused person, always has his hand on the pulse. They have great messaging. And they tend to pick the right waves and they've had some false starts with Cloud. They've had some acquisitions, things been cobbled together, but they've never wavered from their mission. And the mission has always been powering the speed of business, great software solutions. The issue is they're moving off of SAP to new Cloud solutions. So SAP is taking a proactive strike to say, look it, we can play in the Cloud, therefore this multi-Cloud game is critical for the growth of SAP in my opinion. But how much of the SAP in Cloud will be new Greenfield opportunities where people want the flexibility in a lot of the attributes of Cloud versus they're not migrating old R3 instances into the Cloud. I mean, this is I would assume mainly new Greenfield opportunities. Well, I think it's both, right? I mean, I think you have Greenfield developers basically that are being hired by their customers to build apps, top-line driven apps and also some consolidation apps. But mainly their customers are hiring developers. Hey, we need a mobile app for our business so you need to have data, you need to have some domain expertise, but at the end of the day the system of records probably stored in some SAP system somewhere. So what they're trying to do is decouple the dependency between that developer but still use SAP and offer an extension of SAP. It really is an opportunity in my mind for that to happen and also partners. Look at Accenture, CapChem and I, all these different partners, they are poised to create some great value and make some cash along the way. Remember the mini computer boom, people who lined their pockets with cash were the integrators, the large global system integrators. So I think that and the channel partners are going to have a great opportunity to take advantage of pre-existing legacy accounts and to grow them further. Well, they certainly have a giant ecosystem. I mean, there's no doubt about it. It's one of the startup challenges that new companies start is to build that ecosystem. I mean, they have a giant ecosystem. So what are you looking for this week besides the obvious announcement? Any kind of tells that you want to see to let you know that SAP continues to be on track and move with the shifting tides of the market trends? Well, to me, I'm looking at the multi-cloud story. It's a good story. Not sure how baked it is, but from a story standpoint, I really like it. I think that whoever can really crack the code on multi-cloud in a viable way is going to be a winner. So to me, I'm going to be looking heavily at the multi-cloud stuff coming out of Orlando. I'm interested to see how the developer traction pans out. I'm really interested in following up on the Apple relationship and seeing how that pans out and then ultimately how the rest of SAP can transform as a business. Because SAP tends to have a lot of buzzwords, a lot of word salad, not a lot of breaking it down and straightening it. So to me, SAP, where I'm critical of them is they kind of can't get out of their own way, Jeff. So sometimes they kind of get caught in that old world thinking when the world is moving very, very fast. You look at Amazon web services, you look at what Google's doing, you look at what VMware is changing. VMware started at Pat Gelsinger. He was in the dumps in 2016. Now he's flying high. He went from almost being fired, stuck on a 52-week low to them sore and they never market cap that's greater than HPE. So these old incumbents like SAP, they have to transform their culture, get relevant and get real. And if they can't show the proof points with customer wins and partners and multi-cloud, then they're going to be on shaky ground. So that's what I'm looking for. All right, well, it should be a good week. We're looking forward to it. Okay, we are here in the Palo Alto studio, our new 4,500 square foot operation. We can do coverage here and then have on the ground coverage of which we will be doing all week Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday for SAP Sapphire Now. Got great guests coming in, great editorial coverage. And I want to thank our sponsors SAP for allowing us to do this and continue the CUBE tradition at Sapphire Now. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick Moore coming after this short break.