 It's theCUBE, covering Sapphire Now 2017. Brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform and HANA Enterprise Cloud. Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here for special Sapphire Now coverage inside the CUBE studios, covering all the action in Orlando, Florida. SAP Sapphire Now happening in Orlando. CUBE has been covering Sapphire. This is the eighth season covering Sapphire, watching the innovations from SAP that happened over the past eight years. It's been incredible and our coverage continues here with Scott Harrison, Senior Director of America's ISV's Platform as a Service with SAP. Scott, welcome to this CUBE conversation during our special coverage of Sapphire Now in Orlando. Thank you, thank you very much for having me. So your role is partners in ISV and so the cloud has become a great enabler for partners. You're seeing them transform their business and look at real big lucrative opportunities, both in making money, but also in extending their customer base. So what are customers expecting to see and what are they hearing at Sapphire this year? Well, I think what customers are seeing at Sapphire is that there is some tremendous new innovation from SAP. We are the cloud company powered by HANA and we're delivering great solutions to help customers digitize their business, right? The transformational journey of the digital enterprise is real. SAP is leading the way and in regards to partners, partners are key to helping SAP and customers be successful. We're enabling them to build solutions, to enable those solutions and deliver them to customers so that the customers can not only get the benefits of SAP but they get the benefits of some of the partners innovation in real time. Talk about the growing ecosystem because SAP certainly has been changing and in talking to Bill McDermid over the years, it really hasn't been a course correction for SAP. They've been on this trajectory for a while. Certainly maybe some zigs and zags and some acquisitions here and there but for the most part the journey trajectory has been the same but the opportunities are shifting. Talk about the landscape of the ISV ecosystem that you guys have and what tweaks are you making? Where are you putting the pedal to the metal? Where are you pulling back? What are you doubling down on? Sure, we're really doubling down on our partners and partner innovation. We have 600 partners globally that are building on SAP cloud platform. That's a fantastic number and that's just the partners building on cloud platform. We have over a thousand applications that our partners have built that have launched into the SAP App Center which you're hearing great things about at Sapphire. So we're doubling down on partners helping us innovate. We're doubling down on an end to end program to not only help partners build solutions that solve customer problems but jointly going to market with them so that they can be successful creating new revenue routes to market for their organizations. SAP is no newbie when it comes to partners. I mean, look at the SAP, they run software and biggest companies in the world going back to the old days. I mean, old days showing my age here but in the late 80s, early 90s, during that boom, SAP set the table and became now running the software on some of the biggest businesses in the world and McDermott's always got to quote the top Fortune 100 all run on SAP or something like that. But the landscape has changed. So I always look at the partner ecosystem and the partner story and the partner attraction as the canary and the coal mine for company success. So here at Sapphire, because these partners are always about, what's in it for me? And they won't say that directly but it's ultimately the proof point. It's not good for the partners, it's probably not good for business. What's the impact at Sapphire this year for partners? What's the big impact announcement trends that are really going to get the partners super excited when they say, hey, this is going to help my business? Yeah, I think there's a couple of things that partners are really excited about to help their business. Number one is some of the announcements coming out around cloud platform and the multi-cloud capabilities that SAP will have. Additionally, it will be in terms of revenue routes and go to market. As you know, we have launched the SAP App Center, which is not only just an app center to discover new applications but to actually transact and drive revenue through the SAP App Center. So we have partners that are showcasing their solutions on the SAP App Center and customers have the ability to discover, try and buy those applications. That's a real impact for partners in terms of driving new revenue and routes to market and minimizing the costs of sales the best that they possibly can. Talk about the go-to-market and the subscription models because one of the things I find fascinating about the cloud is it's an evolution and a continuation of some of the things we talked about the old days but really the business models are changing. Talk about the specific things that you're doing with partners because the digital transformation is no doubt it's a huge opportunity but it's a business model change and technology changing in real time. What's the big go-to-market tweak that you feel the partners are excited for? I think what partners are really excited for is the idea of creating a subscription-based revenue model for their organization. Whether they're a traditional SI or whether they're a reseller, there are more pressures on the margins than ever before and what we're providing for partners is the ability to create a new revenue model where they can offer subscription-based services powered by cloud platform. So it's their innovation and IP running on cloud platform and it gives them that subscription-based revenue model so that they can change the dynamics of their company and be able to increase valuations of their company have additional revenue flowing through. Scott, one of the themes this year at Sapphire and certainly last year really put the stake in the ground was the Apple deal. The iOS, you're starting to see cloud-native developers really extending the range, if you will, of the traditional SAP reach which you have a huge developer community, SAP in particular and you're seeing others like Cisco moving outside their quote swim lanes around developers going into these cloud-native developers. We're hearing the same thing from partners here inside the queue when we talked to the, whether it's the large SIs or the ISVs, SIs are a little bit different because they have the big money but a lot of the ISVs are really doubling down on their development staff which those roles are changing. You don't have to be a hardcore full-stack developer to be a developer anymore. How are you seeing the impact of some of the things happening at Sapphire that are going to really go to the ISVs? It's okay to staff up and be developer focused and that's really where the action is. What's the story there? Yeah, it's a great story that we've done in conjunction with Apple and the iOS SDK and that being announced within cloud platform. So we have great partners that have been a part of that. So you have a good story for developers. We have a fantastic story for ISV and developers. One of the examples and there are many as one of innovative. They are a startup company of four years ago. They developed mobile solutions on cloud platform and they have been part of this launch to be able to use the iOS SDK to develop mobile applications within HANA Cloud Platform and leveraging that SDK. All right, Scott, final question for you. Bottom line, the ISV partner that's out there on the show floor at Sapphire, Orlando and the folks potentially watching online here. Bottom line me, what's in it for me? I'm an ISV, I'm a partner. What is SAP doing? What's different now? Why is it good for me to continue and extend or double down my relationship with SAP? Yeah, we really have made it very easy to partner with SAP. You can come in and build solutions on our technologies very easily and we can help you take it to market. You get instant access to all of the SAP customers worldwide. So whether you're a developer with an idea or you're a very large traditional SI, you have the ability to build new innovation. You have the ability to easily showcase that in the app center and other places within SAP. And you have the ability to go to market jointly with us. So we want you to win because as a ISV developing a solution, when you're successful and only when you're successful is when SAP is successful with our partners. And what are you guys doing specifically to make that frictionless for the partner? We're enabling them with key technologies. We're giving them the ability to build easily. And then we're putting together, go to market plans for the partners to be able to execute and sell successfully. Final, final question. What's the big takeaway from Sapphire this year? What's the aha? If you'd kind of look at the stage, look down on the stage and watch all the action happening in Orlando, what's the big walk away for you and your partners? I think the walk away for the partners is that SAP is 100% behind you in terms of helping you and most importantly your customers with their digital transformation. We're making it easy for you to innovate. We're making it easy to showcase who you are. And we're putting some of our best cloud solutions into our partner ecosystem so that they can extend those and create new routes to market. All right, Scott Harrison here on the special SAP Sapphire Now 2017 coverage from studios here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching more continued coverage after this short break.