 Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering Mobile World Congress 2017, brought to you by Intel. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Palo Alto for special two days of wall-to-wall coverage with Mobile World Congress here in our new 4,500 square foot studio in Palo Alto. We have folks on the ground, analysts. We have reporters in Barcelona but we're going to be covering all the action here in our studio. We're going to bring folks from Silicon Valley who did not make the trek to Barcelona here to weigh in with reaction and commentary and opinions and analysis of all the happenings in Mobile World Congress. But first, as the day winds down Monday in Europe, we wanted to make sure we get on the phone and get with folks who were on the ground. And right now on the phone, we have Floyd Strimling, who's the global vice president of HANA Cloud, I'm sorry, the HANA Cloud Platform, which the big news was they renamed their product from SAP HANA Cloud Platform to SAP Cloud Platform. Floyd, Strimling, thanks for taking the time as you after your dinner. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm glad to be there. Happy to help out and give you some insights of what's going on here in beautiful Barcelona. It's actually quite warm there. Is it warm? I saw some umbrellas over the weekend but great city, I would love to have been there but I wanted to anchor the coverage here, one of my favorite cities. But first, tell me what's going on. Obviously, over the weekend, we were preparing, we were covering and covering all the content for the folks watching, cube365.net slash MWC17. The news is all there. Every single piece of signal is there. Go to our site, check it out. Floyd, what's happening? It's been a handset show all weekend. Obviously, Nokia making a comeback. Blackberry making a comeback. LG, Huawei has phones. They all want to be Apple, but yet 5G is also dominating as well. There's a culture clash. What's happening in Barcelona? What's your analysis? The biggest thing that I was surprised by is exactly what you're talking about. The number of headset announcements and the number of displays that are all based upon new devices and the nostalgia for Blackberry and Nokia continues. People are rooting for them to make a comeback. In the meantime, you've got new devices from Huawei, you've got Samsung, you've got announcements. You know you're in a show when Sony has a big presence in Europe with their handsets, which I don't see too much in North America, and it just seems to be everybody is gunning really further. Maybe what they perceive as a perceived weakness in Apple, just not going for the killer. Seven and really waiting for the eight to change the game and they're all going to try to knock them off the pedestal and there's some very interesting phones that are out there. 5G is definitely everywhere too. Everyone's talking about it. Everyone's trying to be the first. Trying to show, especially the streaming capabilities, what that they were able to do and what they were able to change. And then one of my favorite sections was the drones. Get to see some commercial carbon fiber drones that I never saw up in personals. See what's going on in there. A lot of interesting things going on with those things and more than just delivery, right? Everything that you could possibly do. So there's no shortage of IoT and connected this, connected that, but they're adding a flavor of AI now. And I think we still got to get to step one with IoT before we go to step two. So it's been interesting to watch people try to leapfrog each other and then move towards new technologies. How big is the crowds there? How packed is it? I mean, one of the things we were talking about was the identity crisis of the show Mobile World Congress. You mentioned people going after Apple, but also Samsung, remember, they're bailing out of the show. They had their own little presser conference yes last night. They're not active in the show and they have their own problems. I mean, the Galaxy 7 blowing up is, you know, everyone's going after Samsung and Apple on the phone side, but you got Sony, you got 4K screens, you got Netflix there, you got an entertainment. It's like a CES wannabe show for those guys at the same time, it's a serious meat and potatoes telco show with a lot of 5G, IoT, and I haven't heard anything about eSports. I saw a little bit with Twitch doing some stuff there, but for the most part, it's a digital show. It's a digital, so is there a huge crowd there and what's the demographics like there for the makeup of the attendees? You know what, I'm seeing big crowds, judging from how long it takes to take a taxi or get the subway, it's a lot of people there, and I'm seeing it's mixed. I'm actually seeing quite a few large enterprises from all over the world that are looking around, just looking at the technology and trying to make sense of what's happening. I do see the big telcos are here, you know, everything from telplot at the, you of course have Huawei, you have Keemobile from an orange and a bunch of those major vendors that are doing it. I'm also seeing HPE and Intel on the same, at least the same chill area that we are on the other side that are generating traffic. I think the mix is pretty good this year and I will tell you, look, I've been to a lot of shows and I've seen some shows have trouble drawing people and this medium some people are saying is not going to survive and I'm, I love going to the show and actually feeling the energy because there's a ton of people here, there are a ton of large exhibitions with some really interesting stuff. VR, some geek talks, some funny stuff, there's people selling cases, you know, for your phone. I thought that was kind of awesome to see that again. I mean, it's all over the place. So I think the show is extremely healthy and it's as busy as ever. The, one of the things about Mobile World Congress, it's a lot of business development too. There's some heavy hitters there. It's kind of like Sun Valley meets, you know, the CES shows really is a mix there. I want to get your take on some of the emerging areas that are really exploding in the mind of the consumer and these are, you know, forward thinking, categorical areas, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, smart home and the, just in general, this new IoT area. So what's your take on those areas? I mean, autonomous vehicles, they're huge, but smart cities, smart home, entertainment. Is there a lot of buzz there? You guys have a stadium exhibit. What's the sexy demos? What's the sexy areas? Yeah, I'll tell you a couple of things on this. You know, on autonomous vehicles, now it's not just autonomous vehicles, it's going to try to be the first 5K autonomous vehicle. You know, people are looking at just pushing the envelope on it and, you know, and I think in Europe, where people definitely love to drive, it's big, but I, you know, I don't know if I, it's got the same excitement as you do in the traffic jammed areas of the United States where we're constantly battling this and to put the car into autonomous mode and be able to do something else. So I'm stuck on the 405 would be a nice thing to do. I do think that the smart homes is extremely interesting right now. On the IoT front, it seems like some of the people are getting their arms around. And I'm starting to see people actually talking about it and, you know, a lot of people talking about smart things, you know, this ability to a single gateway to be able to connect to all different types of devices, to be able to hook in with Alexa and Google Home and to be able to actually do more things with it and trying to make it simpler. You know, so that I can do this reliably and easily. That's what everyone wants right now. On the smart city front, I've seen a lot of people talk about smart cities. I think we're still kind of in that experimentation phase, you know, a lot of geosensing stories I'm seeing, some power conservations for lights. The ones that I'm interested in are kind of like traffic management. I'm extremely interested in this where we finally can get even smarter traffic lights and systems where you can do things like turn a no left turn or make a lane that's all four lanes, you know, make it one direction, the traffic comes up. Very interesting concepts that people are trying out. You know, for SAP, the biggest thing that we got going, it continues to be our smart stadium demonstration. Every time that runs, it's standing remotely. People very interested about, of course, it's a football, European football, not American football, so we're showing what you can do and change the experience of watching the games and actually how you can change the experience of training and a tremendous amount of people interested in that. I mean, it's always an amazing crowd of people just because it's so intriguing and something we all can relate to because we want to have a better experience with it. You know, it's interesting about the smart stadiums is that, you know, Floyd, the smart stadium things is a really interesting thing. I just shared a link on the cube365.net slash MWC17, that's our URL for our new cube 365 all year long site. But one of the articles I shared was from the FC Barcelona Football Club and there was a speech at a Mobile World Congress with a president, gave a talk to explain the role FC Barcelona in the development of sports through knowledge and innovation to generate value for the club and society. And you think about the stadium aspect of what you were just talking about is interesting. It's a place where people get together in an analog world but yet when you weave in a digital services, the role of say an SAP powering the database and doing all the back office things to power the business, combined with IoT, you now can bring in real people into experiences that are tied to the sports but also you can go beyond that. You can take that digital interaction and take it to the next level. So there is a data aspect to a society role here. So you're seeing sports teams going beyond marketing their club to having an impact. Can you share any color on that? Do you agree? You guys have anything that you're showing? Well, I agree. I think that's much like racing is for the auto industry to bring innovation to the consumer side or you can even say NASA's and space that comes into all of our lives. I think that this sport is going to push the envelope even harder than other areas. Simply because they know that 100th of a second is the difference in winning and losing. You know, we've gone with McLaren for years working with them on tracking their race cars and building dashboards and giving them information and now to be able to bring that type of technology up to the stadium and bend the way that you actually have that interactive experience it actually makes it that you want to go to the stadiums which as you know, people are... It's a little bit of a hassle. You got the traffic, you got the people, it's like you could sit at their couch and watch it on your 4K television and be happy. I think that people need a way to actually draw the crowds in there. And I think that the interactions, especially with the work that we're doing with Apple and building native applications using our Fiori technology and our UI technology it's starting to really bring together those classical back end systems with all that rich data and bring it forward so people could actually experience what that data means and use it in different ways. So I definitely agree with you. I enjoy working with the sports teams because they're willing to try anything that gives them a competitive advantage. And it's interesting how we take that technology that applies to the consumer and the business world. Well, you know, we'd love to be called ESPN of Tech so we love sports here. So anytime you have a great sports event you can invite us to, we'd be happy to accept your invitation in advance. Appreciate that. Floyd, of course, great coverage. I'll give you the final word and next we have about a minute or two left. Obviously SAP, big announcement with the Apple software development kit, the iOS general availability now. You get native developer support. That's classic bringing cloud native developers into the SAP fold, which dominates the enterprise and business space from sports firms to large enterprises. Great marketplace behind that. But you guys are doing a lot more with IoT, AI and machine learning. Share, just take a minute to talk about the key things that SAP is doing for the folks watching because losing the name HANA cloud really emphasizes that SAP is satisfying their entire business, which includes things like microservices and having kind of IoT as a service and managing workflows dynamically in real time with a consumer front end field to it. Take a minute to describe the key important points of what you guys announced and are impacting. Yeah, I would say the biggest thing that we have gone really is two-fold. One, it's the elevation of this brand. SAP protects our brand. It's a very, very noticeable and valuable brand. To elevate the platform to a top tier brand basically is signaling to everybody, our customers, our partners, independent software vendors, our competitors, anyone else out there that SAP is serious about building a platform in the cloud that is world-class, enterprise-grade and has the capabilities that our customers need to make this digital transformation. And we're coming, we're gonna innovate at a fast clip and we're not that old SAP that people think about. I think the partnership with Apple further shows that. I mean, Apple is very choosy about who they work with. They're at our booth, they're helping us, they're showing the demonstrations they're working on the SDK and that realization that, hey, to build these world-class native applications using Swift and this SDK and the capabilities that we're bringing are now elevating that game in the mobile space for our customers, which is key. And I think it's a very powerful partnership because we're both such recognizable brands and we both have a really solid enterprise presence and a large ecosystem. On the services, you know, the big thing I would just say is the IoT services is ready for people to use now in the beta fashion, it's combining all of our assets so we could build a device cloud with a symmetric data model that's a little bit different than other people are doing and combining that with our Leonardo applications which give you a good idea of what's possible on the cloud and to be able to keep pushing that forward. I think it's key. You have the big data services which with the alpha-scale announcements, acquisition now being fully integrated into the platform which is huge, basically gives us world-class spark and a few services which we need to be able to compete in this world. You know, and I think that the service improvements are there, there's some good service improvements incremental and some things that our enterprises really want from us like workflow and the ability to put a little infrastructure in there with virtual machines and our data center build out. You know, friends don't let your friends build data centers, but some companies have to build data centers. So having the ability to have a data center now in Japan and in China is key to our customers especially with all this legal wrangling that's going on in cloud. So I think all in all for FAP, it's been a great show, great place to showcase that we're doing stuff differently and watch out for what we're gonna be doing in the future because we've got a lot more stuff coming and we're gonna be a player in this space and we're ready. All right, Floyd Shremling global vice president with SAP cloud platform. Final question, I mean, you got to ask you, how's the food, how's the tapas? Are you gonna take a nap and then go out and stay out till four in the morning and then do it all over again? Barcelona style? It is Barcelona style right now. I got to get some sangria, tapas and then we'll hit the places that the tourists don't go to and have some real good time with the locals still. All right. You can't come to Barcelona, go to sleep, that's not allowed. All right, you're not allowed. And hey, spread the cube love for us out there. Really appreciate you taking the time. Thanks, Floyd. We'll talk to you later. Thanks so much. All right, thanks. Okay, Floyd Shremling on the ground in Barcelona here on the cube, our remote coverage from Palo Alto. We're going to be going wall to wall till six o'clock tonight, eight a.m. tomorrow morning. And again, we'll have reaction from folks on the ground in Barcelona. Hopefully we'll get some folks late night and hopefully it might be a little bit of lubricated up a little bit, socially lubricated, get, share some good dirt. That's where all the action's happening up in Barcelona and this is the cube. We'll be wrapping up with more coverage, more now. So Tom Joyce coming in, industry executive to help me break down from his perspective, the horses on the track, which who's going to win, who's going to lose? And what's going on with NFV? Because NFV certainly now has a bigger opportunity with 5G connecting all these devices together. That's the big story as well as the big devices and the new upgrades. We'll be back with more after the short break.