 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 in Orlando, Florida at SAP Sapphire 2018 in the NetApp booth. We're excited to welcome to theCUBE the, from SAP, the SVP of Global Technology Partners, Joe Zarb. Joe, welcome to theCUBE. I am so happy to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to share with you all the great things that are going on here at Sapphire and with SAP. This event is huge. Bill McDermott was saying this morning in his keynote that it's the biggest Sapphire that you guys have ever done. And one of the numbers, he gave a lot of numbers this morning. I always geek out on numbers. He said, you guys are expecting about a million people to engage with SAP related to SAP. That's incredible. It's incredible. It's incredible. A million people think about the global reach of a company with 70% of the world's commerce transactions going through our systems. People wanting to want to know what's next. What's coming out next from an innovation point of view. What are our leaders saying? What are our partners saying about where the future is? And it really speaks to the whole concept of digitizing business processes. Every company wants to be a startup. And I think what you're seeing here is a lot of that excitement, that SAP. We just consider ourselves a very big startup with a broad reach. So I think Bill was able to capture that excitement, convey that excitement. And I think the ecosystem is reflecting that, right? So 46 year old startup, none the less. Yeah, right, exactly, exactly. So as the leader of the technology partners, talk to us about how those technology partners have been fundamental in SAP's transformation. Totally fundamental. Particularly as SAP starts to transform into really a platform company. The platform provides a level of abstraction that customers can leverage to simplify their infrastructure and their access to applications. And it also creates extensibility and it's all about the partner ecosystem. So one of the biggest agenda items that we have in terms of that is really the whole hyper-converged infrastructure play. And it's really going to be something that is going to help customers innovate, drive down costs and drive up ROI. It's just there's very few plays that are a triple whammy and this is one of them. So the partner ecosystem to us that spans our global service providers, our technology partners which are both hardware and software partners, but we also have data syndication partners and we have other partners in the management consulting fields, et cetera. They all contribute to expanding and enhancing our digital platform and our applications. So one of the areas I like to challenge infrastructure companies on, NetApp is data-driven infrastructure company and when you're talking to enterprise application centric people, infrastructure is one of these things that's an afterthought. But HCI is really changing the game. NetApp's solid fire division along with some of their now compute innovations to form this new HCI story. Provide some color. What's the significance of having an HCI based infrastructure for your SAP deployment? Yes, that's a great question. So first let me back up and I completely agree with you. When you talk to most customers their eyes glaze over when you start talking about storage or what have you. But when you start talking about the sophisticated customers that are driving innovation and trying to transform their business, there's really three technical elements that they're very focused on. One is connectivity. They're trying to connect to all kinds of devices, business processes and aspects of their business that haven't been connected. They're connecting because they want to retrieve signals from areas in the field and areas of customers and products they've never collected before. As they collect these signals, they're creating tremendous storages of data. And so until you get over that, realize the enormity of that problem and the scope of how do you now take this data and turn it into a collection of perishable insights that you can act on. Until you've reached that level of sophistication, you don't understand why a company like NetApp is critical to your entire digital infrastructure and story. And that whole hyper-converged area is really the ability to promise, it's a promise to the customer that their workload can scale essentially infinitely on premise in the cloud, the cloud backed on premise. And so SAP as an application provider, we look at applications that are going to run at the edge, at the core on premise and in the cloud. HCI helps us deliver that vision at the application tier, but you have to have the platform and the infrastructure there. And NetApp is a great partner to help us fulfill that vision as well as other partners, but they're very key. So you have your business applications, you have SAP HANA from a database, and memory database capability. Now we're talking about the Leonardo stack. You have this, what's becoming a platform. And as a platform provider, you look towards your ecosystem to extend the capability of the platform to create more value. Where are you seeing the value generated in the partnership with NetApp? It's a great question. So all of our partners have the ability to, one, reinforce the dominance in those markets we choose to serve and those applications we choose to deliver. However, the real value of the ecosystem at a company like NetApp is when they take us out of our comfort zone. And by taking us out of our comfort zone, they're taking us to roll your own applications, custom applications, or third-party non-SAP applications where they're storing and managing the data, yet making it accessible to Leonardo for machine learning to create blockchain scenarios where we can create trusted relationships, leveraging data that may not be SAP data. And also in the whole Internet of Things, connecting to sensors and using that data from sensors in ways that really have nothing to do with SAP's core applications per se, but may have benefits to the customer in ways that really needs to be co-innovated. So our partners are a critical player to put us outside of our comfort zone, force us to grow, force us to learn, force us to expand. And NetApp has proven to be one of those partners that could deal with a myriad of data types from a myriad of applications that forces the stretch into voice recognition, that forces the data mining and data analytics and the like. So as we talk about pushing out of your comfort zone, SAP has been extremely steady in being able to provide, make sure between hardware partners, whether it's appliance model for deployment of HANA to partnerships with first level support through partners such as NetApp. Talk through where you guys are at in the partnerships, specifically with a technology that's killer that Bill talked about, which is SAP HANA on HCI. Are we going to see HANA on HCI? And then if you do, I mean, customers are really interested in it. And it seems like a, you know, a slam dunk. It seems like a no-brainer, right? Yeah, it looks seems like a no-brainer. And it is, it is a no-brainer. We're going to see HANA on HCI, not because SAP wants HANA on HCI, it's because our customers want HANA on HCI. And we're slaves to our customers. So, where we are right now is we know that we are a trusted supplier and provider to our customers. And they know that the SAP brand stands for Tegrity and all of the illities that go with running a large complex enterprise, reliability, serviceability, maintainability, et cetera. So we're actually working very closely with all of our HCI partners to go through a rather arduous certification process through that certification process. It's a commitment that we're asking them to make and they're asking us to make for the long term. I don't like the word certification. I prefer new product introduction because what we're asking them to do is build their product, tune it to our products, we're going to do the same and we're going to continuously innovate and continuously introduce new products. So the word, the former world word is certification. All I could say is we don't like to pre-release or announce anything. So watch this space, but I am so excited to be a tech-ed. What are some of the, if we look at a retailer, for example, who has to work with, say it's a clothing, an apparel manufacturer that's gone and designer, they've got to work with, you know, textiles and all these different sources of information. And it might take a year from a design to go from concept to an actual product that they can sell. So you mentioned, and I really like that you talked about insights as perishable. We were talking about actionable insights, but for a company like an apparel company who has such a long cycle from concept to delivery, how will HCI facilitate them being able to link and sync what Bill McDermas said this morning is synchronize the supply chain with demand chain. Right, right, yeah. So that whole value chain, value proposition. So the beautiful thing is all of those companies have a track record and a history of data. A lot of that data is right now in NetApp. So there's a lot of learnings and knowledge that haven't been mined and pooled out of that data that exists today. HCI is going to enable a couple things. One is when you look at a distributed supply chain, we have probably the industry's leading distributed supply chain solution, track and trace capabilities to be able to follow that product throughout its life cycle. As we capture that data with HCI infrastructure, we're going to be able to analyze and transform those business processes candidly in ways that we haven't thought of yet. The beauty of HCI is when you talk about retailers, you're oftentimes dealing with companies that have wire thin margins. So they want to be able to create products quickly, get them to market quickly, and do it within the cost constraints. HCI is one of those rare platform and enabling technologies that delivers on that. It's going to allow you to right size your workload in the cloud or on premise or on the right size servers, et cetera. And it's going to allow you to scale up as needed and manage a more efficient yet effective infrastructure. So I see HCI playing a role not only in retailers, but really across all industries. It's one of those really beautiful, horizontal technologies that adds immediate value to those people that have reached that maturity curve. So as we talk about these advanced applications, can't help but to get into topics such as IoT, Edge in general, applications as we look at SAP as a platform company, applications SAP may not build directly, but have to integrate with us. How do you see HCI and your global partners figuring into those advanced applications in an infrastructure realm? Yeah, so that's a great question. Thank you. If you really look at those new emerging applications that are Edge, Core, and Cloud, lots of moving parts. Lots of moving parts gives you the opportunity to right size the workload and the processing at the Edge or at the Core or at the Cloud, but it also creates a tremendous amount of complexity. So to really create a breakthrough, you have to radically simplify and standardize the processes that manage that Core, Cloud, Edge relationship. If you could create that environment, then people can deploy, manage, monitor, maintain these environments much more effectively with a lower skill set, right? So there's not that hurdle. I kind of think of it as, you know, today's IT infrastructure is kind of like a manual car. You know, and as you get, you know, bigger IT, it becomes an 18-wheeler. It's a little hard to un-wheel. You got to be really good at driving in reverse and stuff like that. When you add, you know, HCI, you're not necessarily going to an autonomous car, but you've definitely got an automatic transmission. You probably could do a couple things pretty well automatically, right? And that allows a whole new class of drivers to get in the car. And so I think that's what HCI is going to do as the architectures and the deployment methods get more complex. It's going to keep it manageable and within a skill base and price point that people can live with. I like that analogy. I think that's very simple to follow, speaking of simplicity. I wanted to ask you about what, when you guys are going to market with partners, you know, Bill, which I must have been very vocal as we talked about when we kicked off this segment about wanting to be one of the top 10 most valuable brands among the likes of Apple, Coca-Cola, Mercedes-Benz, Google, who sell products that we can touch and wear and feel and see with technology like SAP and even, you know, say what you're doing with NetApp on Hyperconverged. What's the conversation like when you're talking about products that people may not even know are under the hood? How do you kind of ignite a customer to be excited? Like what are some of those exciting customer examples that you see that really show how this technology from SAP and your partners can change a company, change an industry, change a life? Right, that's a great question. And that's really the essence of a brand, right? So first I would encourage all of your viewers, go play Bill's keynote from Sapphire today. I mean, I think he was totally evangelical and I think he painted the picture. So from my perspective, the brand, so first all of those brands that you mentioned, right? Apple and Google, these are all loyal SAP customers, right? They're also SAP partners, right? So we're punching with the heavyweights, right? We're at, I think, number 17 in brand equity and we're working our way up. And I think our focus isn't so much touching and feeling our products. I think it's more about trust, making a promise and a commitment to the market and that market validating that commitment and statement with money. Basically buying our products, deploying our products, and basing their business on our products. And so when I think of SAP becoming that brand, as more and more companies continue to rely on us, trust in us, and as we become a more integrated, economy and society, they're going to realize Apple is going to be able to trust Google because they're using SAP and they know there's integrity of the data in the process and Google's going to be able to trust their suppliers like NetApp and HP and et cetera of that because they're using SAP as well. So there's this, basically this movement of trust and brand identity that will be validated by our customers. We create the message, the customers create the back brand and so I think that's our approach. Like trust is the new currency. It is, it really is, particularly in a database, data oriented society, right, in economy. Yeah, my good friend Tom on Twitter said that the future is data, the future isn't databases. So I thought it was a brilliant poll. So shout out to Tom. So as we look at that, the future is data and not databases and you guys have rolled out a fabulous database in HANA, but how do you refocus not on the actual technology, but on the data itself? As it relates to, you know, NetApp has started to market themselves as a data driven company. What's the relationship between the infrastructure, the database, the application and the actual data? So good question, it's a long answer. So let me try to net out a couple of key areas there. So if you kind of look at data, data plays a point of origination where you're going to enter data and capture the transactions of the business. It's also the source of innovation. After capturing all that data, there are these perishable insights and there are these anomalies and signals that are trapped in there that you're going to pull out. So when you look at the infrastructure itself, our belief is that consumers and the consumer experience with technology has created a very real time society. We chat in real time, we post images in real time, we message in real time and we believe that level of performance is what enterprises are going to demand. Batch is going away, people, they don't want to hear, oh no, it takes hours to sift through a petabyte of data, they don't want to hear it. So they want to move to, they want their answers now. And so that's what we've really focused on is that whole real time experience and we believe that data, like you said data, it is going to be both the source of insights, it's going to be the system of record and then it's really going to be the basis of the next generation products and services. So if you look at all the companies that people are trying to copy and mirror, they're giving away their software product and they're monetizing the insights that they glean from that data, right? So Facebook makes their money off of advertising that is based on your likes and preferences and shares, et cetera like that. So their business isn't software, it's how do I monetize that data, that behavior that is trapped in that data, how do I surface those behaviors? So we think that's very core to us. We have a group within SAP that works with our partners and customers to help them build data-driven business models, data-driven business products and data-driven solutions. And NetApp is core to all of that, right? I mean, I think once you start to get and start to deal with the order of magnitude of data that we're talking about here, you have to move to an HCI and you have to move to a trusted player like that. In the Facebook example, as we wrap things up, you know, kind of just alluded to one of the things that I've heard some of your execs say, including your CMO, Alicia Tillman, where our customers don't care about the technology, they care about their customers. And you just kind of articulated that really well, that that's what you need to be able to enable is what Facebook is delivering, or Apple is delivering, or Google is delivering. So thanks so much Joe for stopping by and sharing what you guys are doing with partners to really kind of fundamentally change the direction that SAP is going in. Thanks, it's great to be here and thanks for having me. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from Sapphire 2018. Thanks for watching.