 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018, brought to you by NetApp. Welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin. With Keith Townsend, we are just wrapping up day two at SAP Sapphire 2018. Keith, this event is enormous. We were just comparing our step goals. This event size is 16 American football fields. I think combined, we have around 15,000 steps today. That sounds about right. Quite a few of them go to year-long legs than mine, but this event has really been incredible. The energy that SAP's CEO Bill McDermott kicked off with yesterday morning has really been carried through this event and with our guests on the show for the last two days. No, we did 23, 24 interviews, and every last one of them was high energy. The guests were extremely excited about the products, the solutions, and the problems they're solving for not just enterprise, but for society. I thought that was a really great theme of the guests today, specifically. It's amazing, and you talk about the impact on society, and SAP wants to be one of the top 10 world's most valuable brands like Apple, Google, Coca-Cola, who are all customers of SAPs, and who all sell products that we can interact with, that we can taste, you know, Mercedes-Benz, we can drive. They've got this invisible software product. They've been around for 46 years, and to your point, the stories that we have heard about how this invisible product, products, are transforming industries, are transforming, saving lives was really something that I did not expect. Well, when you make a great product that impacts lives, I compare it to making great content. The Cube makes great content, that content will be found, people will take notice. You make a great product that impacts people's lives. It's no wonder that SAP is near the top of that brand recognition, brand value, 17th on the list. If they continue to do that, if they become the product, the ERP solution that you can talk to, and you can ask a question, you know, not just business questions of what were the numbers the last quarter for Chicago, but you can ask a question, you know what, where's the best place to take my family to live in Eastern Europe during the summer months? That becomes value-add that people wouldn't be able to even work. They've done a tremendous job building this partner ecosystem. There were hundreds of partner sessions alone. We've heard from a lot of their partners. We're in the NetApp booth thanks to NetApp for having the Cube here. NetApp is a customer and a partner of SAP, and we heard a lot about how SAP is transforming to the cloud dramatically with the help of this massive partner ecosystem. You know what, we've had Microsoft, Fujitsu, SAP, NetApp, NVIDIA, the list goes on and on of customers and partnerships of examples of companies that have come together, and they've been consistent. In some areas, obviously, Microsoft competes with SAP. Some areas, Microsoft competes with NetApp, but they recognize that without these alliances, without these partnerships, they can't solve these large, complex problems of ridding parts of Africa with mosquitoes. SAP can't do that by themselves. Microsoft can't do that by themselves, and this week was a great acknowledgement and an example of how the ecosystem works. They also talked a lot at this event about the intelligent enterprise, where it's not just about digital transformation as table stakes, companies that do it well have, are working towards getting this true 360 degree view of the customer, which is essential. They talked about enabling that via certain things that they're leading in, which is our pioneering, which is connecting the demand chain and the supply chain. They really talked about enabling this current SAP that's built for this fourth generation customer experience. Our lives as consumers have dramatically influenced business. We expect to have the ability to, you know, try and buy an app if we want it, right? And they're using that model very well to give customers in many industries, they have 390,000 customers choice and flexibility. And the partner ecosystem is just part of that flexibility that they have to give. And they do a great job of listening to their customers who really are helping with a lot of the co-development in a very symbiotic way. Yeah, SAP is re-entering this people-centric view of ERP, CRM, of data, saying that the relationship is about people. You know, Bill McDermott spent a lot of time talking about trust. One of the reasons why people trust the brand of the Cube is because we're on the ground, we're talking to the users, we're talking to the people. People can reach out and touch and feel you. There's a personal relationship between that brand and the community. The same thing with... I got the same feel for what SAP is trying to do. You know, obviously, nor for 20,000 people, I don't know if the number is 21,000, 22,000, but more than 20,000 people, a million people online watching the event. SAP is serious about this C4HANA move of being able to say, you know what, we're going to create an ecosystem of trust. We talked about trust with the App Center and being able to validate applications on the platform. SAP has long been one of those companies that's serious about their partnerships and validation and certification of platforms. So whether it's HCI, Storage with NetApp, the deep relationship with NetApp, SAP is going to put this brand up front and say that if you're going to engage with one of our partnerships, there's a transient trust that goes from SAP to their partners. And we talked with a number of folks working in different groups within SAP focused on the customer. This morning we had on their chief customer, a guy from their chief customer office who talked about these kind of top 100 strategic accounts that they partner with, who then also they take that information and those learnings and don't just improve the technologies but they also use them to influence much greater than 100 customers. They're strategically utilizing that data. We talked yesterday with one of the gentlemen running the SAP S4HANA community rather and the Leonardo community and the amount of engagement that they have in that community, especially Leonardo which has only been around for a year, the customer engagement is key but also their reaction to it and I would say even, I think we heard a lot of how they're being proactive with creating content and enabling their customers to be able to learn at the same time as they're learning from their customers. Yeah, some hero numbers that we heard this week. 6,000 people in that S4HANA community while the customer success group focuses on the top 100 customers there were, I think, 38,000 people following the Twitter account so that's obviously our outreach stretch. The Leonardo and S4 communities have created a thousand videos on how to so obviously the impact and the reach of SAP has ambitions of not just raising brand awareness and getting in that top 10 with Apple and Google they also have the ambitions of becoming a platform, an ecosystem. You know, we look at Microsoft as kind of one of the ultimate platform companies. Microsoft partners make more money off of Windows than Microsoft makes off of Windows. SAP seems to have the same goal of their partners, 100 partners on the show floor. That should generate more revenue than SAP which would be impressive. SAP looked at $136 billion market cap, not a small company at all. So you have an interesting perspective for many reasons but when you run large SAP infrastructures before and here you are now at Sapphire from the press and media, the analysts perspective what are some of the things that really surprised you in all of your experience as a user of SAP to now covering up from this angle. You know what? I don't even know if it was a year ago it's not even a full year. My anniversary before running my company is August so less than a year ago I ran SAP for a large pharmaceutical and we're in the throes of selecting where our next platform is going to be hosted. Cloud was a possibility and it is amazing how the conversations have changed from my peers a year ago or a year and a half or even a year ago to now to how readily acceptable customers are running mission critical the core of the business, 77% of the world's transactions we heard today goes through SAP, how willing customers are to run those workloads in the cloud. Second piece was probably a proof point how much SAP has improved SAP in the cloud. SAP has marketed SAP HANA and SAP as cloud ready applications it was more of something that I took legacy application I installed it on VMs in the cloud, cloud ready. No, we've given examples from the hyperscalers specifically Google of how in Microsoft of how customers are coming whipping a credit card up spinning up instances of HANA spinning them down. Google talked about how you can migrate your whole ECC on HANA to the cloud within 30 minutes to two hours. Amazing movement in cloud I think is by far my biggest surprise coming to the show. I didn't expect SAP to accelerate their cloud adoption as fast as they have. I'm curious your thoughts too about simplicity simplicity of message their best run businesses campaign best run businesses run on SAP simplicity has long been part of their messaging as we look at the SAP cloud platform and some of the announcements there today and you look at they've got Ariba and Concur and Fieldglass and SuccessFactors with the C4 announcement from yesterday what is your impression on have they been able to sort of simplify and kind of reduce customer confusion in terms of this breadth of products and technologies that SAP now delivers? You know SAP is a big company and they have a lot of products they've been around for 46 years you know we didn't talk about any legacy database stuff they still own Cybo so they still own a traditional database company it's easier said than done to simplify the message when you come to you know we talk to interviewee at the interviewee customers are still overwhelmed they look at the overall problem they can even identify SAP as the potential partner to solve it but 300 products still 300 products you can help simplify the message by throwing those products in categories sales force which product you lead with so that new customers sales force will help you with that traditional customers that don't have deep relationships with their sales force and solution providers I think there's still a little difficulty around understanding the messaging around all 300 products there's always work to be done there was a lot of product announcements a lot of energy and evangelicalism that you and I heard consistently throughout the event and on set here a third area that I think really struck me is SAP has been very vocal about having an initiative to raise the profile of women in technology they did an excellent job of getting women on stage during both keynote sessions yesterday and today from their CMO Alicia Tillman to Lindsay Vaughn and a whole suite of women's Olympic athletes that were yesterday in the general session some of the women that were doing some of these outstanding demos and I really tip my hat to SAP and as lengthy of and incumbent as they are they're really able to focus on some of these key areas and we at theCUBE love to cover that because it's something that really needs consistent awareness well I don't know if people would notice but we probably both of us are very vested in diversity in Silicon Valley in general it's always appreciated when companies go not just acknowledge the challenge of diversity it is a very very difficult problem probably one of the most difficult problems in our industry so to actually put some meat on a bone accept announce the problem, announce the challenge and go forth and put obviously extremely capable women and minorities in forefront. Yeah well Keith always a pleasure hosting with you thanks so much for working with me the last couple of days I always enjoy it I do too it's really been a really fun energetic show so thanks for all of your help thank you Keith and I want to thank you for watching theCUBE Lisa Martin for Keith Townsend we're from SAP Sapphire 2018 thanks for watching