 It's theCUBE, covering Sapphire Now 2017. Brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform and HANA Enterprise Cloud. Welcome back everyone, live here in Palo Alto for our studio coverage of SAP Sapphire Now 2017. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Three days of Sapphire Now coverage from our 4,500 square foot studio in Palo Alto, covering all the action news on the ground in Orlando, Florida where SAP Sapphire Now is taking place. The big news and big story of Sapphire is the cloud, multi-cloud strategy and what it means for customers. This is part of SAP's cloud platform. I had a chance to sit down with the leader of that team, Dan Law, who's the vice president of product marketing. I asked Dan to break down the big news for SAP Cloud Platform. Here's the conversation with myself and Dan Law. What we're announcing at Sapphire this week is we are going to be running SAP Cloud Platform, not only in SAP data centers, but also in AWS data centers, in Azure data centers, and in GCP data centers. So we really now are above the fray of the infrastructure wars. It's actually, we also talked with your team at SAP Cloud Platform around Google Next, okay? And you guys had a significant announcement. The folks flew in from Germany, the big entourage on stage with Diane Greene's team at Google. And I was scratching my head saying, I didn't even see this coming. You kind of kept it from me. You know, I knew you had something up your sleeve. Significant presence with Google. So I ping the Amazon folks and say, hey, what's going on? You losing customer? They said, no, no, we're doing a lot of great stuff with SAP. Of course, Google's trying it out there as a big win. But this is the strategy for SAP. And Andy Jassy was in San Francisco a while back and he said, you know, look at, we are winning with more services, more services. But he made a point. The lock-in spec of the old, and he also talked about that you can't fight gravity. The old way to buy infrastructure is just gravity's taking it down. It's dead. It's dead. And our view is we're going to be a software company, right? We're not going to play at the hardware layer. We're going to play above that and differentiate with business services above that. Let the customers decide what they think the best hyperscale vendor is. We'll give them great software, business services, above those layers. So I think multi-cloud is the hottest trend that nobody's talking about. Oh, you guys are talking about obviously. But in the press corps, in the media, no one's actually really digging into this because it's very nuanced. It's an industry kind of thing. But having multi-cloud is like interoperability back in the networking day. That's right. That's right. Just to be clear, you guys are still behind 100% with AWS, Amazon Web Services. Absolutely. Microsoft Azure. Yep, and GCP as well. And then you want to run an SAP data center. You can do that too. And we'll give customers one cockpit, one piece of glass to manage all those different environments. So your pass is on Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services. To be perfectly clear, GA on AWS, beta on Azure, and we're doing a pilot showcase on GCP. Okay, so that's cool. So that's platform as a service. And that's a completely different strategy than, say, Oracle. Yeah, let's lock you in one more time. Let's lock you into cloud. But they have hardware, and they're going frontal attack against Amazon and vice versa. There's a war going on between the two. That's not what SAP is trying to do. I don't see you making any noise out there. To me, that's a race to the bottom. That's a race to the bottom. So we're going to provide business services above that hardware layer with the Paz and then business services above that to help customers. So managing cloud workloads is also another topic. And this is being talked a lot in context to hybrid cloud. So hybrid cloud obviously is a big deal. A lot of people are moving to public cloud and Angie Jassy says they're happening much faster. I kind of disagree with Andy on this point. I think he's got momentum for sure and I love what they're doing, but I don't think they're moving as fast. Still got a lot of on-premise. This is your world as well at SAP. So you have to kind of build the connectors if you will, connectors or APIs. So a lot of customers want to know what to do. And so, okay, multi-cloud, I think is going to be super important. But I still got the on-premise investment in systems of record, systems of software that need to enable opportunities for new app development and whatnot. How do you talk to the customers about that? That's not going away. That is not going away for 10 years. So hybrid cloud is going to be with us. So our strategy is we will provide integration services, whether that be at the data layer, whether it be at the process layer, or whether that be through API or microservices. We're going all in on all of those. So if you want to connect a business process that you've built in cloud platform with an on-premise system, you can do that whether that's SAP or not SAP. If you want to use APIs and use that infrastructure, we're exposing more and more APIs. In fact, this week, we're announcing over 100 APIs being exposed for S for HANA in the finance area, for Ariba for success factors, for field glass. And then we're adding actually specific APIs for specific business functions. So do a billing off an invoice, collect information off a purchase order. We're exposing those higher level services as well. So integration is huge. And again, we've been in the data services as well. So you want to move data to the cloud. We're providing services to do that too. So two things that are jumping out at me, looking at what you guys are doing this week at Sapphire is this API connector. So you're connecting the SAP world into the cloud. Certainly the platform is a service that you have and the platform, the cloud platform is fundamental. But there's a big buzz around marketplaces. So talk about some of the new things you do in there because I think this is where it gets kind of interesting. And I'll let this get your perspective on what you guys are announcing and your thoughts on this notion of the app center, marketplace, I mean, Amazon web services is doing a lot of great things. They think that the consumption pattern in the future will all be driven by some sort of app center. You guys are in the software business. I'm assuming that's a big part of what you got doing. What's new? Yeah, very exciting for marketplace as well. So we're extending the value of the app center for our customers. So today, you want to look at a partner application. You can go look at it. You can discover it, but you really can't do much more than that off the app center. So today what we're announcing this week at Sapphire, the ability to discover, to learn, to try, to buy and to use all directly off the app center. And then further on to that, we'll manage the application for the partner and for the customer. So if the partner updates their application, automatically gets downloaded and updated through the marketplace, through the app center. I've been reading a lot of stuff on the cloud and AI and stuff and people use the line. Talk to me like I'm a, pretend I'm a five year old and people are using that quote a lot. So pretend that I'm a customer. I'm not a five year old, but a customer that's not under the hood might not be following all the trends. Here's my challenge. I'm on-prem, I'm moving to the cloud and I just haven't decided yet who I want to look at. John hasn't published his competitive matrix yet. So I don't know how he feels. I got that coming out, a little plug from my upcoming research. But they have a relationship with Microsoft. I have a relationship with SAP. I love Google's got the mojo with TensorFlow and machine learning, all the smart engineers they have. And Amazon is just awesome. I just don't know yet which ones. Can I just choose from the app center? Absolutely. Cloud, any cloud that I want? Well, it's really for any partner that's built on the cloud platform today. So as we move forward with the multi-cloud, you're going to see that happening. But that's a trend you guys see. We definitely see that and you're right. We want to make it like a five year old. You want to discover, you want to try, you want to use, that's what we do with the app center today. So the thing I liked about Mobile World Congress when we did chat last, you guys announced in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress this notion of workflow. What is the new with that? Because there's some news around, some new things you're doing with workflow. What do you have? So we're extending workflow with actually a rule system as well. So we've added a new service to go along with workflow called business rules. So now you can mash up workflows as we've talked before, mash up some business processes. But now you can actually use the rule system to open up each business process, add logic into that. And as a business analyst, it's really if then type of capability. So pretty easy. Put that, close it back up. Now you have a whole new business process or an extended business process in using workflow and rules together. So you make it more flexible for the workflow to get some customers? Let the business analysts deliver more value in their job and extend business processes more easily. What about the app developer? I'm an app developer. I want to take advantage of all the greatness of SAP. What mechanisms are you guys announcing or talking about at Sapphire this year that make my life easier without being an expert on SAP? Is there any mechanism for me to say, hey, I want some rules and app goodness coming into my app? Yeah, we have all new tooling that we're going to be talking about at Sapphire. So we have some relationships we're building with other partners to do high productivity application work and then we're extending our Web IDE development tool to be a full stack development environment. Whether you want to do it via the web, whether you want to do it via mobile, if you want to integrate other combinations, other technologies like Slack or other technologies in there, you can do all that in the Web IDE development tool. So I can add business services into the API. Into the Web IDE and you can extend the Web IDE like we've done with Slack. So you just create another tab and import that tool into the Web IDE. So very easy for developers now to create applications that were run seamlessly on cloud platform. And just take a step back while you're on this topic. This is interesting. DevOps has been the movement that has gone mainstream now with things that we're talking about here. Your philosophy with the developer is what? To just give them SAP all day long. What's the main value proposition for the platform as a service that you have for the developer? So my joke is with cloud platform, we're able to talk to developers under 40 because it's a Java based environment. So what we get with the cloud foundry work that we've done with the multi-pads, and that's how we're doing it. By the way, everyone over 40 still likes Java too. So we learned that in Java. Me too, me too. So anyway, what we're delivering through multi-cloud, we're doing it through cloud foundry, and that gives the ability to have multiple run times. So for those folks who want to use node.js, they can use that. They want to use different languages like Ruby, Python, Perl, Go, those languages. They can use those as well. So our view is whatever language, whatever runtime you want to bring to the party, SAP will have this environment where you can develop and deploy in that. And we bring all the mobile technology that we've had for years and years and years. If you wanted to deploy on mobile, you can do that too. So I think where we've been lacking in the past is some of the high productivity tools. So we're adding high productivity capabilities for mobile development, as well as for core development too. Bottom line, me, on how you would package this up because there's so much going on at Sapphire. What's the net net net? What's the bottom line? Because give me the elevator pitch real quick. What's the big news? Here's the real soundbite. SAP SAP Cloud Platform. Yeah, the real soundbite is we're accelerating choice, accelerating adoption, and accelerating ease of use for customers to be able to adopt cloud. So you get your choice through multi-cloud, you get your choice of different applications that you can do business directly on, and then you're getting choice and capabilities through all the services. What are you most excited about is to point to one thing and say, look at this new feature. It's multi-cloud. We think multi-cloud, as you said, it's the hottest thing going today. We are all in on multi-cloud. And you'll see us deliver more and more capabilities and services that run on whatever infrastructure provider you want to run on. So again, we're a software company. We're not going to participate at the hardware layer. We're going up, not going down. I recently interviewed the CTO of Analytics at Accenture here on one of my shows. And he got a huge amount of views as a huge interest in analytics. I'll say not something new to you guys, but Accenture's a partner. And that brings up the question, this is all great, you got the cloud relationship. So essentially, you guys look at cloud the same way you looked at hardware vendors in the past. They're partners. So SAP doesn't really change their game. You're still doing the software, still providing all that business intelligence to your customers through software. But I got to ask you the impact of partners because they're changing. They are changing. Accenture, Deloitte, all of them, all the top guys out there are changing. They're having to become ISVs. It's pretty amazing. They're having to do more than just coming in with a big pitch saying a million dollars in two years. So what we see Accenture, Deloitte, others doing is providing actual full applications now as an ISV and Deloitte and Accenture have actually done that both for cloud platform. And they're also becoming prototyping and POC specialists as well. So they'll come in, they'll do a design thinking with our customer, they'll prototype it, they'll POC it on the cloud platform, do something in four weeks, prove out a concept so that they can then go to the next level, the next step on the agreement. So- Yeah, they're becoming much more strategic with the customers. They always have been. I'm not saying they have been fast. But not just implementation, right? It's actually proving that they can do something new in digital transformation, for example. I mean, back in the old days, SAP, ERP rolled out in the 80s, in the early 90s. It was a gravy train for the integrators. The timetables were multi-year. To your point, the world has changed with Agile that they have to then break down these milestones and have proof of value, time to value is much shorter. So still lucrative, but just different execution cadence. Can you talk about that? And just think about that. The value they're providing, they're actually bringing a prototype or a POC, that's a proven part of the application that they're going to show to the customer so that they can get to that next level of application development with the customer. So it's really much more of a partnership and we get to be the platform on which they're running, which is the cool part for us. Dan, thanks for coming. This CUBE conversation is special on Sapphire and what's happening around all the new announcements. What should people be looking at this week? What cool things have you got going on on the ground in Orlando? Yeah, come to our campus. Come see all the cool things we're doing. Not just what I've talked about, but also IoT that runs on cloud platform, machine learning, AI that runs on cloud platform, big data that runs on cloud platform, all the new applications we're bringing that are part of cloud platform as well that run on top of the platform. So we are truly becoming a pretty cool cog in the SAP wheel. Well, great strategy. I'll see it's really brilliant. It's actually mapped the old SAP onto a modern world with cloud as infrastructure. You get the multi-cloud vision. I think that's very relevant. I still, it's still early, early innings days, but certainly great with the past. The platforms of service. The API and the app center, all the new services. Great for partners, great for SAP. And again, you're not Oracle. Oracle is fighting all the cloud guys directly. You guys are, you're Switzerland here. Exactly, exactly. Congratulations. Thanks for spending the time and breaking it down. Thank you, John. Appreciate your time today. Hi, I'm John Furrier. This is a CUBE conversation about Sapphire 2017 with SAP Cloud Platforms. Dan Lawls, Vice President of Product Market. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.