 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Sapphire Now, headline sponsored by SAP HANA Cloud, the leader in platform as a service. With support from Console Inc, the cloud internet company. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Orlando, Florida for Sapphire Now SAP Show exclusive coverage from SiliconANGLE Media as theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Peter Burris, head of research at SiliconANGLE Media. I want to give a shout out to our sponsors, SAP HANA Cloud Platform, Console Inc, Berksha Stream, EMC, and CapCham and I. Thanks for your support, really appreciate it. Our next guest is Michael Brucci, who is the SAP Global VP of Partner Solutions. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. It's an honor to be here. The theme of the ecosystem has been pretty big, but the ecosystem as we've been learning on theCUBE is the channels of ours, the Vabs, the ISVs, all that stuff going on there. But the global channel, your involvement, is the big integrators, the much more advanced traditional SAP partners, back in the old days of big six accounting firms that were doing the early day employment deployments. Now they're doing the cloud. So what's different now? What are you guys doing? Share with the audience some of the things that you guys are doing today, and you're talking about at Sapphire this week. Yeah, you know, I think one of the big changes, and one of the things I'm always curious of is time and over generations, how the element of time has changed. And in the old days, when you talked about the big six or the big eight, it was probably more about implementations. It was more about how do I get this software to actually run and do something for me? And while that's still an important element, it has to get done. A lot of it today is really about innovation. And it's how does SAP and how do our business partners help our customers innovate their business? So it's not just about implementing a piece of financial software. It's about how do they innovate their business so that they can create a competitive advantage for themselves. So I look at it and say implementations are important and we absolutely have to go do that. But if we don't help our customers innovate, then they might as well just be standing still because their competition or somebody that doesn't even exist yet is going to come up with an idea or a way to go do something that's going to pass them by. It's interesting too, the global channel is obviously very effective in terms of delivering value to the market. But it's interesting, you have a customer who has a customer, customer, customer, customer. So it's like three levels down, but the partner is close to the customer. So Peter said something on Monday, I thought was interesting about the trend we're on. I want to get your thoughts on this and how it relates to the innovation piece. In the old days it was known processes and used unknown technologies that were being figured out to automate those processes, deliver those technologies, accounting, ERP. Now you have unknown processes developing with known technology. And technology's obviously getting developed more and more. But the unknown processes like IoT, these are use cases where it's a complete digital transformation on the workflow. So it's kind of unknown. So this is where the innovation comes in. I want to get your thoughts. What innovation aspects do you see and processes that are developing that are getting a clear line of sight for the partners? Obviously big data is one, we see that all the time. What would you share? What insights? Spend a minute to talk about that. Yeah, it's a great question because I believe that this is one of the big differentiators that SAP is bringing to the market in that I talked a little bit about time and the importance of getting information on a real time basis. It's interesting, I learned from one of my colleagues this morning that the R in our earlier products was for real time. But their perspective on real time was the fact that it wasn't on punch cards. I mean, this was at the beginning of our company and you think about where we are today. For our customers, when they innovate the business and you look at things like the internet of things and you want that connectivity, it's not good enough to connect to the systems they have today because if I can't process that data in real time, then it doesn't, what do I do with it? What service can I provide to my customer? And that's part of the innovation or the enabling of innovation that SAP brings to the table with S for HANA is the fact that not only can I help you connect those devices, those internet of things, but I can help you do something with those devices, do it in real time and provide that feedback directly to you as an organization and to your customer immediately. And what's interesting too on the ecosystem play and this is highlighted as well and I'll get your thoughts on is as these discoveries come up, people in the trenches who see customer needs in a vertical or a domain specific expertise set, they see an opportunity to innovate, then they got actually programming. So they need a developer approach, right? So the developer approach becomes a pretty big deal. So now they see an opportunity to problem to abstract away the complexity and deliver it. So again, time is important, but they have to program it. It actually writes software, right? So take a step back and say, okay, how long is that going to take? So what's interesting, the ecosystem you guys are putting together is a time to value equation. What's the perspective on that? I mean, because that becomes now a developer cloud concept, the platform as a service and the ecosystem. What are you guys seeing there and what use cases can you share? I'll give you a real live example for me and what we do and how we operate our business with our global business partners. When we decide to go to market with a global systems integrator to address a specific business problem, it's important for us to be able to track and measure whether what we're doing is being effective or not. If we create some sort of a campaign that distributes that message to our customers or our prospects, how many of them come forth are actually interested in it and do we create business opportunity? And once we've created business opportunity, we get it closed. Now we really want to track and measure where is it in the implementation? When do they go live? Once they've gone live, let's create a story so we can share that with the rest of the marketplace so that people can see the value that other customers are getting for what we do. We didn't really have a system to be able to track that. I came into this role about two years ago and for the first year we took something we had and we sort of got the duct tape out and we wrapped it up and we used it to do the best that we could but we realized it really wasn't adequate for what we wanted to go do. So we actually contracted with one of our business partners and we had them develop an application for us utilizing HANA Cloud Platform. So it's a HANA Cloud Platform based application. It's fully integrated with our CRM system and the beauty of it is in the old world if you didn't look at the innovative tools that SAP has available today, if you went back to the old way of doing things it probably would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and it would have done. We wouldn't have, well and that's part of the reason why we didn't have anything. That's right. It's because we could never get it done. That's right. So we contract with one of our business partners who is an expert with HANA Cloud Platform and they develop an application for us in literally weeks. That's awesome. We defined our business requirements, we used our own technology, worked with a third party company, that's a business partner, to go develop an application that solves a business problem. Yeah, now we had to go through the exercise of defining what our business requirements were but the fact that we could do that and we were able to do it economically, that's one of those big differences between the way that we used to do things and the way that we can do things today and that's the important message for our customers is that if you have to take months or years and spend thousands and thousands of dollars to get things done, your competition will pass you by. Somebody you don't even know exists today will pass you by. We need to enable them so that they can be innovative, they can be quick and they can respond to the requirements that are happening in the marketplace so that they can create their own innovations. We did that for ourselves. We used our own technology to do that. But the other thing I'm presuming, I'll bet you, well, let me put it this way, there's been a consistent theme here that the platform approach allows that backend, that traditional SAP, that stable, that secure, that compliant foundation, that it allows innovation to occur in a way that doesn't freak out the IT organization. Exactly. And when I say that you probably weren't going to be able to get it done a few years ago, is that someone within the IT organization would have come and whacked you with a hammer. But because you're using your own technology, and this is the test, this is the question, to what degree did you no longer have to run that traditional gauntlet of getting it up and running it into production and integrated with the rest of the system? Yeah, so we hadn't spoken about this before, and your question's great, because I'd indicated that there was a solution that we had. I hesitated using the word solution because it really wasn't designed for what we were trying to go do. It was built on technology from somebody else. It wasn't built on SAP technology. And there were probably two driving factors to move off of that system. Number one, it didn't adequately meet our business requirements. But number two, the IT department said, the clock is ticking. We will only support this for so long. You need to move to HANA, and you need to utilize SAP tools in order to get the support that you're looking for. So in some respects, we were forced to go do it, but we were able to embrace and adopt the new technologies that we have available. And by doing that, we got ourselves back into something that was standard, that our IT operation could support and get it done much more quickly and get it done much more economically, where in the past we could never get it done. So one of the things that's been occurring here on theCUBE over the past couple of days, John, you have a lot of interviews with a lot of people that are part of the overall ecosystem. And SAP has an enormous amount of talent that's devoted to trying to drive the productivity and the success and the value of partners and the whole ecosystem for customers. As you look forward, when you think about collaboration, you heard Hasso talk this morning about some of the new technology in his keynote, some of the new technologies, some of the ways that's going to make it easier for smart, high quality, high success people to work together. Talk a little bit about how you think technology is going to make it easier for you to work with all of the SAP experts and folks who are trying to bring value to the ecosystem for customers. So today, pretty much all of our global systems integrators are creating innovation centers that will allow them to take advantage of these tools and to quickly develop and deploy assets that will help customers solve specific business problems. And so I believe what we'll be able to have, and I'm envisioning one in particular that happens to be in the same town that I live in, we will be able to work very, very quickly with that organization and integrate that group on a global basis. So it doesn't matter if the business problem is in the United States or if the business problem is in Asia Pacific or in Latin America. We can create those assets in a single location and deploy them anywhere across the globe. And it's interesting when I go around the globe and I meet with business partners, sometimes the challenge that they have is to understand all of the assets that are available within their own organization. And with the way that they're setting up these, some of them will call them solution centers, some of them will call them innovation centers, but essentially these centers of excellence where they have the ability to bring the right resources together who have the industry knowledge, they have the line of business knowledge, they've got the technical expertise that they can develop these kinds of solutions that can be deployed in the cloud and can be deployed anywhere across the globe. Big buzz this week has been the Apple announcement. Obviously that's going to impact you guys because it's one great, sexy announcement. Everyone loves Apple, it billions in the cash, two thirds overseas, but then you guys are global company, hopefully take advantage of that. That's going to bring a lot of attention to the ecosystem and more, and certainly put a spring in the step for developers that's going to attract a non-SAP set of folks. Yet you guys have an open choice model where you can buy SAP end-to-end, do all the greatness and goodness of SAP, but for the most part, you might get new customers. How is that impacting the game? Because that's now opens SAP ecosystem up to a boatload of new opportunities. How are you guys structured for that? What's your thoughts on that? How are you guys organizing the capture of that opportunity? Are you going to double down the marketing budgets and go all in because Apple, you got a window opportunity, the wins at your back on this one. So it's a great opportunity. How are you organizing it? How are you taking that to market? I think that one of the things, certainly as we work with our business partners, especially, it's not about just working with them where they have their SAP expertise. They're not the only people that communicate either with our customers or with prospects, people who aren't our customers. And so one of the things that we're really trying to do is to ensure that where they have digital practices and those digital practices aren't necessarily within the SAP practice at all. As a matter of fact, they're not. It's really working and collaborating with them and helping them understand how the SAP today has the ability to work with them and to work with customers who haven't necessarily implemented anything of SAP today. Whether you're the smallest enterprise or you're the largest global corporation, we have solutions that we can jointly come in together and solve business problems. And the consumerization of IT is happening, so that certainly is an exclamation point on that. I thought Haso's example today was outstanding because it took something that he's absolutely got on his app and say, you wouldn't be able to do this any other way. And to be able to open SAP up to the user, regardless of whether it's somebody just walking down the street or it's somebody within the four walls of a corporation, and to be able to use those Apple devices in order to access that information and to make decisions that have an impact on what they do day in and day out, it's pretty significant. I mean, it's going to be a competitive advance for you guys, and I think one of the things that's not being discussed heavily, mainly because it's one of those things people don't like to talk about is money making. A huge money making opportunity exposing the SAP customer base to all this white space developer opportunities could be fantastic. Yeah, well yeah, and it also opens it up to a set of developers who may not have historically even looked at developing on an SAP platform. Michael, thanks so much for spending the time on theCUBE, really appreciate great conversation, great insights, sharing the data here on theCUBE. The CUBE ecosystem is growing, got a new CUBE alumni. Michael, welcome to theCUBE, appreciate it. You're live here at SAP Sapphire, you're watching theCUBE.