 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's your host, Peter Burris. Hi, welcome back to theCUBE here at SAP Sapphire. I'm Peter Burris, and we've got some great guests here in this segment today. We're going to talk specifically about how a customer is working with their business to transform their overall mission, utilizing great partnerships. So, I'm very excited. Carlo Amesquita from Hershey, CIO of Hershey, as well as Henrik Wagner from VirtuaStream and Clay Caldwell from SAP. Thanks very much for joining us here on theCUBE and being now part of the CUBE alumni network. Thanks for having us. So, Carlos, let's start with you. Ultimately, every application, every IT investment, every IT decision is supposed to be in support of something that the business wants to do. Let's talk a little bit about what Hershey wants to do. Okay, thank you, Peter. Hershey's a 125-year-old company and it's a customer-centric, consumer-focused, branded company. And to enable that consumer centricity and that customer focus as well, you need to have deep insights about what the consumers want, what they need and how to get it to them at the time they want, when they want it. So, we have a CEO, a visionary CEO who has articulated to, in public, that he considers Hershey to be a knowledge and insight company that just happens to make chocolate. Okay, that on itself is a very tall order for any IT organization when they tell publicly that you are a knowledge company. So, in order to achieve that vision, we have to change what we call our entire platform of systems for speed and for delivering those insights to answer the questions so we can continue to lead in the marketplace. It's a long journey and I came to Hershey with that mandate to transform our IT backbone and to be able to be on the 21st century a leading analytics company. And to help build out those capabilities so the company can be, and I want to make a point here because I will, just a personal aside, one of my favorite days as a father was bringing my kids and my wife to Hershey, Pennsylvania, doing the, going through the factory, seeing the tour, going to Hershey, the amusement park. I got to tell you, if you can get to Hershey, Pennsylvania, the story, it's a wonderful story and you see this notion of customer and employee centricity very much in action. And I would think that Hershey's history of focusing in customers, although they want to ramp that up, but also employee engagement, having great relationships with employees, would make SAP a natural partner for you because SAP has also a strong focus on that notion of employee engagement and customer satisfaction. Why did you choose to work with Virtue Stream and SAP to drive this vision or this execution orientation forward? Okay, because it's every other generation that you have some substantial, I would say, tectonic shifts in the industry. And I would say that in memory, columnar databases, with lightning speed, it's a shift. That combined with cloud services is a shift and at some point you need to change from where you are to where you want to be and you have to carefully pick those inflection points and I think we are at the key inflection point and SAP is leading that inflection point. Now, so we established a very strong partnership from CEO to CEO, from CFO to CFO, from at the top of the company. So it's not only about a contract, it's not about an implementation, it's about a strategic long-term partnership. Within that partnership, we have also systems like Integrator and we have Virtue Stream as a key component of that trifecta that will help us deliver on our plans. And why Virtue Stream? Because I believe in virtualization, long-term, may not be completely here yet, but I do believe that in the future, computing will be just like power. So the analogy I like to make is that doesn't matter how big a company is and your ability to have your own generators or gas for electricity, no body does that. You buy it from the grid and the grid, you don't know where it's coming from. Normally, you may have a hydroelectric very close, comes from that hydroelectric, but at peak times, it's a turbine. And you don't see any difference. Virtualization will get us to that place in computing at some point. And I think Virtue Stream is a leading company in that area. So a big part of your job is to weave together the communities and ensure that they work. The Hershey community, the SAP community and the Virtue Stream community. So, Henrik, on the Virtue Stream side, when your team is looking at Hershey, what's the mandate to make sure that you're delivering in a consistent way to ensure that you're staying focused on Hershey's objectives? Excellent question. And I think, first of all, as you know, we're a very young company being founded since 2009, become a very long way, extremely fortunate to have the type of partnership we have with SAP. And then it's extremely humbling to be a part of a journey, such as Carlos' journey around S4HANA, around cloud to drive innovation. And because we are fortunate and feel humble to be part of that, we have an extremely large focus of the going into that project, the commitments from all the way to our top. You know, Carlos personally, good friends with Kevin Reed, our co-founder and CTO and Rodney Rogers. And I think coming from all the way from our leadership all the way down and people being there in the beginning of the project and as we're kicking it off now all the way through the journey, we feel humble to be part of it and we want it to be successful and we love being around that innovation and it's just exciting time. And I think that elevates the importance of the attention to the actual project. So Clay, in many respects, we've said on theCUBE the last couple of days, a couple of times, that it's been interesting to watch SAP transform from an applications company to a platform company, from a company that presumes that all the new stuff is going to happen here to a company that presumes that a lot of it's going to be co-created with customers and with partners. Tell us a little bit about how SAP is regarding this engagement and how you're ensuring that that foundation remains rock solid. Yeah, so a little bit of history first. You know, Carlos mentioned the tectonic shift that occurs every decade or so and Hershey, I want to say that they're embracing innovation but they're doing so with an air of caution and due diligence. So we started out on our journey with Hershey with regards to HANA Enterprise Cloud and our partnership with VirtuaStream, not just recently but half a year ago with Hershey dipping their big toe in the water with a mission critical enterprise application in business warehouse, putting that in our HANA Enterprise Cloud with VirtuaStream. And seeing how that went and then moving forward with a more recent announcement to move the totality of their environment into HANA Enterprise Cloud. So it's a big move for Hershey. It's a big investment and commitment for SAP and for VirtuaStream. But they went about it cautiously, did due diligence and we're in partnership together now with a fantastic path towards S. Verhana. To your question about SAP's general movement from application centricity to our expansion into the platform, it was an easy move for us. Some five years ago when we rolled out HANA, our in-memory database, we heard from our customers loud and clear that they were ready but consumption of the HANA product was taking longer than they wanted to enable innovation internally. And what was our answer to it? Our answer was HANA Enterprise Cloud with some great premium suppliers like VirtuaStream to supply great S4 HANA future roadmaps for wonderful customers like Hershey. So Carlos, when you think about what your next six months are going to be focused on and the delivery of some of these new capabilities that SAP and others are providing, how are you working with the business to ensure that there is close collaboration between the technology capabilities that you have, the partnerships that you have, and the direction that the business is taking? Because it's not just about putting the technology in place, it's about getting the employees to adopt it and the business to manifest those new capabilities. Well, it takes, first of all, it takes commitment from the top. And we have commitment from CEO down, CFO, supply chain officer, and everybody else that we are going to do this transformation. Is the largest investment that Hershey has done other than acquisitions, you know, probably the second largest investment in the last five years? Okay, so we take this very seriously. So that commitment brings us to no customization, standard processes, what my CEO likes to say is, so we can do the ordinary well, so we can focus on the extraordinary. So that partnership starts at the top and then the team has been assembled with people from every function. And it's not about what I need but why wouldn't this work for me? So we take that clear approach that we're going to embrace industry standards. And the other leg component is change management. Okay, focusing very actively on change management. So we can take the organization through, you know, it's not only super users and training but it's going through that, it's almost like a culture change. You know, when you are used to working in a highly customized environment and suddenly you're going to go into a plain vanilla standard system, there is, you know, a change. And it's, we have to articulate that this is for the greater good of the company, you know, versus the person who says, I may have two screens today, I used to have one screen before. You know, it's very minute point but the greater good of the company is pursuing standardization. It's a new point but it may have significant impact and when that person, that function and folks related to that function successfully adopt those changes. Absolutely, and absolutely. And it comes top down. It comes with a program for change management. It comes with training of course and it comes with, you know, a period of hand holding and working through the project with the people who are involved in those activities. When you talk about change management, change management is a set of disciplines that's very appropriate for employees. Absolutely crucial. Not a lot of people are particularly good at it. Not a lot of companies do it well. Very hard, be great partners to make it happen. But I presume that you're also working with the business to bring new capabilities, new experiences to your customers. Yes. How does change, well let me put it this way. Let me ask you a question. I think of marketing as a crucial piece of change management within the digital enterprise because marketing is crucial to envisioning how your customer base is going to adopt new behaviors, adopt new offers, adopt new ways of engaging the brand. Is that how you see it too? Yes, to a certain degree. It's similar, you know, when you look at consumer good companies and when they sell to, you know, you sell to a consumer, the most difficult thing to achieve is a change in habits. People consume some things in one way and you're going to change the habit. That's the most difficult thing to do. You know, same thing happens with when you introduce a new system. You know, if it's the same, you know, it's a new screen but it's the same functionality, that's an easy thing. If you're going to change the process, that's a new habit. And it takes a lot of training talks, takes a lot of, you know, a very deliberate change management effort to be able to make it stick, you know. And we see it all the time. You know, consumer good companies, you know, either succeed or fail based on how successful they are in converting you to the new habits because of the new products. Absolutely. So, very quickly, we got a couple minutes here, Hamrick. When you go back to the ranch, how are you talking to VirtuaStream about progress? Are you continuing to talk about implementation? Or are you starting to speak more in terms of change management and the overall business objectives? How do you sustain your team's engagement, again, with the vision of what Hershey's trying to do and not just what the project says has to happen? Sure. You know, I think we're extremely focused, focused organization and really got great attention to the details. But, you know, being a chess player, I really care about both the tactic and the strategy in the longer term. So, I think right now, the day to day, the week, what's in front of us, we're very focused on that kind of tactical things to make sure project gets off the ground in really good experience. But then we're also looking and very focused on the strategic piece. Where is that roadmap, you know, one year, three year, five year? Are we on that roadmap? And are we having open communication around maybe altering that roadmap to ensure as the changing business requirements come down from Hershey, we're still aligned with meeting expectations and we're aligned as organizations to meet the goal. So, tremendous focus from our organization and being part of this journey as a result. Excellent. So, Clay, last question for you, just very, very quickly. We've got a great customer story, great partner story, 60,000 people, I presume you've met with a lot of customers. Couple sentences. What are customers saying about what they want to do with SAP in the next year? Yeah. Most of the questions I receive at Sapphire this week as an example from our customers are two-fold. One, do I have to bite off a whole piece of the pie or can I take it in small pieces to move my infrastructure to the cloud? And the answer is very simple there. Yes, we've modular capabilities to move in small components, very similar to what Hershey did. The other question that I get in the biggest progression over the course of the next year is predominantly around risk mitigation. We need to make a move. We're probably not going to buy hardware anymore. We recognize that we're done, hardware is dead. How quickly can we get into the cloud and from a risk mitigation perspective, what can I promise the business for lack of disruption from a downtime as we move from on-premise to the cloud? Most of the questions that we see, so for SAP further optimizing over the course of the next year to be more minimally disruptive to our customers. So basically a lot of different paths to onboarding with a focus on cost, but also that compliance, security, and stability that's associated with this. Yeah, absolutely. So to wind this down from a change management perspective, alluding to what Carlos said, and don't take this the wrong way, Carlos, we're doing something really well if Carlos and I don't speak for the next year. From an infrastructure and managed services perspective, where he can focus on his projects, I want to be quiet. I want Verstrem and SAP to be quiet in this one category. So let's hope you guys don't get to know each other. No, absolutely. And I just want to add what Carlos is saying that, heck is also evolving, not only Hershey, but the offering from heck with Verstrem and it's only going to get better over time. So today we may be working on some disaster recovery times. Tomorrow may be much shorter than what it is today. So it's a fast moving space and we're going to learn together, we're going to go together through this and we're going to grow and win. Excellent. Well, thank you gentlemen very, very much. It's been a phenomenal session, I really appreciate it. Carlos, honor Clay. Thank you. This is theCUBE, great conversation about user stories and how partners in SAP are making it happen. We're here at Sapphire, we'll be right back with more of theCUBE from Sapphire. Thank you. 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