 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Sapphire Now, headlines 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. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal and noise. I want to thank our sponsors SAP HANA Cloud Platform, Console Inc, At Console Cloud, and Capgemini. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Peter Burris, our next guest, Mike Gallo, Vice President of Global, ERP Practice Lead at Capgemini. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. Thanks for coming on. So tell us what you do at Capgemini. What's your job? Sure, so I lead the ERP practice and the ERP practice is responsible for coming up with new solutions and offers around ERP focused on cloud and hosting capabilities. I also lead a team of subject matter experts and work in the pre-sales area as well. So you talk to a lot of customers. You see a lot of activity in the marketplace. What's your takeaway right now? What's the state of the market from your standpoint? Obviously, cloud's hot. They see all the advantages. Public's obviously out, the G's out of the bottle to Amazon, but you got now hybrid, a little bit harder to pull off. SAP's talking integration, partner ecosystem, certainly APIs everywhere with HANA on the cloud, Microsoft's on the stage with IDM on theCUBE, Apple, what's your take on the current customer challenges, your customer's challenges? Sure, well, I see two main areas that our clients are talking to us about. Number one is certainly cloud, of course, right? Because there's so many different options. I think you laid it out very well there between public, private, hybrid, all these different options around cloud and clients really need help in understanding what's the right solution for them? How does it fit for them? And really, is it safe to put their enterprise workload, which is very important like SAP in the cloud? How do you do that in a safe way? The second area my clients are talking to me about in this context is around SAP and HANA, of course. So HANA, you have to treat it differently, of course, because of the different uniqueness around hosting those certain workloads as well. So clients want to make sure that when they approach HANA, it's done in a certain way that you make sure you take that into account. How has ERP changed for SAP with HANA? I hear a lot of talk, oh, it's been rewritten. I mean, what specifically has been modernized for their ERP? Well, certainly the big shift, of course, is the time to insights, as you might hear people say. So the time it takes in order to get reports done or get information, in some cases, close to real time at their fingertips, has been a real shift from where things were a few years ago before HANA. So that's the real business value shift that we've seen with moving toward HANA. What's getting you excited right now out there? Because you have a lot of tools in your tools chest. SAP, obviously, we're here for Sapphire, but it's not an all SAP world. Cloud certainly brings up the question of other point technologies that wrap around from infrastructure, gear, commodity hardware up through the stack. Well, the things that get me excited are really talking to our clients and discussing what are the right cloud options for them? What's the right hosting solution from an infrastructure standpoint? How can we work with them to really understand where's the value? And it's not a one size fits all. There's many different options to look at. So how can we work with them to understand what is the right solution? What are the right options? And how can they derive that cloud value for what honestly is probably one of their most important IT assets? So you are to be perhaps a little inflammatory, but you're canary in the coal mine in certain respects. And by that I mean that you're at, you're the arrowhead in many respects. Folks thinking about going from implementation or things about going from on premise to the cloud, are you seeing the same deal flow you used to see? Are you starting to see a deal flow go down? Are you starting to see cloud deal flow go up? How does it feel from a person and a practice that probably was stood up to do on premise implementation and now watch that go to the cloud? How's it playing out for your guys? Yeah, that's a great question. We've been doing, we saw an inflection on cloud, really enterprise type of cloud solutions hosted within our data centers. Probably a couple of years ago where mid-market type of clients say, maybe not necessarily enterprise, but mid-market we're saying, why not cloud a few years ago? But now we're looking at public cloud as coming into the fold as being a potential option and what other enterprise cloud capabilities are out there. So you're absolutely right. It's interesting to hear what clients are asking us about and which way they want to go. And now we're getting a lot more enterprise clients saying, hey, we want to take advantage of the cloud. We have these legacy deployments that we need to somehow derive value from still while still looking at what the future's going to bring and that's where hybrid cloud solutions could come into. So those conversations are definitely happening a lot more than they did in the past. So your conversations and becoming less of, well, here's the solution and more of, here's the options, both now and in the future, that this option is going to lead to these future options or these future alternatives. Is that becoming an increasing part of the conversation? Yeah, absolutely. Especially when you talk with enterprise clients, they have a vision and they have where they need to be. And a lot of times large corporations, it's not a matter of making a decision and turning on a dime. You really have to set the strategy on where you want to be. We can help them with here are the options but understanding what their business reasons are and then bringing to them potential options that maybe they didn't think of while keeping in mind where the end state is going to be and where they want to be down the road. So it's a journey in some respects. So Capgemini is a global services brand like other consulting firms and you have a stake in how this all plays out. John asked you, what do you do today? What do you want to be doing in four years? From what will Capgemini's difference be in your area in four years? Helping bring clients or helping bring ERP up and running with the cloud and some of the other options. What will your job be in four years, do you think? Same thing? Well, I think it's going to, I think it will change over time of course to be more of an advisor around the services that make the most sense and bring those different options to our client and helping them to get to where they need to be. Maybe it's not an on-premise solution in their data center, maybe it's cloud and helping them come up with meeting what their business objectives are around IT, especially in the ERP space and how can we do that by saying, looking at more OPEX type solutions or looking at different other business drivers that we can help them with. So I think that it's going to shift into that somewhat advisory state in a lot of ways. So John, we've been hearing a lot about partner ecosystems and some of the new acquisitions that SAP has made that are driving away, a little bit further away from ERP and to some other domains that are leading more to a revenue side of things. Are you also starting to see your practice move away from traditional IT closer to the business, close to revenue decisions? Absolutely, absolutely. We're seeing a lot more integration with say digital and things in that nature where, now you're much closer to where the end client is actually clicking a button and buying something or something. And so that's bringing SAP that much closer to the client and bringing the ERP into that portion of the business where you really are in the revenue driving side of the business. What does digital transformation mean to you when a customer says help me with digital transformation? Well, it's really, in my personal view, it's really a way for a company or organization to work much more closely with their end client or their end customer to understand what their needs are and be more reactive in a real-time way to their needs. And in some cases, maybe even predict what their needs are to provide that better experience for their clients. So how do you guys combine with the whole Virtuostream product to deliver some transformation? Sure, so we're working very closely with Virtuostream where a client is looking for enterprise workloads such as SAP and they really need business-level, service-level agreements where they need application availability, they need application reliability, application performance guarantees, and working with Virtuostream we're able to do that. We're also working with Virtuostream around their software tool sets that we're layering onto our enterprise-hosted cloud that we have at Capgemini that really gives us some automation capabilities around SAP that we didn't have before. And we're working with them very closely in some regions to partner with them in terms of data centers where we're pairing up with their data centers and sharing client workloads and really partnering in that way in a pretty big way. What are some of the critical elements for your customer's workloads in moving to the cloud? What are some of the specific challenges and elements that they've successfully, for the ones that have successfully moved over, what can you take away from that? Sure, well, what I would say is, of course, their ERP is the most critical, in some cases, to their business, most critical IT asset. So what you really have to understand, and then, of course, throw into that, and from an SAP perspective is you've got HANA that you have to take into account, which takes its own degree of complexity that gets added there. And so you really have to look at all the potential options and come up with what's the best fit and also think through what's the total cost of ownership of this solution and really think through where's the business going to be in another year or another two years? What's the consumption model going to look like? How is that going to be modeled? How can I fit the best cloud sort of scenario or solution to where my business is going to go and that flexibility that I might need? So you really have to think through what's the next year, two years, three years going to look like for me to really make those right choices. What's your big takeaway from the conference this year? If you look out on what's kind of happening, that was day one. What's your personal takeaway when you got to get the aroma of the vibe and hear some of the announcements, hear the keynotes? Well, one of the interesting takeaways that I got was the announcement that SAP is certifying virtualized HANA up to four terabytes now on VM or as vSphere, that's been very interesting to hear about. We've been waiting for this for a long time to make that jump from one terabyte to four terabytes. It's big in our business, so that was good to see. Otherwise, it's a matter of meeting with my clients, you hear them talking to CIOs, understanding what's on their mind, making sure that we're aligned in terms of what our services and solutions might be, and then talking to partners that we have as well, working with them to how do we better serve them, come up with new solutions around that for our clients? So that's really been the exciting part for me and it's been a really good day. So your job in many respects used to be where the rubber met the road in a client organization. As the cloud becomes more of an option and you are presenting to your customers a broader range of options, are you finding yourself being less of a, well I don't want to say less of, being more than just a partner to your customers, but also are you starting to work in the partner realm for Capgemini with a lot of other cloud players to try to ensure that you have a pulse on all this value that's being created in the SAP ecosystem from a cloud standpoint? And are you part of that process of bringing that into the customer? Yeah, I have to be, right? Part of my role is to understand what should be in Capgemini's portfolio around ERP and ERP cloud and hosting solutions. So I can't do my job working with clients and advising them on different options and solutions that are out there without going out there, kicking the tires, understanding what's out there, talking to partners, talking to clients, what are the needs that are out there? And so that's definitely a part of the job is to really get that feedback and then sort of take that in, take it under consideration and then build that into our own portfolio to see what makes the most sense for our clients. So it's very important. Mike, final question for you. What's your advice to people out there that are about to contact you or in the middle of transformation or just whiteboarding out options as they start thinking about ERP and go on the next level? Maybe they sat in the fence a little bit, now where did it take the plunge? What's your advice to those people? Well, my advice is to really look deep into the, like I had mentioned, think through what your next one year, two years are going to look like, understand what's going to be the right fit for that different solution and understand what's the total cost of ownership when you look at different cloud providers, different scenarios, understand that there's a lot of different components and bits and pieces that make up different solutions and you really have to dig deep into that ROI total package from a holistic perspective. So that's one area I would give some advice. Mike, thanks for sharing your insights here on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Thanks for joining us, Mike Gallo, VP of ERP, practice lead at Capgemini, big technology practice, doing all the heavy lifting, delivering on the cloud. That's the key to success. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. We are here live, theCUBE at SAP Sapphire, day one of three days of coverage. I'm John Furrier with Peter Bearish. 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