 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. Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are here live in Orlando, Florida for SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal and noise. Thanks to our sponsors for getting us here. SAP HANA Cloud Platform and Console Inc at Console Cloud, thanks to the sponsors. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. Our next guest is Bobby Vetter, SVP of Global Channels, General Gym's partner solution management for SAP, S4HANA and of course the digital experience, digital enterprise platform. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. That's a long title. Good to be with you guys. It must be really big. Well, obviously, Dave Vellante and I over the past many years have always saw the value of indirect sales through channels, certainly from a cost per order dollar. Great leverage and an era where people are buying sales. You see here startups having a cost per sale of about a dollar 30, that's 30 cents more than the dollar that they're actually getting creates that kind of bubble bursting situation we're seeing. But so the channel has been very strategic for SAP, certainly over the years, going back to the big six accounting firms back in the day to now as cloud comes in, there's a thirst and a real demand for agile solutions and the partners make a good fit there. So question is, what's the status of the new playbook in channels, global channels? And what is some of your critical success factors? I mean, obviously labor must be hard. What are your challenges and opportunities? Yeah, it was actually a pretty good comment. I think, you know, if you have a channel, why you have a channel? Obviously you can say, yo, you want to lower your cost of sales, but I think that's the wrong view. In my view, the channel adds value. And why is that? Because if you approach customer, we have 70,000 people as SAP, but we're unable to cover the market. If you're in the countries, in the sub-region of a country, in an industry, in any dimension, you cannot cover the market. Means you cannot approach each customer with direct sales force, with even direct approach. We need to have a value add partner ecosystem that can cover the market. And I'm really talking value add here and not about cost reduction. So that's my first comment. Therefore, it's important that a channel partner, they need to really understand our strategy, our roadmaps. They need to be enabled, educated to provide these added value. So this is a lot of investment you do in a channel. It's not just low ring sales cost, it doesn't work. So you need to spend a lot of money to have a value add channel, right? So the value adds key. We know that they're close to the customer. Also gross profit is high on services and there's a lot of delivery involved. So they're close to their customers and delivery seems to be the hot trend. What's going on at Sapphire this year on the delivery front that you're seeing that's notable to share with the audience? I think first our portfolio is growing fast. It's a lot of products we have. Our demand for our products is increasing. Means we need to think about ways how we increase efficiency, not just in selling and pre-sales, but also in delivery. And the way we do it is in many areas with smart packaging. So we package implementation if you so want. We pre-define business processes, intellectual knowledge involved for many customers we know and we package it and we provide to partners. They can build on this and actually deploy much faster based on best practice approaches. So that's what we do I think very successfully. Whether you do that on premise or cloud every customer deserves a fast deployment because what you want to do once you spend the money you want to have a return and you want to wait for half a year or one year you want to have it immediately. And the deployment needs to be done on high quality because if you run a company on mission critical processes it's got to be right. You cannot do that in the wrong way. It means they need to be highly skilled to do this and adopt to final customer needs. And this- But they also need to focus on the customer. So going back to this notion of what a channel does you know on a global basis billions of people are going to be coming online in the next few years. Those billions of people are going to be served by hundreds of millions of new businesses. Some of which are going to grow and scale to the point where they're SAP prospects and you're not going to be able to reach them. But there is an enormous amount of experience in the SAP ecosystem that as you're saying you're trying to package up so that implementation becomes simpler time to value is faster. But there's also been some tension because many of the folks in whom a lot of that experience has been aggregated some channel partners some professional services firms have used their experience not to make it faster but to make it more complex because it increases billions. How are you going about trying to encourage your channel to really focus on the customer speed comprehensiveness compliance and to diminish the tendency or the temptation to just focus on billions. Yeah. I think it's two sides right first the customer behavior has changed. First the customer and the consumer demands what you need to do. They have choices. So if you are not able to deliver a solution in the right way they will simply not choose you because you make a decision not just of a software or a solution but you also want to know how fast is my return on investment. So they check about this even in a selling phase you cannot go over the board with this. So we need to be in line with what customers expect. So I think that's the natural thing that happens anyway. It's like a regulatory from the market. But when we start to capture that information is SAP starting to capture that information and alert customers to. We measure customer satisfaction at the end and partner satisfaction and for us that's important and a customer will not be happy if his implementation is not successful or takes too long goes over a budget or he doesn't get the functionality and the benefits they want to do. So we measure this. We have KPIs and we even measure on this. But I think what we can do is also in the cloud for example the way how it's done in the deployment it's different than on premise. So in cloud you cannot do what you want. You're in certain boundary need to do what the solution allows you to do. So in cloud we see that this behavior of extend the services to extend that the customer does not agree is not happening or let's say we have few exceptions but in general cloud, how do you say? Cloud addresses these needs. Yeah. Cloud disciplines. Disciplines. Exactly. And we try to do the same on premise that we also apply these packages to partners even on premise and we're going to certify them on their solution. So they pre-build solution for industry. We are in 26 industries and what we do is we give them let's say the raw material of best practices and then what they do they add their own IP for the country, for the specific industry. They complete the solution and go to market with it and this speeds up obviously deployment but also increases quality. And the customization on that is off the charts because you now have someone on the front lines serving the customer in a unique way with differentiated product. Yes, and I can tell you this what we call best practices are really frequently used by partners and I had about six meetings already and I would say five out of six are using these packages for go-to-market. So reference implementations, reference architecture and technology not just how to guys, right? Yeah, what you do is you package intellectual property how you sell and deploy a solution and you bundle it and you make it available. All right, so take us through the top conversations you're having with partners. You mentioned you're talking to people here they usually get excited about one thing it's usually around monetization and value. What's the big top three conversations that you're involved with here at Sapphire this year? I think one big topic is S for Hanna. It's our digital core, our ERP digital core. This is really important because we're changing the architecture of ERP to as you know on Hanna means we use a column based in memory architecture that allows us to simplify an ERP on a technical level. We can simplify as well the user experience on top. We make role specific nice looking screens, flexible screens that you can use on any device where you're on iPhone here or any mobile device or using a laptop, right? It's adjust to the size of the screen. It provides not just transactional information it also adds analytical information. I think that's key. If you look how people work today they need much more analytical information but the thing is it needs to be content or context relevant I would say and they want to have it real time because when you're transact you don't want to wait for half an hour to get the analytical information so it needs to be contextual right real time and even you need to have advanced analytics on your screen if you need to resolve the situation on-flight and this new as for Hanna architecture does exactly this. What's the biggest thing that on your to-do list for your job to take this to market because is it training, is it marketing, is it social, is it assets, having assets out there? I mean what's on your hot list of things that you need so that you can get the channel humming? I think first we have a very long relationship with our channel partners so we know our partners. I have an organization in place that takes care of partners from a solution perspective and we have these set-up is in each region so they know their partners. So while we do normally let's take as for Hanna as an example what we do is first we explain the strategy and the roadmap. That gives you the overarching idea of what we want to do. Gives you the context why we rebuild a solution. What are the added value areas of a solution and we also give an impact on where they need to change skills or experience. So first we explain this, the second is then that we make sure the partners are ready for selling and pre-sales that they can articulate a value proposition and that they can demo a solution. That's the point number two. And then for the consultants we learn them how to build packaging and extend the packaging. That's what I just explained. And another important thing is we have a lot of what we call the existing customers so they learn how to convert existing customer to S4 Hanna. This is mainly the basic thing and then what we look is when we interact with the partner we package enablement and make it available in form for scalable learning platforms. These are cloud-based learning platforms you can register, you go in and you have curriculums and you can learn on the fly when you have time. You learn and you also can enter into learning rooms where you not just learn but you interact with experts who can do Q and A's. So digital assets. It's digitally sized, yes, in digital business experience you need to also approach enablement in a digital way. But you know, I know, you know, and I imagine you know that sales guys, for example, sales guys learn from other sales guys. Partners learn from other partners. Are you starting to make it possible for partners to have partner to partner experiences, go to market, learn from each other, work from each other, take each other's templates, share intellectual property all around and within the umbrella of the Hanna ecosystem. That's a very good input. I think what we do is in the countries or by region we do so-called partner executive councils where we bring partner together. We select a few topics and then we discuss with the partners how we best approach it together. And the partners share information. They're willing to share. We also teach them obviously that nobody wants to be different than the others, how you differentiate. So how we can extend the solution yet your own IP. This is a major thing where we're well teaching. They don't want to be different because they kind of compete and you will. Of course, yeah. They compete but they share. They share, they help each other sometimes. Sometimes they're in competition but let's just remind my competition obviously is all the vendors. That's why I try to talk to partner. Hey, let's put it together, let's help each other because the portfolio is so broad nobody can cover all aspects of our portfolio. So we have specialization. For example, industry. If you go discreet manufacturing, automotive or healthcare, utility or banking, that's completely different. You cannot do everything. So we have normally in our approach in industry, driven go to market and if there are opportunities here and they're not within your industry then partners sometimes they exchange this kind of information. Bobby, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your perspective and insight. Appreciate it. Thank you. Coming on theCUBE here and Sapphire. SiliconANGLE Media is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. We're with Bobby Vedder, SVP of Global Channels and among other things, Digital Enterprise, Platform Solutions and other things. Congratulations, you've got a big job and a great opportunity for channels. The cloud is a great opportunity to add value. This is theCUBE. We're trying to do our part adding value here live at SAP Sapphire. You're watching theCUBE. Thank you very much. There'll be millions of people in the near future that want to be involved in their own personal well-being and wellness. Nobody wants to age in a way that we're bound to a chair or a bed and I think being able to manage one's health is about keeping track of diet effect, exercise effects, sleep effects. And learn how to improve your life and how to be healthy longer.