 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 Consolink, the cloud internet company. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. We're live? Okay, we're live, we're back here. Live at SAP Sapphire. I'm John Furrier, and we just look at the site of our guest, Sandeep Ravandi, who's the president co-founder of Innovaptive and Thorsten Lyduck, vice president of platform partners at SAP. Welcome to theCUBE. I got so excited, I missed the intro. So, one of the things that's going on is obviously the certification of apps, and it's kind of a nuanced story, but the partnering and the platforms that are out there are enabling ecosystems to grow very rapidly, and this is coming down to this notion of are you a platform or are you a tool? And certainly, developers will have platform-like features, but ultimately, if they're in a big enterprise ecosystem, they're just a feature or a tool. It's the classic line, oh, that's not a company, that's a feature. That used to be the story for venture-backed companies 10 years ago, but now you could really do well being a tool or a feature if you're on a platform. Sandeep, you do this. Yes. Share with the audience what's going on in the market, how are you guys succeeding, and what's your company doing? I mean, when we started off, like I mentioned earlier in our conversation, we come from management-consulting backgrounds, and we understand business processes and the gaps in business processes, and where mobile can dramatically transform how people connect with processes. We evaluated several platforms back in the day where we had an opportunity to look at different platforms, and we saw SAP mobile platform back in the day before HANA Cloud platform was available. As our doorway and segue, to be able to create application that can resolve those pain points in the business process areas where mobile is mission critical, and we built upon that, but then we quickly also realized that if these productized solutions cannot be personalized to meet specific business needs, then it's hard to capitalize and monetize on that. And what does your company do? Just share real quickly, what is your company doing? Absolutely, so our focus is really to enable instant digitization by connecting people, processes, and things, and the way we approach that is through a very large portfolio of mobile solutions that go across multiple lines of businesses, prepackaged, leveraging SAP mobile platform and the SAP HANA Cloud platform, and then we built a patent-pending technology which is called as the Rapid Application Configurator Engine that allows instant personalization, which ties back to the mission I spoke about. So you put a wrapper around a traditional app, SAP app, and provides some integration or modernization. So the applications are innovative as IP, but we are leveraging SAP's technologies and their SDKs to develop these applications. Okay, got it, okay. Yeah. Thors, so talk about the dynamic. Is this a new breed of partner, or is there a trend here where you're starting to see these new relationships? Share the trends. Yeah, so this is I think one of the amazing stories which we have to tell, right? When SAP really invested in the ecosystem on the platform side, and I think everybody agrees that without an ecosystem and successful ecosystem, nobody has been successful adopting the platforms, then we have been able to attract really a huge amount of net new companies working with SAP. So in fact, 60% of all the partners who are part of the CartNedge built program, how we call it, are basically net new SAP. They're born in the cloud, native mobile social, so they really add these great capabilities like innovative that, right, to the ecosystem and basically complement the core portfolio of SAP very well. So if you think about SAP's history, SAP has been a company that showed a very large integrated, comprehensive approach to thinking about applications. A lot of your competitors started down at hardware, middleware, database, and eventually built themselves up. Platforms tend to be more comprehensive large. Does the historical perspective of SAP comprehensive give you an advantage as we think about platforms versus some of the other companies that are trying to cobble things together from the piece parts a little bit more? Yeah, I absolutely believe this for the various reasons. So when you think about the opportunity any partner gets when he joins an SAP platform is actually instant access to 300,000 plus customers, right? But it's not just customers, it's also business content. So when you think about HANA Cloud Platform, it's the only platform in the market who has really business access to all the various backend systems of the customers, right? So think about business suite, ERP, all the different disciplines. When you think about line of business, HR, success factors, procurement, Ariba, Concord, you know, so you can't name it. So basically the different shade, I think, which we have from a value proposition is that we have very broad platform capabilities, but we have also the business content access and this is exactly what the other companies are lacking when you start something up from scratch, where you don't have this kind of customer environment which you can expose to the ecosystem. You have Sandbox, really. Yes. HANA Cloud is basically a money-making Sandbox for developers because SAP already does big business, pretty much everything runs on SAP. Right. So for a developer to jump into this environment allows them to do some integration. So if someone wants to build custom app, they can just jump right in. Absolutely. Is that the mean? Am I getting it right? Yeah, absolutely. So we have three key use cases. Either companies build new applications, that's what innovative is. You can integrate, this is the second one. You know, and then the third one is obviously that you extend the existing SAP solutions on the customer side and drive innovation in the cloud. So when you think about HANA Cloud platform, it's really a agility layer for the customers to drive innovation in the cloud and they can basically keep a stable environment on the backend side. So and the ecosystem is obviously enabling this kind of innovation, right? So for the customers who really want to get to the next level, they have access to a wealth portfolio of partner solutions which they can instantly deploy, where they can instantly consume value to get basically this innovation into the company. And this helps them to get basically executed, to execute on their digital transformation story. I want to build another 300,000 number though because that 300,000 number is companies. That's customers, yes. But it's companies that are customers. Companies, yes. So how many actual users are in your ecosystem right now? I mean, it's what, 1,000, 1,500, 2,000, 5,000 on average at your company? So we're talking hundreds of millions of people are under management, so to speak, within the SAP ecosystem, is that accurate? Yeah, so I mean obviously HANA Cloud platform is actually any customer of SAP should consider to have it, right? And we are pushing this as a strategic platform with all the sales cycles. So what it means is actually, when you buy, when customer buys, success factors, he needs to think about, how do I add the other solution components? How do I keep basic innovation going? HANA Cloud platform is enabling that, right? When you think about IoT scenarios, when you think about use experience, mobile, independently, if you are on the business suite, if you are the next generation business, S4 business suite, it doesn't matter. You need an extension capability to be agile and to extend. So we have driven HANA Cloud platform via all the sales channels, via all the portfolios which we have in SAP to our customers, right? So basically our goal is to drive HANA Cloud platform adoption, basically very broad and ideally, every customer should have it. That's the goal. I mean a great example is, we, one of our top selling applications is in the enterprise asset management space, right? Where we are offering a mobile enterprise asset management solution for preventive maintenance and calibration maintenance on the cloud, leveraging HCP, where we can deliver it both as a software as a service or we partner up with SAP to deliver that as a platform as a service and the software running on top. The great example of the value that we see as independent developers in the platform is to take this above and beyond because our customers are asking us, great you gave me preventive maintenance, I'd like to move to predictive maintenance models. The fact that we're already on the HANA Cloud platform, I have the ability as an independent developer now to leverage the HANA databases to drive predictive analytics and I can also bring the internet of things services to drive sensor-based connectivity that can further monetize and give me upsell opportunities as a business. That's extensibility, so you provide the head room, basically. So I've got to ask the question, I'm sorry, Peter, you got that. No, no, I was going to, well, very quickly. So one of the things that SAP did right early on was start to weave together its partners into something that looked like a network. So partners, especially application providers and service providers, could work inside the SAP ecosystem to add new value. Are you actually starting to extend that now and make it possible or easier for partners to use each other's tools, to use each other's APIs so that you are able to publish out and other partners are able to apply your stuff within the SAP ecosystem to drive new levels of value. Is that becoming a feature of how you're presenting the ecosystem? Yes, it is. I mean, even though that, you know, it's obviously kind of roadmap and steps which have to happen to fully enable that. But, you know, when you think about cloud foundry, right? Which is basically an open platform standard which I have joined by many of the IT companies. What it does, it gives openness to developers to leverage their tools, the development tools to deploy it. And in principle, you get access via this construct to multiple ecosystems. So if a company has built application A with an ecosystem A, it's immediately available also in all those ecosystems where cloud foundry is represented, right? So it's a huge value from a reach and from a reach perspective, right? The second important area with regards to where we cross promote is obviously what we call the microservices area. So we have micro building, microservice framework where partners can publish their microservices, where customers can pick and orchestrate and also developers obviously can pick and orchestrate those microservice and build us into the application. So basically we promote the cross-pollination of innovation within the ecosystem via this kind of market microservices concept and framework. But are you also at the same time coming up with standardized con or do you envision that there's going to be an SAP way of doing business? SAP has been also at the vanguard of thinking about some business model innovations. Inside the ecosystem is there going to be an SAP way of doing business that makes it easier to do contracting, joint go to market and other types of things? Yeah, sure. So I mean from a go to market perspective, obviously what we do is we publish all these solutions on the SAP on our app center. That's where customers can go to discover, find and basically try those solutions. Customers can navigate by industry, LOB, so it's very comprehensive and it gives them a good overview on what is available in V-Cousins. The second important thing is where we empower the partners to be successful is we implemented a model that companies like Innovaptive can bundle their solution with the HANA Cloud platform on a very simplified model. So we basically ask for a revenue share for based on their application value. It's simple, it's predictable, and it allows them to consume all the parts of HANA Cloud platform end to end without thinking about, hey, do I need to switch on another storage element? Do I need to switch on the portal? Do I need to consume some kind of mobile services? We, in principle, don't care. Take us through that. This is the big, I think the big deal you guys have is an opportunity. Monetization, yeah. It's a really on-board developer in a way that's elegant, but yet they get in and they can enjoy the benefits. I'm a developer, we have an app, take me through what's in it for me. Yeah, okay. So why do I join? What do I get? Exactly. Do I get people to talk to? So the reason why you develop is to build something that you can sell to customers. Yes, we have an app. Exactly, so when we have built an end-to-end engagement framework which guides you very effectively through the different steps in the lifecycle to get reached this point, right? So we give you access to developer resources, HANA Cloud platform, they give you enablement packages, including high-touch enablement for strategic areas where we know you complement our portfolio very well to get you effectively trained to build those solutions. We give you feedback. Who pays for that? SAP takes care of that, right? So we give every partner standard enablement. So the developer doesn't know how to pocket for the developer yet? No, out of pockets. I was talking to a price, but it costs to the end, but I can tell you the investment for any partner, the investment for any partner is literally 3,500 euros per year to be part of the program and get all the services which I was referring to. So is that upfront or can I back-end it? No, that's a subscription. It's an annual subscription to get the SAP partner status, to get access to the developer resources, to get access to enablement training packages. We provide feedback on the solution use cases in terms of is this complementing what SAP has? Is it only a roadmap of SAP so that partners don't make the wrong investments? We review the solution from a quality perspective to ensure it can be deployed to a customer seriously and instantly if a customer wants to buy it. And then we promote it via the various routes to market. I was relating to the HAP Center as a digital property, E-PASS, this is the embedded license model where we empower the partners to buy it on a revenue share model to sell the solution self-sufficiently. And obviously in certain cases we orchestrate the engagement with the SAP field as well. So the fixed fee for the subscription, I get that's a good developer fee, I got that. Out of pocket is going to be actually hiring developers or labor to write the code. And then if I go to the marketplace, if I go to market with SAP, that's where the rev share comes in. Correct. And other partners. And other partners, so distribution. Right, so when they sell, say a 100 license deal, an annual subscription deal, we would typically do a percentage revenue share with SAP. And SAP's shown tremendous flexibility in how they help us monetize on that model. So we work closely with Tarzan and the different go-to marketing and the GCO guys that come together to make that deal happen. And you're obviously here in theCUBE, so you're a fan, so you're supportive, right? So you think this is a good deal. Perfect developers. Well, quite frankly, the success we've had so far, I mean, two years in a row, we have won SAP Pinnacle Awards. We have only good things to say, I mean, quite frankly. I have other things that I can share as well that where I would like to see improvement, which, like I- Please share. Yeah, I think the area is that where I think we need some clarity, apart from the fantastic technology stuff and monetization models, is really the roadmap alignment, right? We don't want, as a developer, we're always threatened as a small developer that what if SAP comes up- You don't want to get rolled over by the big elephant. Yeah, so our ask to SAP has always been that if we are spending so much money and I'm getting investor money now, into building our business out of the platform, that we align well as true partners in the ecosystem. Over time. Over a period of time. You don't want to be in the crosshairs of a trajectory. So just speaking very straightforward and honestly, that's really where we as developers believe that if we have made some traction in the market with a certain product, we don't want our partner to compete with that. Just like, you know, force.com or Salesforce does not do that, right? I mean, they let the partner ecosystem progress, which I think SAP's already committed. Yeah, I mean, Microsoft used to have a great developer system. They were very clear on how they articulated where their core was. So essentially the train is going down the track. So, and everyone wanted to draft off that. I think that's right. And I think, so Torsen shares a URL. Where do people get information? So I'm an app builder. I want to check this out. Where do I go? Yeah, so the easiest place to go, we have an app center. So it's www.sapapdc, you know, that's the app developer center. And that's where you find all the information. It's basically guided end-to-end. SAP.com slash, no, not .com. It's really just SAP AD, PC AD, PC for application development partner center, right? And that's where all partners would land, you know, to basically get information on a program, but also to sign up, right? So we help partners to give, to, we give them a complete overview on the program along the various steps. Get started, development, you find your enablement training materials there to a certain extent, even the go-to-market support is already there. So they really fully understand what is ahead of them, what are the different steps and where to find it. And they sign up electronically on this page as well. SAP AD, PC. Yeah, okay, got it. Make sure you pull the URL up. Well, thanks guys so much for coming in. I really believe, and again, Peter and I were just talking about the developer opportunity. It's no one really has won this new modern developer community yet, certainly great track. You see a lot of growth over 10 years with Amazon. You guys have a great developer community in the enterprise and new opportunities are there, right? So it's going to be fun to watch over the next few years. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Yeah, thank you for having us and we're very confident, right? Yeah. We are here, we are here live at SAP. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.