 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018, brought to you by NetApp. Welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, and we are in Orlando at SAP Sapphire 2018. This is an enormous event. 16 football fields, American football fields is the size of this space, incredible. We're welcoming back to theCUBE one of our distinguished alumni, Rudolph Gupta, you are the global vice president and GM of the SAP App Center. Welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you so much, thank you for having me. And isn't this a lovely event? It's amazing. It is. So much energy and excitement yesterday during Bill McDermott's keynote. He talked about SAP, 46 years old now, has 390,000 customers and is responsible for 77% you said of the world's transactions. Unreal. And you know the best part about this is we talked 77% of the transactions and if you walk around and ask people about SAP, they don't even know SAP, right? It's funny, like I'm from the Bay Area and the first time people started taking SAP and acknowledging the brand of SAP was when they started seeing SAP center. Because that's the shock. Yes, yeah. And they're like, oh, that was the first time. And then the second time we put a building out we bought SuccessFactors and we got a SuccessFactors building at the airport and they're like, oh, yeah, we know SAP from the building next to the airport. But now people have started becoming really serious of associating themselves with the brand because now they've started understanding what a crucial role SAP plays in their life, right? If SAP doesn't do what it does, the entire supply chain for many large enterprises stops, right? Which means your beverages don't come in, your food doesn't come in, nodding, right? Yeah, or it's like your medicine doesn't come. Well, you guys have had, Bill McDermott has talked about for a while about we want to become one of the world's top 10 most valuable brands. But for invisible software, you talk about you want to be up there with the apples and we can engage and touch with so many of these brands and people probably don't know a lot of people that they are using SAP that's driving so many businesses, industries and you guys have done a very good job of articulating your brand value through the voices of your customers who are transforming industries, they're saving lives and also your partner ecosystem. So talk to us about the partner ecosystem and how they're really enabling partners like NetApp, what you're doing with the App Center to really enable SAP's growth and transformation through your partner ecosystem. Absolutely. So one of the good things is, you look at the different transformations that the software industry has gone and cloud is one big one. And right now with the cloud, the advantage that we've got is the cloud is a completely different dynamics of software. It's a very closed environment to software itself so not everybody can actually basically just go ahead and deploy anything within the software itself. So that's created a huge economy of ecosystem for us where we've got partners that are building SaaS solutions that extend our core business products. We've got partners that are building content services that can actually be consumed within our business products. Similarly, SAP's made this transition from being more of a software applications company to actually being a platform company and now taking it to the cloud. So we've got a whole new generation of partners that we kind of started working with that provide technology services into the platform, right? And that's why we work with partners like NetApp, we work with partners like Dun and Brad, we work with partners, even SIs. They're starting to build a whole bunch of repeatable solutions, right? So in order to bring all of these innovations that are happening around the SAP ecosystem in the hands of our customers, like NetApp is a customer of SAP too, how do we bring that easily into their hands so that they can discover these products, they can try the products, they can buy these products and then they can manage this product. And that's the whole idea of the App Center. And this has only been around for a year. In fact, you just celebrated your first birthday. Exactly. But it's tremendous amount, tremendous volume of apps that are already available for trying to buy. Yes, it's amazing. The ecosystem has really embraced us with both their hands open, right? So within a year, we've got 1,100 partners that are on the App Center. We've got 1,500 solutions that are on the App Center and we are growing like crazy, right? We've got amazing endorsement from partners that are on it. We've got amazing endorsement from customers. Some customers have come and done repeated purchases on the App Center within a month. The number of trials we're executing for partners is huge on the whole, it's doing really well. So let's talk about the range of applications. I know when I think of an App Center, I think of, you know, App Center on my phone. Yes. And I can go and get something as silly as a flashlight or as, in my case, is life changing as my running app that keeps track of my fitness over the course of several years and I have great data to mine from that. What's the, what types of applications and industries are, and what industries do they serve in the App Center? So the App Center is really made for businesses. Right. So definitely we don't have Candy Crush there, right? I don't know if that's a good thing. Oh, that's good, right? But we do have a bunch of fun applications for enterprises, right? Which allow them to get a better insight into how their company is operating. But, and then we have like to give you an analogy to your fitness application that gives you a better idea of how your body works. We've got applications that basically do the same thing for enterprises, right? So let me give you an example. We've got a major SI that actually has built an audit and compliance application for HR, right? So I can actually tell you within your organizations what's your diversity ratio? What's your, you know, compliance ratio? How are people being paid? Gender equality and gender pay, equal pay is a big topic that many CIOs are looking at. It kind of helps in those kind of areas, right? Then we've got apps or solutions in there that basically deal with helping customers do better sales. Right? We have apps in there that basically help provide you tools that can better monitor your platforms. Right? Tools that help you migrate. All of these things are available on the App Center. I'm curious from a differentiation standpoint, you know, it's, SAP has been very vocal about wanting, you know, challenging the old legacy CRM and wanting to be number one against their, you know, the ostensible competitors. How does the App Center and how you enabled this so quickly and with such diversity of apps, how does this differentiate SAP? Absolutely. So we've kind of owned the back office for a very long time now, right? So now it's time for us to basically get in front of the end users and get into the daily work that they do. Right? So it's very important for us to also own the front office. That's a whole big initiative you heard with C4. Right? To enable that, we've got cloud platform. Right? And that's the other big piece of the puzzle. Right? Now when you add these two things up, you don't basically, when you look at customers, the biggest thing for them is time to value them. Right? The whole concept of the bill versus buys and they're starting to fade and the customer is like, here's my problem. Is there a solution out of the box that can actually solve my problem? If it gets 100% great, if it gets 90%, okay? If it gets 80%, I'll take it and then I'll improvise on it. And that's exactly what the App Center does. It gives you an out of the box solution from our ecosystem. So you can get started with it and then you can collaborate with the ecosystem to either improvise on it or take a step back and say, okay, now we've plugged the whole. Now let's find the more detailed solution to actually build a more scalable outcome out of it. So let's talk about licensing flexibility from App Center. One, how do customers pay for their App Center? And then two, what are the licensing options for both partners and customers, for those individual apps? So the beauty of the App Center, the way we set it up is the transaction is directly happening between the partners and the customers. So the partners can actually price their applications the way they want it, right? So some partners that are basically doing content services are doing it by base on utilization, right? So you actually use this many number of API calls, that's how it's priced. Some of the others are doing SaaS application and they're pricing it by users. So the partners have complete flexibility of pricing and packaging the way they want. Also because we're actually using the App Center to sell to enterprises, it's very unlikely that somebody is going to go out and say, oh, here's a gold, bronze, and silver package, I'm just going to pick one of them. On the App Center, you can actually go ahead and custom package or create custom packages with tailored terms and conditions that are specific to that customer and the customer can then buy it, right? So we've kind of thought of this from an enterprise standpoint. And that's the beauty, right? When you work with partners like NetApp, that is important for them, right? NetApp is a partner that basically goes ahead and works with some of the largest businesses, right? That's important for them to have the flexibility to go ahead and do the business with them digitally. So I'm curious, at every event, we talk about digital transformation, right? It's table stakes these days. But at Sapphire 2018, there's been a lot of discussion around the intelligent enterprise. I'm curious how this one-year-old App Center that SAP has built and that you're managing, how are you using the data that you're getting about the types of apps that are being developed and consumed, how are you utilizing that data to transform SAP? Absolutely. So if you think of the intelligent enterprise, we're doing everything that we can from the platform side, right? But what's the point of being intelligent if you don't apply your intelligence somewhere, right? And that's exactly- You're like my mother. Ha, ha, ha, ha. And that's what we're trying to do with the apps, right? So while the platform is intelligent, it can do a lot of stuff. The apps are the one that will help you derive the value from the platform. And that's why the App Center is super important and the apps that are on the App Center are super important. So that's the role we think the App Center plays for the intelligent enterprise. So Bill Modermey also talked about trust and trust is the new currency. When you put forth something like the SAP App Center, you're kind of co-signing that, you know what, these apps, these are partners and this is a partner exchange. Can you talk to the value to the enterprise of going to something like an App Center to purchase applications? Oh, trust is a big thing, right? These days, I mean, enterprises come to SAP because they know SAP is such a trusted brand. So when we did the App Center, we also made sure that every app that goes on the App Center is actually thoroughly validated by integration and certification center team, right? So you don't find anything on the App Center that's not gone through a vetting process. The second thing you'll show that on the App Center, you'll find apps that are relevant to your SAP landscape and it's not a Shopify, right? You're not going and selling something that has no relevance to the enterprise. The third thing that we've done and very important for customers is we've actually built workflows that allows them to still have the same comforts of procuring a software but only doing it digitally. So for example, a customer may say, look, not every user in my company is allowed to buy apps. But if a user is interested in buying an app, he should be able to request purchase and then somebody who's entitled in the company to go through contracts and negotiate on behalf of the company can actually negotiate it and then the purchase happens. So we've employed Prost at every level of the App Center. Security is such a hot topic these days, right? I mean, there's been so many public breaches of corporate data. It was just one, again, the other day with I think it was my DNA or my heritage. So, you know, and that kind of opportunity for people to, you know, submit a cheat sample and get their DNA is so popular. That's a lot of personal information. So that security woven into the fabric of that is all key. Absolutely. So you mentioned the number of partners and the number of apps. I think you said 1,000 partners. 1,000 partners and 1,500 apps. 1,500 apps in the first year. In the first year. What are you excited about for the next year? What do you think we're going to be talking about next Sapphire? Oh, I think the growth in the number of apps and the partners that are going to come over is going to be a hockey stick effect. So we are completely looking forward to that. But what's going to be interesting is as these apps come by and you pointed it out, security is one topic but GDPR compliance is another big one. So one of the things that we're working with a lot of these partners is to basically become more and more GDPR compliant. Because now some of these apps are dealing with HR data. Some of these apps are going to start dealing with customer data and they have to be GDPR compliant. So that's what we're working on with them and we'll see more and more of those kind of things happen. But the second big thing that we are looking forward is going beyond the apps, right? We call it the app center, we could call it the solution center, we could call it anything. But the idea is you're going to have apps but you're going to also have vendors like NetApp being able to digitally sell the products to our end customers, right? Somebody bought HANA, they need a HANA appliance with a NetApp storage. That's possible on the apps sometimes. Or some other tools. Somebody is an existing NetApp customer managing really large SAP landscapes and they can buy tools that will basically help them manage the NetApp landscape, right? Or SAP landscape running on NetApp gear. So those are kind of things that I'm looking forward to actually coming into the app center. The third thing is sensors. People are building IoT scenarios and we're having tons of partners basically certifying sensors against our IoT technology. How about we bring those into the app center, right? So it's going to be a huge and beautiful portfolio of solutions. So practical question before we let you go is simple concept because my mind is working come from a traditional SAP shop. So I'm thinking what interesting things have you seen customers do at SRM and the app center? I mean, it seems like, you know, app center, another supplier for SRM should be some integrations. Am I making an assumption? What are some of as we look at or even app center and some of the other SAP core products? What are some of the integration points? Oh, you hit the nail, right? So what some of the customers are coming back to us and asking is can you actually do an app center specifically for my enterprise, right? Where I as a user can basically go curate a whole bunch of apps that I've kind of looked at the terms of condition or are met certain standards, et cetera, and accept the terms of conditions for those products, right? Accept those products, negotiate the price of whatever they do. And then make that open to all of my users, all of their ecosystem, right? So that way anybody in that scenario can actually go purchase an app and start using it in production. And then I have all of my workflow from SRM to approve the purchase of the app. Exactly. So it kind of ties in very neatly into that. So you're 18th Sapphire. Yes. What are some of the key takeaways that you're going to go back to the Bay Area with? You know, the beauty is every Sapphire keeps growing bigger and bigger. And the questions like every three, four years we've done a new transformation, right? Last year when I come to this conference people are still kind of unaware and not really ready to embrace the cloud in an enterprise space. This year I didn't hear one customer say should we go to the cloud? Everybody's like, we are on the cloud. How can you help us? How can SAP and customers and partners like NetApp actually help us get there? And that's a refreshing feel, right? Because now we can talk to them about all the grand plans that we have for them. Probably we're basically still selling them on the concert. Now we're actually walking them and talking to them about how to embrace the cool stuff that we're doing. So it's refreshing. It is cool stuff. It is. Rudolph, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE. Thank you so much for having me. Talking with Keith and me about what you guys are doing with the App Center and happy first birthday again. Thank you, thank you. Thank you for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend at SAP Sapphire 2018. Thanks for watching.