 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 are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. Welcome back everyone, we are here live at Sapphire Now, the SiliconANGLE Media's flagship program theCUBE, where we go out to the events, extract the signal from noise, want to thank our sponsors SAP HANA Cloud Platform and Console Inc, called Console Cloud, growing startup at Silicon Valley, connecting the clouds. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris, our next guest is Jason Wolfe, the GM of Global Technology Partners at SAP, and Jim Gontier, who is the Vice President General Manager of Engineered Solutions and Systems at Dell Technologies. Or can I say that yet? You can, I can say Dell. Michael announced it. Michael kind of announced it, it's not officially Dell Technologies, it's still Dell Computer. Guys, welcome to theCUBE, welcome for the first time. Thank you, thank you John. So obviously Dell and SAP are the longstanding partnership, Jim. We've talked many times about multi-vendor back in the day now, multi-services with the cloud. Yep. Jason, SAP has always been partnering from day one, we've known them. What's changed now? Because you're seeing all the big names up here, we just interviewed IBM earlier. These aren't barney deals, this SAP really getting down and dirty with the partners and its co-development, but the cloud puts pressure on the partnering strategy, because if you've got to produce fast, and so that kind of puts pressure, but also balances, make sure you do the right partnerships. Talk about what it means to partner in this modern era. Yeah, John, it's definitely changing. I think the cloud is one trend that's putting pressure on these partnerships to be more real, but it's also, I'll call it the millennial effect. You've got customers now that are expecting end solutions. They're not anymore about, I'm going to buy the software from you, the boxes from you, the service from you. They're saying, give me a solution. The cloud is a deployment model that kind of forces that, but it might be on-premise hybrid and cloud. So I think the forcing function is more the change to us as nature. We are more inclined to want quicker solutions. It's not about technology or the cloud, in my view. You know, Jason, that's a great point, because in many respects, while the cloud appears simpler, the amount of work required to organize, package, get it right, the software to run in the cloud can be extremely complex. And in many respects, the cloud is the ultimate statement of whether or not you've done a good job of thinking about how the software should look. Go back to that notion of millennials. If you've got a cloud solution, you can do on-premise. If you go on-premise, it doesn't mean you can do a cloud solution. Absolutely. It brings a higher level of responsibility on the vendors to seem as one. We cannot no longer look like multiple solutions. I use this example earlier today because when Bill and Satya were on stage, it became clear. When we grew up, we got Lego blocks, right? We were happy. We got Lego blocks and we built stuff. Now, if you give my kid my nine-year-old Lego blocks, he won't know what to do it. He needs the kit. He needs the instructions. He needs the little add-ons. He's actually moved on to Minecraft. Now it's moving to this thing. I would say I still buy Lego. But it's the same thing happening in this world. We have to work on R&D, like you said, co-development level. We have to engineer the thing ahead of time. We can't go in and sell and then ask Dell to go in and sell boxes that are fit into the solution. We have to do this end-to-end to your point. And that's what I think forces it. If you do it on the cloud, all they see is the veneer of the end result, outcomes-based. So how do you talk to a customer about the value of a partnership? Because it used to be, you buy hardware for me, you buy software for me, yeah, we'll work together to get it, to make sure it works. Now it's our partnership is better than their partnership. Is that a conversation that you're having with customers today? So I'll answer that and then Jason can jump in. So absolutely categorically yes. And we're having that conversation for a couple of reasons. One is folks aren't really interested in buying individual components, assembling, testing, validating, iterating, and then documenting. What they're really looking for is time to business value, time to business results. So in a great partnership, like we've done with SAP, what we're able to do is take a lot of that, reduce the risk, reduce the cost, reduce the amount of iterative engineering, and really let them get to absolutely time and get to the point of how can they now look at all of that data and drive not only actionable intelligence, but more importantly, business results. This is one thing that came up in our last interview with the CTO of Capgemini. Peter made a comment about moving the thought process up to the top of the stack because the hardware, and don't take this personally, but it's commoditized. And certainly you guys know that since why you have the engineer solutions you guys coming out with. So I just kind of teed up the next question. If the customer's moving their mind to the top of the stack for the business outcome, the time to value, that's where all the app energy is going to, certainly cloudable power of that. The commodity and the infrastructure hardware now has to be designed in a way that's purpose built. And you go back six, seven years ago, that was a dirty word. Oh, whoa, purpose built. Now, with hyperconverge, some of the things we heard at EMC World last week and some of these going on in the industry, so with SAP, having turnkey hardware is a trend. But it absolutely is a trend. But here are two things that you'll hear from Dell and SAP that you won't hear from anybody else. The reason why purpose built before was a dirty word is because you had to buy almost a hundred percent of somebody else's stack. So one of the things that separates Dell and also the reason why we love working with SAP is the fact that we're heterogeneous. I'd love for everybody to buy a hundred percent Dell server storage, networking, clients, software and services. But the net is that that's not always the case. So being able to do that in a flexible modular fashion, back to your Lego block analogy, being able to do that in a heterogeneous way, and then more importantly, as of November last year, there's only one company on the planet who in partnership with someone like an SAP can truly deliver end to end. And when I mean end to end, client, data center, cloud services and life cycle support. So talk about that, because this kind of comes back down to partnering but also Dell's differentiation. You have to move up the stack. And that's where the margin is, that's where the software is. What's the plan there? How do you view that and how does that impact the relationship with SAP? Let's talk about some real world announcements that we jointly have done today. So case in point, one of the things that we talk about is our engineered solution for SAP HANA Edge. You've heard us talk about and you had Michael talk about the democratization of IT. For the longest time, data analytics has been like the realm of enterprise and higher end enterprise. So working in partnership with SAP, we've been able to come up with an engineered solution that now allows data analytics to be done for small and medium business. The second thing that we announced and you can tell by all the great buzz behind us is IoT. This is where we can marry a whole bunch of things. I mean case in point, if you believe our friend Mr. Eastwood from IDC, by 2020 there will be 25 billion devices attached to the internet. How do you get all that data in? How do you analyze that data? How do you drive a business result? Yeah, I think he's understated on that forecast too. Ah, okay. Well, we'll go back in. Absolutely, you understand me. I mean, the IoT is the future, no doubt about it. But it's still a little bit away on the app side, but architecturally, people are in IT making those decisions today. Correct. Peter and I would just talk about that before you guys came on that that's kind of a cloud decision and also leveraging existing resources decision. Yeah, but the beauty is, and I think Jim alluded to this, is they are engineered solutions like you're saying, but they pre-built. So this system that he's talking about, the HANA Edge system? It comes in at a price point for all of us to buy $100,000 with everything, with two weeks of consulting, with the SAP software that's 100,000 starting MSRP. But the beauty is it's ready for scale, right? You can take it and you can add to this. And for us, it's great because our software will scale with it. Their machines will scale with it. They can decide, okay, I want to move that to the cloud. They've got a specific software patch that not a lot of people own today that they can actually move things into the cloud from your own friends. Which means the services can scale with it. Exactly. Absolutely. So you get the software, the infrastructure and the services all scaling with the business. Exactly. In a modular, easy to build, easy to add on, easy to deploy fast. And even though it started on purpose built, which is what couldn't be done in the past. Okay, so talk about the partnership again. I want to get back to this because global partnerships, certainly in technology partners, you got to pick the winners, I always want to pick winners. Jim, you always talk about this as well. Industry standard open has been a choice that both of you guys have a lot of experience in. How do you take that forward? As you guys execute your partnership and individually in your companies, you got all the lot of partnership opportunities out there. How do you separate them out? How do you decide? How do you tear them? How do you structure them? How do you guys manage that process? Okay, so I'll give you a perfect example of how we do it. The bottom line is, yes, we want to be open, but within every open ecosystem, there are leaders. No if, answer, but SAP is a leader not only in the database, ERP, and the analytics space. So when you take the power of their innovation and more importantly the power of what Dell can do, there's a reason why we have, without citing double digit number of engineers who actually sit at the partner portal or the partner port in Waldorf who are co-engineering and co-collaborating. So yes, we have to work with a lot of folks and that will always be in our DNA. It's been there since, you know, Michael founded the company 32 years ago. And SAP's got a lot of geeks and Michael's a geek himself. I mean, it's kind of an interesting partnership, yeah. Correct, and so the net is, is the way we pick them is we look for other leaders but more importantly- So technology leadership won. Well, technology leadership, more importantly, a killer differentiated value prop because at the end of the day, customers want to go drive a business result. They drive that business result through a workload or through an application. So how do we co-innovate in a way that gets you the best possible TCO, the best possible ROI? And then we've all kind of talked about it. From a life cycle perspective, how do you get the best possible quality in a modular? I'll go back to your Lego block again. Appliance-like, start small, build fast, future ready fashion. So I got to answer the question. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, and SAP for us, it's not about either or. We have to enable the choice. So today you saw the announcement with Microsoft and supporting the public cloud and Azure. We have a similar relationship with AWS. The beauty is, and I think this is where Dell comes, every one of them has a very unique approach. So if the, we spoke about democratization, Dell is very unique in its ability to take these solutions that are relatively expensive and make them available for everybody. We know- The downsizing of the service is business. We won't put it in that fashion. I mean, one of our taglines has been, we see technology as a way to enable human potential. We want to bring that potential to everybody and we do it through our democratization. Well, you could say downsizing on one level, but also enabling a new class of services. New class of customers, new class of market, new class of opportunity for both of our firms. Okay, so now back to the customer impact to this whole partnering discussion. The old days in the CIO was, I got a single throat to choke, a single pane of glass, whatever the phrase was. We've heard that. We all have. That's not necessarily going to be like that anymore. Just like a perimeter based security's gone. Some are saying that that notion of single throat to choke is now going to be abstracted away into analytics. So a kind of a fuzzy future in IT. How does your customer deal with this new change? Because obviously the partnerings are happening, a lot of co-development. We heard from Apple, IBM, Dell, SAP is an integration point. Now the CIO's become the single throat to choke because it's the business line that's making the decision more and more. Stuff rolls downhill. Yeah. What goes to the vendors? How does the CIO deal with this? Is it good, bad, I mean, what's the, I'm not going to ask, I don't know. I think it's brilliant because it goes back to the fact that they're demanding better and better solutions, which means not necessarily single throat to choke. It means metrics, outcomes. It means we're looking at what is the result of things and the cost to switch has actually gone down, which is why the single throat to choke is less important, still important, but less important than it was in the past because if you went wrong 10 years ago, the company could have gone down the drain. But that was a cost-centric model, that was cost consolidation, but now with top line revenue in IT, they want to enable more cash. So he's the hero in the mind of the business guy. So it's not so much pressure, get it done, keep the lights on. No, no, no, but to your point, there has been a fundamental shift. A CIO and his or her organization has gone from a cost allocation to actually being a partner to the line of business owner. And so the net is, is yes, we're not only making them a hero, but what we're also doing is we're making your lives simpler. Back to Jason's point, the net is is that if we can give them that's something that's easy, something that's scalable, something where if anything does go wrong, the person who sold it to them will take care of everything because it has been co-engineered. It's not like I bought the hardware, I put the software on and if something happens, I get one of these. No, no, no, we've actually done this together. So our services folks are just as trained, our consultants are just as trained, and frankly a lot of the SIs who we also partner with understand what to go do. And the commercial agreements and legal agreements are just as important as the co-innovation and development. But they're simpler because the way we say it is it used to be that we had known process, unknown technology. And now we're moving into an area where we have unknown process because we're dealing with engagement customers and the technology is much more known. And in known process, unknown technology, the seller had all the advantage in understanding and so the buyer had to protect himself from the contract and so we're constantly looking for that single throat to choke because the contracting process is so hard. Now because it's all about co-creation, the buyer is more in charge, they can move forward because the vendor is trying to keep up and that's why the partnership becomes so important. So I want to go into a question. Are you guys, so we've heard a lot today about SAP's partner network. This is a broad partner network. Channels, go-to-market, et cetera. You represent Jason some of the biggest companies. Are you now starting, are the two of you not only starting to merge your IP in appropriate ways, but also starting to think about how you can bring your partner networks together? Actually, we already are. Before I came to join y'all, I was actually with an SI partner who was very complimentary of not just what SAP was doing, but more importantly what they were seeing in the field together. Back to your very salient point, the ability to have a group of folks that can come in and say, I understand your business, I understand your pain points, we have this unique offering between our two teams and then go get that executed. Yeah, this particular systems integrator was thrilled and wanted to figure out how to do a lot more. So seamless in-market dynamic. Yeah, I'll give you a very good example, which I hope we will fall on because it's important for the health of all of us. SAP Foundation for Health is a new business network offering. We have a partnership with Apple. Dell, and Jim said this yesterday, if I can- Who you had a partner? What? Jim said this yesterday. If we come together with a foundation for we all know a messed up, discrete mom and pop shop type information systems in a trillion dollar industry like healthcare, with a provider like Dell that can access all these things with their channels and the usability and devices which you guys are obviously using from Apple, suddenly you can transform an industry not only like Uber does, this is a much, much larger scale and the table stakes for all of society- Execution has to be very tight. Yeah. To execute in-market like that, to come across very seamless at that level. Exactly, exactly. And by the way- To Jason's point. That's why we're so close. Right, exactly. And to Jason's point. It's not just us. It's also when we say the word us. Microsoft, the foundation for health, great partner has been Intel. So industry leaders coming together, looking at particular things such as health and life sciences and how can we fundamentally change that industry by putting our IP innovation differentiation together? And by the way, that trillion dollar industry, none of us are taking a significant part about so there's no competitors. We can now five, six partners take a trillion dollars in. Look, let's be honest, some of the save the world problems that we can all see on the horizon are not going to be solved by one company. We agree. It's going to take the best brains on the globe while working together and that's what we're talking about. That's a beautiful thing about Mike and Bull, specifically, they have in health care and other areas. They have a very clear social agenda. Well, Michael just donated to the Austin. He's building a hospital. He and his wife and excuse me, he and their foundation. Larry Ellison won up them and put cancer research at USC. You see that one? I didn't. I'm going to focus on what we're doing. Kill me with that problem. I'm going to help out that problem someday. No, but this brings up a whole point. These use cases, these unknown processes or assets or apps are being enabled by the new capabilities. I mean, IoT is a great example. I mean, bolting on clouds so that a Siemens could just connect into the cloud. I know the customer of you guys. And speaking of partnerships, you saw the announcement, both SAPs and ours. We are together and separately creating entire ecosystems of folks who can plug into these offerings. Which is how you bring, why your partner networks have to start coming together in context, in the context of specific classes and problems. All right, so how are you guys going to feed the ecosystem? Because this is a big deal. The ecosystem will be a battleground for the next 10 years, 20 years because that's developer ecosystem and also channel. I'll have to say channel with the lack of a better word or a partner. But increasing the channel ecosystem has to become more of a developer ecosystem as well. Absolutely. It's evolving. That is a very good point. Absolutely. From just consulting to their own IP on top of it. Absolutely. So Dell is releasing reference architectures. So that's not the full package, but for the people that take it, it's kind of like the Lego block instructions without the blocks, let people put those packages together. Are you guys funding that? I'm obviously partnering now, but are you a partner? I'm assuming you have a partner conference besides the one here, like a separate event. We had it yesterday. Was that your global event? Yeah, that's our global partner. Are you guys planning on doing a specific event around partners? You know, it's just between us, right? No one else is seen. I personally, I'm more into people. You're pre-announcing theCUBE. Go ahead. Exactly. My personal, and it's not announced, but it's my personal mission is to really up the ante as SAP as a partner because it's traditionally been more of a closed group. User conference. And there's certain things that I'd love to see more open and more large than we have. Even the 30,000, 300,000 online is just a tip of the iceberg of what the SAP ecosystem can draw by touching on 76% of every transaction in the world. But it's a money thing, but it's also an IP thing. Absolutely. I agree. That's what I mean. The test of a partnership historically has been how much money. But I think what CIOs and businesses are going to look for increasingly is the value of the IP that's unique to your partner. The results that you can drive as a function of that partner. The value that you're able to create. Correct. Absolutely. How does Dell's ecosystem change? Because your vision of the solutions we talked about, this is nice because you take away just, I turn keys a word I use, I don't mean, it oversimplifies it, but the idea is that you're not going to be configuring hardware all day long. Correct. You come in, it's built for workloads and apps and scales up, you get in memory, all this other stuff. How does that ecosystem grow? Because that's perfect for the cloud. That's perfect for IoT. Are you funding initiatives in the ecosystem? Absolutely. Yeah, so we're doing basically two high level things and then we're doing a lot of other things with partners. The first thing you're going to start to hear is what we refer to as community validated systems. So one of the great things that's happened in our engineered solutions, reference architectures or blueprint world is a lot of channel partners have basically adopted it. So what we're finding is some of them have come up with some great solutions on their own and now they're turning around and offering those to us. So this virtuous circle of making it better. So the first thing we're going to do is this community validated systems and you'll be hearing a lot more about that over the next couple of months. The second thing we're doing is, yes, we are creating a partner ecosystem. You know this well. Dell OEM powers a lot of the innovations, a lot of the differentiation you see from MRI machines to let's just call it scale up, scale out architectures for others. So as we start to bring in more ISVs, more IHVs, we're not only going to feed that system, but we want to create something where the community itself generates their own solutions and then we can bring that back to the greater good. Jason, final question for you is your KPIs this year, as you look at your business, because you got your hands on the keys to the kingdom. Well, the track's been amazing. What's your goal this year? I can't continue this space. We had Etachi, Apple, Dell, Microsoft in the last four weeks. That's sad. Launches for WIMPs, come on, keep going. No vacation for you. So we're going to have a media Wikibon next week. The idea? We do hundreds of interviews a day, come on. Joking aside, the goal for me is going to be more depth, real, like you guys started, more depth, more real relationships, more real products that come out that next year we can sit here together and say how we transform this industry or these boxes. Depth of the partnership or depth of the bench of people you work with? Depth of each partnership? I think it goes hand in hand, because as you said, there's alignment at the top, CO2CO, vision, culture, and everything, all the way down to the technology stack because we're creating, again, these Lego sets that have to be perfect for the kids to consume. That's a doll's like key. Exactly, that's a doll's like key. Tiffany, there you go. Can I key? No, but I mean, this is IT's changing. What's in Tiffany? High-end jewelry, you know, like a Dell box. I see you're married, but I love my wife and my necklace. I left a logo when I was a kid, now I love IT. There you go. Build your own. I'm staring at that keg of beer over there. I got this line of sight. That's an IOT-enabled. That's a keg-rated. And it runs empty, it sends an update, and Heineken brings another one. It's going to change the supply chain. The Cube's soon to be a Cube sponsor. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. I'll give you the final word. Share with the folks, each of you, you could. What's this year's Sapphire about? If you're the kind of encapsulate for the folks watching it, who couldn't make it? What's going on? You can start. Your thoughts on Sapphire this year. It's a continuing, sorry, in our particular case, at Dell, the continuation of a great collaboration that's almost more than a decade old, equally as important, showing how we can take a combination of engineered solutions, reference architectures, and help people dramatically lower time to result, lower costs, lower risk, and frankly, go enable that human potential that we always know could be done. Perfect. So for me, on the partnership side, I'm not talking about the customer side, as everybody knows, this is the largest Sapphire ever. But I really like Bill's statement about empathy and being able to come back. And maybe it's my nature, but I'm much more humble in terms of how I look at partnerships and how we look for these things. So for me, this Sapphire is a humbling experience because we've had the biggest and the best step up, such as standing on stage for 10, 15 minutes. As an attest to that last week with Tim and Bill, it was an amazing event to be. So I think this is the culmination of those partnerships for us. Jason Wolf and Jim Gontier from Dell inside theCUBE, Jason from SAP, Global Technology Partnerships. Thanks for coming on, sharing your insights. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris here live in Orlando for Sapphire and now theCUBE. We'll be right back. You're watching theCUBE. 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...