 Come on, let me check. From Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud, next 17th. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live in Palo Alto Studios, looking at the media is theCUBE, our new 4,500 square foot studio where we can do broadcast here. And of course, we're covering a two day special coverage wall to wall with Google Next 2017 in San Francisco. We just had the exclusive video with Sam Yen from SAP talking about the new relationship between Google Cloud Platform and SAP, SAP HANA, and also SAP Cloud Platform. And on the phone right now with reaction to the news in San Francisco is Akash Agarwal, GVP with SAP, CUBE alumni, good friend. Akash, welcome to theCUBE coverage and thanks for taking the time. Thanks John, look forward to helping out. So Akash, you've been intimately involved in a variety of very cool things with SAP, one of them has been the Apple announcement where you guys have a strategic relationship with Apple Computer and at Mobile World Congress, you've released the general availability of the developer kit, SDK, now shipping. On the heels of that amazing news, you now have a deal with Google Cloud, also have a deal with Amazon Web Services to be clear, but this is a pretty comprehensive strategic deal. All the heavy hitters flying in from Germany, we had talked to Sam, we're talking to you. What is the reaction in Moscone in San Francisco around the SAP Google relationship news? I think, so the reaction is I think very positive and I think what this sort of shows everybody here that our friends at Google are very serious about the enterprise and as such they have extended a very warm hand in partnering with SAP and bringing what I call transactional and enterprise workloads onto Google Cloud. And I think that's a very significant change from what Google Cloud was doing in the past. They are supporting all kinds of workloads, but they're now really focusing on helping enterprises kind of transition into the cloud. And I think SAP can act as a massive catalyst for that effort. It also brings a huge amount of credibility to the Google Cloud platform, certainly in the enterprise. SAP has been a leader powering some of the biggest business in the world with your software, your system of record, certainly the database is evolving and you've had cloud, you've had HANA, data analytics for many years, I can almost, I think seven years I've been to Sapphire, Bill McDermott and back then Schnabe was talking about analytics. This really hits home because Google has a great mind share with the developer community. They actually have great empathy and they understand developers and open source, certainly they understand cutting edge technology, but now with SAP, this seems to be a nice lucky strike, a lightning strike, if you will, for developers to monetize with SAP because you guys have real big paying enterprise customers that could use some cloud native. Is that how you see it? I mean, help us understand the impact to developers and then the impact to customers. Yeah, so I think the opportunity is multi-fold as I would explain it. So customers, our customers and Google customers can take SAP workloads onto Google Cloud and that is in the form of taking HANA and running any applications that run on top of HANA onto Google Cloud. So I think that's kind of one piece of the announcement that we've made today. And the second piece, and I think that's what you're alluding to, is around developers and those developers could be our developers, SAP 2.5 million developers, it could be a multitude of developers that are attracted to Google and all the services that Google provides. But what they can do now is to leverage SAP's HANA Express product, which is a developer-centric product, and then run that on Google Cloud platform and build applications that could leverage HANA technology and build next generation of applications. So these are applications that are net new that can take data from any data source or applications that want to extract data from SAP. And the final thing that we also announced as part of our HANA Cloud Platform or SAP Cloud Platform is the ability to take the cloud-boundary components of our SAP Cloud Platform and make them available on Google Cloud Platform. And so that, as you can see, is a very rich environment. And we've extended Google's palette of services to include SAP platform as a service components to help fast-track developers who want to build enterprise cloud applications that want to interchange data that's already in SAP systems or want to store stuff in our HANA database that is now going to be able to run on Google Cloud Platform. So I think that's what has been announced there. It's quite a lot. And I think over the coming months, developers will be able to get access to that and they can get access to it on the Google Cloud Launcher Platform. Later today, they should be able to get a copy of the SAP HANA Express product. What is the impact to SAP? Because we spoke recently at the Amazon Web Services to reinvent Akash. Obviously, you have a relationship with them as well. But this really kind of gives SAP a new set of capabilities for developers that aren't familiar with SAP. And you have certainly a huge ecosystem of developers that are SAP-centric. Now a new community is developing for SAP. How do you see that unfolding for SAP? And what are you guys doing specifically to onboard those developers and really give them the seamless tooling that they need so that they don't have to worry about all the engineering and the back office, database? What goodness are you bringing to those developers to make their life? Well, yeah. And I think, first and foremost, we've expanded the market. We are giving them access to three great public cloud platforms in Amazon, AWS, in Microsoft, Azure, and now with Google Cloud Platform. So now a developer that wants to develop using SAP Cloud Platform and SAP HANA has a choice. And they can now, depending on the expertise that they have, depending on what they want to do, they can very easily leverage any of those three major cloud platforms. We're giving them choice. And I think the world wants choice. And we're making it easy. So that's number one. Number two are SAP Cloud Platform. Enablement teams are there to help cross track people. We're making it easy for developers to start working on products that are easy for developers such as the HANA Express. And they can 32 gigabytes worth of data that they use is free to use. And then they can go to SAP Store and get a license key and then enable that license key on any of the other public cloud providers as they expand and extend their systems. So as you can see, I think we're giving them choice. We're giving them a lot of capabilities in terms of enablement. And we're giving them a product that they can get started with with no friction. So I want to ask you a question, Akash, because I know you have a lot of industry's view of the landscape. I was clarifying this morning in a blog post and also here on theCUBE that you really can't compare Google Cloud to Amazon. They're two different worlds. You have apples and oranges, if you will. What help people understand real quickly? Why? What is the Google Cloud all about? Because we really want to separate that conversation. They're not really apples to apples. It still is cloud, but there are differences. What is the key takeaway for users and customers about Google Cloud and what's the differentiation for them vis-a-vis other approaches? Well, that's not something that I want. I'm not the world expert on Google Cloud platform and I think that's something our friends at Google can kind of give you a very good rundown on. But obviously Google finds itself at a set of services that are very data-centric. They have obviously decades of experience in running their own services and they're opening up some of those capabilities and making them available to their customers. And we felt that we need to kind of double down on Google Cloud platform and support that, just like we're supporting the AWS platform in Azure. We believe that these are three major cloud platforms. Each of them have their own uniqueness and capabilities that these companies market and promote. And I think it's best that you get someone from Google to comment on some of the differences because I think there are quite a few and I would be remiss at highlighting those. That's fair, that's fair. I appreciate that. And we'll try to have someone on at five o'clock. We'll hopefully get someone slotted in. Final question for you, Akash. What's in it for the developers? Share your perspective on what you're excited about that developers that don't know SAP should be excited about. What's the real opportunity for them? Well, I think today, a Google Cloud platform developer has suddenly a window into the SAP Word. And the SAP Word is big. It's very rich in usage. And those customers are large. They're interesting customers doing very complex things. And I think it opens them up to grabbing the digital transformation ways that's hitting a lot of customers. And I think what this can do to those developers is give them a window into a Word that they perhaps didn't have before because today with SAP technology becoming available on Google Cloud platform, they could suddenly target enterprise use cases that perhaps they were not doing before. These are transactional use cases. And obviously, both transactional and analytical type use cases, what we call OLAP use cases, suddenly become important. I think the IoT opportunities are interesting for developers. The industrial internet is in full swing. And just coming back from Mobile World Congress, I think that was the theme. Everything is connected. And we can get you access to the customer record. We can get you access to the product, the skew. That's all in SAP systems. Suddenly, the developer can access those systems to build next generation engagement applications as part of a digital transformation that the company may be doing. Yeah, I think Google could lean on you guys a little bit too for partnering with the IoT. Certainly not a lot mentioned. Maybe we'll hear more tomorrow. But I do think that if I'm a developer, I would look at you guys as a innovation ground for using AI and using that data analytics making it very intelligent. You're the store of the data, you have the database. So congratulations, Akash. Really appreciate you taking the time on the ground in San Francisco. Akash Raghurwal, GVP at SAP, friend of the cube, a regular contributor here on our new studio programs. Thanks so much for taking the time and giving us a reaction and breaking down the news for us on the SAP Google relationship. Okay, more live coverage of Google Next coming right up. Be right back.