 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's your host, Peter Burris. Hello, I'm Peter Burris and welcome back to theCUBE, reporting live from Orlando, Florida and SAP Sapphire. You've had a couple of great days. This is the third day that we're doing this and we've got another half dozen or so great guests. Please stay with us to get the signal from the noise of what's happening here at Sapphire. Today, or right now, I'm speaking to Toby Davidson. Toby is a great job. Strategy within SAP Anywhere, which actually was announced this week here at Sapphire. Toby, tell us a little bit about what SAP Anywhere is. SAP Anywhere is a front office application. So what that means is it's an application for a small business to use to engage with their customers. So whether you're trying to market to them, have them sell or purchase through digital commerce or a traditional e-store, social selling, or even brick and mortar retail stores, we provide the capability to the small business to bring all of these channels of sale together so they can really truly engage with their customers and deliver a great customer experience. So we know pretty well from industry data, but also just anecdotal observation that customers are increasingly asking for digital engagement mechanisms. They walk into a retail store in a very traditional brick and mortar, as you said, but they're bringing their iPhones. They're bringing their Android tablets. They are demanding to be able to complement that experience with the ability to access all sources of information Anywhere as part of their experience. Is that the kind of thing that you're helping small organizations or small retailers and other types of shops make happen very quickly within their businesses? Yes, absolutely. It's certainly it's one of the elements. We're mobile first, so the idea being the application is designed to be used on mobile platforms, tablets, phones, et cetera. So we're not just our customers able to engage on a mobile platform as well as a computer, run their business the way they want to, access it how they want to, but also taking that to the end customer. So how do you want to buy from a retailer? Do you want to go in the store, do a traditional physical purchase with cash or NFC technology over Google for Android, pay that type of thing? Or would you prefer to actually buy online and have goods delivered or buy online and go and pick it up in the store, track it on your mobile, work with the retailer the way you want to. And I think we see that transacting both the B2C market, the end consumer market and also the B2B market, so business to business. We want the experience in B2B commerce that we have when we do our personal banking online on the mobile or we're buying from one of the sales platforms like eBay, et cetera, when you're sitting on a train. We want to be able to do that in the B2B environment as well. So we're bringing both of those together, providing the great experience that we like as a B2C customer, the user interface, the way we interact with the banking systems, the sales systems, e-commerce platforms, as well as the power that you get in the B2B platforms of pricing that specifically for you and your business, the order to invoice rather than having to pay with a credit card, tracking the account, the shipping, all of that sort of good stuff. We bring it all together so that the small business can offer that functionality to their customers so that they can actually expand the markets that they work in. They're not restricted by their traditional method of selling. So another very important and interesting announcement, at least in the last couple of weeks, was the SAP-Apple partnership. Correct, yeah. You must be frothing at the mouth. Absolutely. To start translating that into great deliverables for customers. Yes. Talk a bit about how SAP Anywhere is going to be affected by that announcement and how that ecosystem can be engaged to drive a lot of these new capabilities in smaller and medium-sized enterprises. So I think when you look at the likes of Apple, and yeah, we've had some great discussions with them this week already. I'm sure. And it's very exciting, but you look at the adoption of Apple technology within the small business. You look at how the SMB is really adopting Apple-based technology. Everybody has an iPhone. Everybody uses a tablet of some sort or other. So what we can really do is if we design our software to work on those platforms well, things like using the capabilities that they provide natively. So we're not just building an application that sits on an iPad or sits on a phone. What we're actually doing is we're building it so it uses the capabilities and the functionalities that those specific devices use so that when you pick up your phone and you go into SAP Anywhere, actually you already know how it works because you're used to using the device. You know how to drive around it. So it's that the user adoption is absolutely huge. Very quickly, we can get our customers up and running and live. I think we would also very much like to look at the reach that Apple has within their retail environment to small business, et cetera. That's very early days and ongoing discussions, but the ability for us to expand our reach into the market by leveraging the key relationships that we're able to drive as SAP. And I would think that certainly a SAP Anywhere customer would be excited, not as you said, because their customers are using those devices and they may themselves also be using those devices, but because Apple has shown what a combination of digital and brick and mortar can mean from an experience standpoint. Do you anticipate that this partnership is going to allow a mom and pop shop somewhere to adopt certain elements of that experience in their businesses? Yes, absolutely. And I think it's from two elements. You know, you have the devices, you have the physical capabilities. You also have the mechanisms that are allowed. So if we look at our software, you could buy something online. Okay, you go into the equivalent to the Apple Store, we're talking the mom and pop shop, the small independent trader. Actually that order has been sent through to their device. They're working on an iPad as a point of sale. So they actually see that the order's coming in. They're expecting you, they can have the order ready. You can walk in, you can pay, we partner with PayPal as well, so you could pay using your phone near the PayPal here device with their NFC technology. So actually your whole transaction, you may have bought the product on the phone, on the train because we're mobile responsive. You've gone to the store, you've paid for it with the phone, you're given the product. What we can then do is, like in the Apple Store, would you like us to email your receipt? You don't want a physical paper copy, have it emailed. Provide the feedback, go on social media, share the news of what you bought so that we then know about you to remark it to you, to enable us to try and expand your purchases with us and breed some customer loyalty with, actually what is a small business? You know, the large enterprise organizations, the big retailers, they have the capability and the resources to drive that social media, drive that repeat business, ensure that you come back to us in the best way possible by providing the offers based on the learning that we've got from you and many other customers about purchase trend and purchase history. If you consider a small business selling on an independent platform, they may have an e-commerce web store that they're paying $9.99 a month for it enables the selling of products. That's not connected to the retail store. That's not connected to the Amazon platform sale. You may actually buy from each of those, but the typical retailer's not going to have that knowledge that it is you that's across all of those platforms. So by bringing the elements of big data together, we're able to tie together who you bought from, where you bought, what are your personal buying trends, what do you like doing? So we can help deliver back some intelligence back to that small retailer to retarget to you. And it may well be that you only ever buy off your mobile device. You only ever buy off your phone. So let's make sure that the way we target you with a marketing campaign hits your phone. And it hits it at the right time in the right format so that we can really try and drive your business back to us as a small retailer. This is capabilities that really only larger enterprises have had the ability to invest in and to be able to leverage for the last, you know, certainly 10 years. So let's talk about the role that the ecosystem is going to play in SAP anyway. We've heard a lot here at SAP Satfire about the increasing value of the SAP ecosystem, both SAP but also the customers. But we've also started hearing about how that ecosystem is valuable to other partners and certainly the SME universe. Do you anticipate, for example, that a small, medium enterprise that has a customer base is going to be able to use SAP anywhere not only to engage their customers but also to engage adjacent businesses. So perhaps they can, in a location, start to weave together new concepts of services that might have been limited to before just the inventory that I had in the store. Yes, and I think we'll see it on two levels. You know, we're building out an ecosystem of both larger, more strategic partners, the likes we've already talked about, the Googles, the UPSs, the PayPal's, et cetera. We can actually enable our customers and our partners, our solution provider partners, to have access to those resources. What we're also looking to do is to build out an ecosystem of solution providers plus sort of more vertical specific partners where they can provide functionality and services within our platform. So we may have a subvertical. We may have some functionality that SAP anywhere doesn't necessarily deliver out of the box, but the toolkit that we provide as an application enables you as a partner to build out that subvertical capability and deliver it on the platform. Now what that might do is it might mean that you can then extend that reach into those more location-based partnerships, for example, where you are then bringing in additional partners, additional teams, additional services, and you could leverage SAP anywhere to help control and manage all of that as well as be an outlet for your products and also as a solution for you to sell your products on. So last question here, and let's talk a bit about the role that strategy is playing as you put this together. So you're a strategist, you have to engage an enormous number of people, both within SAP, but also within this ecosystem. How are you getting and building that consensus to try to drive everybody in a common direction? So it's a lot of hard work. We take a lot of data feeds, a lot of information, and we try and build a picture of what the market is doing now and also what the trends are moving towards. I'll give you an example. Recently I've been looking at our digital marketing capabilities and where should we be in 18 months, two years time? We've spent a lot of time working with Facebook on how their platforms being leveraged and how they're seeing the trend move. 90% of revenue for small businesses that comes through their advertising comes off a mobile device. So should we focus our resources on providing that mobile capability on the iPhone, for example, or do we look at the web-based technology as well? So it's pulling all of this data together, pulling all of the trend analysis together, and actually building a picture of where we're going. So it's leveraging big data for ourselves to work out where we should be going and actually where we hope to drive our customers. Because again, the SMB don't necessarily have access to these resources themselves. So it's the likes of us who can pull this data together and really drive the market for the SMB so they can move up in the marketplace and achieve that next level where they may move on to some of the products in the rest of the SAP portfolio. Excellent, Toby, SAP anywhere. Thank you very much. Great announcement this week, congratulations. And there's a lot of small businesses out there that would love to see Main Street get resurrected precisely because of the new capabilities that you're able to bring to retailers and small businesses everywhere. Once again, Peter Burris, theCUBE, SAP Sapphire, lot more coming, stay with us.