 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018, brought to you by NetApp. Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We have been here all day at SAP Sapphire 2018. Keith, this venue in Orlando is so huge. It's the equivalent of 16 American football fields. Yeah, I probably should not have wore a pair of new shoes. No, but you do close your rings. So it's a trade-off, right? It's a trade-off, yeah. So the keynote this morning started out with a bang. Bill McDermott, the CEO of SAP, is probably the most energetic, evangelical C-level I've ever seen on stage. You really could feel the excitement, the momentum. They also followed that with some great announcements. You know, they've been saying for a while, been being pretty bullish about wanting to not just disrupt the CRM market, but wanting to become one of the world's most valuable brands. They want to be up there with the apples and the Googles and Coca-Cola and Mercedes-Benz, who all have products that we all see, and touch, and feel, and buy. And they announced that the brand Z rankings just came out the other day, that they're number 17, up four spots from last year. So their momentum is, they're really putting their money where their mouth is. Yeah, so SAP is the cash register of the world. 70% of the world's transactions go through SAP, but most of us don't see it. So it's amazing to see that their ranks, number 17 on those brands that are very, you know, they're, if you tell somebody you worked for SAP, they're like, oh, okay, I think I might have heard of that. Or I've heard that that was the reason why manufacturing is down because the SAP system was down. So it is a bold statement to say that you're going to go from that to a household name. Interestingly enough, part of that is becoming an ecosystem. So becoming a platform. What we've heard today was a lot of talk about how SAP is transforming from a product company. You know, a point of sale system is one thing, but to say that you've built an ecosystem and the platform around that is the goal that I think I heard today from the stage floor. And you're right, you talk about, you know, them becoming a household name with a product that's basically invisible to most people who probably use it. They have amassed 390,000 customers in 46 years. They've been around for a long time. This event though is massive. It's the partner area alone is huge. There's probably more than 20,000 people, not just that are here in Orlando, but he said, Bill McDermott, a million people engaging with SAP Sapphire via the online experience, that's enormous. But to your point, it's all really fundamentally due to the partnerships, the systems integrators, the technology partners, and more who have helped them on their transformation. Yeah, we had KPIT on. They said the gas has been at 20 sapphires for 20 years. The event has gone on for 25 years in some form. He remembered, initially they might have had one or two sessions. They have 12 KPIT, has 12 sessions here at Sapphire 2018. There's a huge ecosystem of partners here on the show floor. Over 500, I think, sessions in general. We had the VP of community for S4. They have 1,000 how-to videos on S, how to just do basic things in S4. Huge community, huge event. SAP is starting to make enrols in becoming, again, not just a products company, but an ecosystem company. I think Sapphire and Orlando is a great example of how they're expanding the brand. Yes, and in fact, on the brand part, that's one of the things that their CMO, Alicia Tillman, who was on main stage this morning, that's something that I've heard her talk about before. She's been the CMO for about nine months now, and she said, you know, and marketals will know, campaigns and messaging will change every quarter, six months, and that is fine. It's the brand narrative that they really started to work on at SAP. So you're seeing this best run companies run on SAP. It's sharing the value of what SAP can deliver with their partner ecosystem in terms of how it's helping customers transform their businesses, transform industries, save lives. They've done a very focused job on showing how this invisible technology is really revolutionizing the world. They're now going full force, embedding AI and really being quite bold. They're saying, I loved what Bill McDermott had on the slide this morning of augmented intelligence. And there's always a lot of concern with AI right jobs being replaced. And he talked about what he and some of the other world leaders were talking about it. And I liked augmented intelligence to augment humanity, this connection of humans and machines working together. They're really being quite bold and focused in that area. I'm just curious what your take was from an advanced analytics AI perspective. So there's a lot of talk around advanced AI analytics. At the end of the day, it's about actual business results. We're here in the booth of NetApp who has done a great job frankly of transforming their image from a storage company in the middle of a transformation to being known as a data driven company. So NetApp has gone through a similar change that SAP is looking to do from a brand perspective. Reasonably enough, we had the CIO Bill from NetApp that talked about that transformation and how data is a key part of their own transformation internally and how SAP could probably hold NetApp up as a great example of a company that's using the predecessor to C4, which was just announced, C4 HANA, which was just announced on the stage, Hypris of taking data, analyzing that data, applying AI, machine learning, more like machine learning in reality, machine learning to that data and then getting insights so that humans can make better decisions. Right, you know, on that front, I, one of the themes I heard today, Keith, from not just Bill Miller, the CIO of NetApp who was on here with us earlier, but some of their other partners, NetApp and SAP's partners, all talk about their own transformations internally as essential for them to become intelligent enterprises, which is a lot of what SAP is talking about. But I also thought that was quite valuable from an external perspective, to hear a NetApp talk so candidly about their transformation and share that with their customers who are in similar positions. I think when vendors, we'll say, drink their own champagne and there's real proof they're in the pudding, I think that's tremendously valuable for these brands and we've just heard that kind of consistently throughout the day-to-day of companies that are showing how they're transforming to then help their customers also transform. So one of the things that we like to ask on theCUBE is not just about current customer base, but what new customers are you're attracting? So one of the interesting conversations, it's one of the last ones we had with Workspan and how they're a small company and they started out the gate with SAP and how the brand is going beyond this, oh, this is a manufacturing supply chain, you must be a Fortune 500 company to even consider rolling it out to, you know what, we're a brand new company providing a data-driven product and out of the gate, we're selecting HANA S4 HANA and the platform to create this new product that's consumed by not necessarily technologists that powers an alliance platform to find and curate business alliances. I thought that was an extremely interesting interview that shows the power of expanding beyond just a focus on traditional enterprise, but the power of data and once you become a platform, how you can power your partner ecosystem. I thought that was a great example as well of a company that's only been in business for three years, less than four years, how they saw this gap in the market where they said, you know, and this is, we're surrounded by alliance partners of SAPs in this 16 football fields location that we're in and WorkSpan found that 60 to 75% of announced alliances fail, huge opportunity for them to then get in from a systematic perspective and align, you know, two companies, marketing automation systems, for example, and sales automation systems. They really saw this big opportunity and to your like, we're saying create an entirely new product and probably create a new market as a result I thought that was a really modern example of an idea that saw a huge gap and can be transformative. I asked Ahmed after we stopped rolling the cameras. All right, so you found 60 to 75% of these announced alliances fail, typically. What does WorkSpan think you can do to bring that number down? He said within two years we want to get that down to about 30%. Wow, that is an amazing stat. And not just, so let's look at the companies that are digitally transforming. So we had two guys that I wanted to highlight. One was Mike McGimney from SAP's Success Fire. So Success Factors, which is SAP's people-focused cloud and then Wolfgang Holfus, the head of SAP Business for EMEA. And they're in a unique challenge. SAP has been around for 46 years and in IT years that's like a thousand. So there's a lot of technical debt that companies are now paying for. They've back in the 90s, early 2000s customizing SAP with all the rage. Now customers are faced with they have to digitally transform their organizations. How do they do so? Well, it's not so easy to move from a customized SAP to S4. Bill trumpeted the numbers of 1800 SAP HANA customers, which is great, well over a billion dollars in sales for a memory database. However, SAP has over 300,000 customers. So there's a lot of opportunity, but a lot of challenge. So the ecosystem of partners, Fujitsu, NetApp, other infrastructure companies looking to help simplify the infrastructure so that technologists within these customer organizations can focus on the higher stack of those larger business challenges of basically pulling apart what they've built. Bill from NetApp shared how difficult their transformation was from their CRM to... Hypers? Hypers, he called it painful, a painful six months. And a lot of enterprises, I think was, what we saw today was a reality check. A lot of enterprises have a lot of pain ahead of them. Well, it's pain in a number of areas. And one of them is cultural. Yes. And I really thought, you know, you say SAP being 46 years old is like 1,000 in IT or dog years. They're like the Gandalf of IT, right? But one of the things that I found quite remarkable is 46-year-old history, 390,000 customers, but clearly they have been able to evolve their culture to be able to support what their customers need and go from just being a supply chain procurement focused type of business. I thought that was really quite... It was just quite compelling to see how they must have had to transform their culture so that they can help businesses transform. They make it look easy with the messaging and the momentum, but that was something that, for a company that's an incumbent like that, is a bit of, it might save in a model for how to do that right. Yeah, we talked to Joe Zarr from, he's the SAP VP of Global Technology Partners. He talked about how SAP likes to be pushed to be a little uncomfortable by their partners. And we asked him the tough question. You know, there's been tweets and there's been announcements from all the HCI vendors. I've talked to a customer, I've talked to a customer that says, you know what, S4 on, S4 HANA on HCI is what we want. A very quotable comment that he made was we're doing S4, we're not doing S4 on HANA because we want to, we're doing S4 on HANA because customers demand it. So SAP is definitely listening to customer demand. S4 on HANA is one of those things they have to, you know, he's tried to go stay away from the bad word of certified on, on for HANA and the validated and focused on, you know, solutions. But SAP has a little ways to go. You know, that's kind of a, you talked to any HCI customer, validated and certified for HANA is a bad word today, but SAP understands it and they're moving to certify the platform for HCI. So I thought that was a great example of them listening to customers and continuing to transform over the years. You're absolutely right. In fact, you know, if you look up digital transformation, one of the first pillars that you're going to see is you've got to become customer centric. And we saw, we really heard that a lot today. Even NetApp, when you were talking with Bill Miller about on tap in the cloud going, it's okay guys, we maybe, we have to listen to our customers. We don't, we won't be in business. Obviously people can't say that, but that's a hallmark of an enterprise that is digitally transformed. Yeah, I argue Dave Hitz was one who forced that, that kind of cultural change. You had to bring in the founder to talk to the engineers, that very engineering driven thing. And I think Dave was very direct, like, you know, we have to make the change and we won't be in business. The, the pendulum has changed to cloud. The SAP, which is not by any stretch of the mind, is designed, was never designed to run in the cloud, but they're adopting the technology for what customers are demanding. There's a AWS booth here. Fujitsu was the first one to say that, you know what, if customers need fail fast environments, that's exactly where they should go and put S4 implementations and then steady stage should be moved to on-prem or private data center hosted solutions. So the ecosystem seems to be embracing this change. Definitely. Anything that you're particularly looking forward to tomorrow for day two? You know what, I love talking to customers. So I'm looking forward to more customer conversations talking about how is this being used. We haven't really talked a lot about Leonardo much. So, you know, IOT, AI, how are these things that we, that get a lot of press? How are they being perceived by actual customers? How are they being implemented? What's the true adoption rate? Awesome. I look forward to hosting with you tomorrow. Keith, thanks so much. Appreciate it. Thanks for watching. Keith and I have been at SAP Sapphire bringing you some hopefully great informative content from the NetApp booth. Lisa Martin for Keith Townsend. Thanks for watching.