>> 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 NOW 2018.
This is a huge event.
Not just 20,000 people here
but there's about a million people SAP SAS
are going to engage with their life and on-demand video
experiences for Sapphire, amazing.
We are excited to welcome for the first time to theCUBE
Jinesh Jain the VP of Global Delivery at CenturyLink.
Welcome to theCUBE.
>> Thank you, thank you guys for having me here.
>> The theme in this event is really around
what SAP is doing to enable the intelligent enterprise.
This is really beyond digital transformation
where customers have to have a customer centric view.
It's about infusing and embedding emerging and advanced
technologies, AI machine learning into business processes.
How is CenturyLink helping customers
on that transformation journey?
>> I think that's a great question.
Let me give you a little bit of background
behind what CenturyLink is all about because
this is all SAP here in this event right?
CenturyLink is all about connecting customers in the
in the digital world.
And we recently acquired Level 3,
and with that Level 3 acquisition we became now,
we provide trusted connections to all the connected world,
you know all the network world.
So you can imagine in a digital transformation
you need a very strong foundation when it comes to
connectivity, network, infrastructure
and security behind that and that's what CenturyLink does.
That's our core business and with that journey
as we started the journey, we have 60 plus datacenters
as part of CenturyLink core strategic assets.
We have around 500K miles of fiber optics,
which is one of the, we are the second largest in the
United States when it comes to network connectivity
and redundancy across.
And in 60 plus countries,
I think all this strategic assets mix provides us very
strong foundation for any customers who is embarking
this digital journey.
It reminds me of one of those recent survey done by
McKinsey Global Institute, where they said that
they figured out that digitization index
for Europe was 12% and for North America
was little better around 18%.
But look at the gap, how much of gap is there in terms of
exploring the full potential of digitization.
So I think our journey in terms of giving the digital
transformation starts from our strong foundation
of our strategic assets of data centers network
and security, along with that as you mentioned about the
intelligent enterprise, we have a very strong practice
in terms of not just descriptive analytics,
but we do prescriptive analytics.
We do machine learning.
We have IOT and we do big data analysis as well.
So all these things combined together provides a complete
end-to-end solution.
And of course SAP plays a big play here
and we can talk about that in terms of
what we do on the SAP side as well.
>> So let's add some more color to that.
When I think of CenturyLink, I think
about the 60 data centers.
Even when I think about SAP what I normally consider
CenturyLink's role traditionally in a SAP relationship
is that you know what CenturyLink
to get me better either closer to my customers
so that data injection can happen faster
with lower latency.
When I think of CenturyLink, I think of
lower latency to hyper scale cloud providers
so that if I have hold on applications
I can get closer to my core SAP data,
but what I'm hearing is that CenturyLink
has greater SAP capability outside of that.
Tell us about the SAP practice at CenturyLink.
>> I'm glad you asked that because everybody is
wondering about CenturyLink and SAP relationship.
In fact let me go back in time here.
Six years, few years back I would say six,
five years back, CenturyLink acquired Cognilytics.
Cognilytics was all about deep HANA expertise,
deep analytics and all about BI strategy.
And then recently a couple of years back,
they acquired SEAL Consulting.
So these two organizations which CenturyLink acquired,
that gave us deep roots into SAP ecosystem
in terms of what CenturyLink and SAP can work together.
So now let's look at Cognilytics.
They were all about HANA, core HANA expertise.
They co-innovated with SAP in terms of that HANA analytics.
They came out with number of used cases symptoms
of predictive science and then when they acquired
SEAL Consulting, it was all about yes for HANA
transformation, which is absolutely the theme
across this Sapphire and for all the SAP customers globally.
From SEAL perspective, which is now of course part
of CenturyLink, but now we can provide infrastructure
as a service, platform as a service,
OSDB as a service, which is already part of CenturyLink.
Now with SEAL and Cognilytics coming into play,
we are end-to-end sharp in terms of SAP strategy,
digital transformation strategy, using SAP tools
and products, implementation upgrades,
application management services,
and continual improvement as part of the digital
transformation every customer is looking for.
I think that's how we are using the strategic assets
of CenturyLink as part of with the SAP expertise
coming into play.
>> So every customer, digital transformation to any
business is just, it's you got to do it right
or you will lose relevance and go out of business
and we've seen a lot of incumbent retailers for example
go away because they haven't been able to
transform digitally.
I read a stat recently that said 70% of siloed
digital transformation projects fail.
So how does CenturyLink and your expertise with SAP
as for with HANA, how do you help customers be successful?
Do you come in and see these siloed projects that
you know maybe shadow IT had evolved and helped them
to break down those silos, so that they can actually
facilitate what it is that they need which is that
that 360-degree view of their customers.
What they want, when they want it, to be able to predict
what they're gonna want next.
How do you help break down those silos?
>> Right, now I think is a known problem, known challenge
across all of the customers
who are embarking this journey.
I'll tell you what.
I'll give you a simple, the way we work,
our digital strategy is very much aligned with our
customer's business and IT goals.
So what we do first and foremost is
we want to align ourselves with what the business
and IT goals are.
Let's double click on that right.
So if I look at the business goals, so most of the customers
today, A, they want to make sure they want to protect
the revenue stream right?
B, they want to make sure they have real-time position,
no latency in terms of their business decision making.
And C, they want to make sure that they go into
the new markets.
They just can't stay silent to same market there.
Plus know the unfamiliar competition,
which comes up many times.
So that's the business aspect of the goals.
We want to look at that and make sure that we align our
implementation, our strategy to those business goals.
If you look at IT side of that,
and I tell you what, these are the things which
are being missed out with most of the partners
in this ecosystem.
If I look at the IT side of it,
first and foremost we want to make sure that
IT think goals are, it's all about innovation.
They want to be innovative.
They want to have minimal shelf wear
so that they can innovate all the time.
They want to evolve the resources so they are aligned
with the lines of business all the way
and that way everybody has a career path,
and they are evolving to the market needs.
And then lastly it's all about making sure that
all the mundane tasks you know if I look at they need
to focus on core competency and offload
all the routine tasks.
And we very much aligned as part of the journey
to those business and IT goals.
So if you look at our mission, we won't just look
at our mission in terms of overall CenturyLink
for SAP customers.
We want to provide them a private managed
secured cloud, which is scalable,
which can be commissioned in a week's time
with full automation, completely secure,
data protected and an uptime of 99.99%
and take care of all the lights on kind of routine tasks,
so they can focus on their main core competency about
business decision, new business, business process design
and things like that which are being lagging behind.
So that's our key theme in terms of how we drive
all the SAP information.
>> There's a lot of complexity behind getting this
much value out of any platform,
whether it's complexity at the data analytics layer,
whether it's the networking that needs to be done,
the design and deployment of NetApp stack.
We're in a conference where all the hyper scalers are here.
>> Yes.
>> The company smaller than CenturyLink
provides larger than CenturyLink.
How is CenturyLink uniquely positioned to basically
go to whether it's a Fortune 100 customer
or someone down level to basically add value where
these other providers potentially will trouble at.
>> Alright, no I think it's very true,
we need to be nimble.
I mean you know we can be a big ship,
but should not take time to turn.
And I completely agree with that.
I think what we do is I'll tell you,
one of the unique position we have in this market space is
you know we can proudly say that we are,
we don't need to go to any third party
when it comes to data center locations.
We have our own 500k lines of fiberoptics.
So network is where we provide,
we can provide minimal latency from network perspective.
We are all over the, we are 60 plus countries.
We are into 350 metros.
We can do a metro tier.
I think if you look at our network, our hosting capabilities
our infrastructure capabilities,
we are uniquely positioned compared
what the customers need today
as a one-stop shop or a one hand to shake
to make things happen for them.
At the same time, we are very nimble for many customers
because that's how CenturyLink has grown up.
They acquired us, and we were 800 people company.
So was other acquisition as well.
We can very easily adapt, innovate, comprehend
and adapt to the needs of the customers
based on our core competency, our solutions
which are available, and strategy which is very much fitting
most of our customers in the retail space,
in CPG space, in manufacturing space,
in healthcare, and in life sciences.
We have some designated industry solutions as well,
which can help us drive those values quicker.
At the same time measurable.
>> Being nimble I think of you know being adaptive
and being flexible but adaptive struck a big,
actually Hasso Plattner this morning in his keynote
talked about SAP being adaptive in the context,
I think he was talking about intelligence.
And everybody wants to paint intelligence
all over everything and they talked about
SAP being adaptive.
That kind of aligns with something I read recently
that Bill McDermott said, which is where SAP was the last
to accept the status quo.
I think he was talking about in relation to CRM specifically
but the first to change it.
So with that spirit of being nimble,
being adaptive how are you helping customers adapt
to needing to bring on you know edge core millions of
devices or customers that go you know what
I want to be able to use advanced technologies like AI
to make you know my manufacturing smarter or to be able
start connecting my supply chain with demand chain?
How are you harnessing that,
your adaptability to meet their needs on
some of those emerging trends?
>> Absolutely, this can be very overwhelming
and if you really look at what everybody's talking about,
where do you start with and I think we have been doing this
for last six years, even before the keynote announcement
to be honest to you guys.
We have documented 60 to 70 used cases in this case.
So what we do is when we approach a customer or a prospect,
we come out with some specific used case
for their line of business.
It can be in a marketing campaign.
It can be in a supply chain.
It can be in financials.
It can be in insurance.
So depending on what the needs are, we have those documented
used cases, so what we do is for each of these used cases,
we break it down in terms of what problem are
we gonna to solve, what is the problem definition.
And for that problem definition,
what's my used case, how do I solve this,
what are the alternatives, and how do I reach to my
measurable value of that solution.
And then we have built-in data models
ready to go for each of these used cases behind the scene.
So that helps us build something which is nimble,
because the data is available.
We just need to customize to 20% of what the customer
needs are, and then provide that value right away.
And once that pilot goes live for a small segment of
user community, then we expand that to the larger audience
to see the value of whether this is a predictive science
machine learning or just pure KPI driven analytics.
So we do that and then we expand that.
This is what we have done with number of Fortune 500
companies and we're really proud of what we do
in terms of being big, but being nimble.
>> So speaking of being big, talk about customer engagement,
not necessarily the actual customer conversations,
but how do customers engage with CenturyLink.
One of the simple things that you look at the
hyperscalers, I can go to the website,
and when I have a question, I can type it in
and I'll get a script that answers me in an hour or so.
What is the engagement model for interacting
with CenturyLink for new customers?
>> I think, actually let me go back on this one.
I was reading a survey in a CIO magazine.
Actually this is a recent survey last year it was,
that around thousand-plus CIO's who were interviewed
and most of the CIO's, all the CIO's had SAP systems
in their companies.
And 40% of them said they want to move from
on-premise to cloud.
Right there that's our engagement strategy there.
That we come as a one-stop shop for all these customers
who are planning to move from on-premise to cloud.
Why? Because number one, they want to reduce their CAPEX,
upfront reduction in your cost.
They want to make sure that their steady-state cost
for keeping the lights on is bare minimal.
So whatever budget is left out they can
focus more on innovation.
We take the sliver line of keeping the lights on
and moving them from on-premise to cloud as part of our
engagement strategy to start with number one.
As we do that, they realize, customer realize that
we are not just hosting partners.
We just don't provide scalable private managed security
cloud for our customers, but we can also do
SAP implementation end-to-end, which is whether this is
ECC upgrade to S/4HANA or this is a digital strategy
for S/4HANA going forward,
or just HANA as a pure analytics tool.
Or the different SAP suite of products,
whether this is Hybris, whether this is Ariba
or other suite of products which are very much
in a SAS model aspect of SAP,
we support that end to end.
Our support model is based out of the United States.
We have offshore centers in India.
So globally follow the same kind of approach.
We do this between our number of you know units here
in US and in India.
That's our engagement strategy across.
>> So last question is we're now in our booth
here at SAPPHIRE NOW.
Tell us about what CenturyLink, NetApp, SAP are doing
within the context of automation.
>> Wonderful yeah great.
That's important actually because I think
if you really look at the pace of what customer needs
today, the pace is changing so fast.
In a typical SAP landscape, you want to commission a system,
a development system or a production system within weeks
or within days.
Gone are other days where you need two months
and three months.
I mean you miss the business goals for doing
all these things.
So what we have done is we want to get into
the automation mode, and we are heavily investing
in that part with help of Cisco, UCSKS.
NetApp plays a very big role here in terms of providing
their data-driven strategy,
their hyper-converged infrastructure
as part of the storage system and working with
another partner Vnomic to make sure that entire,
all these gears behind the scene
have a very good orchestration layer
to automate the whole process of building the
infrastructure, building the application,
building all the services and handing it over to our,
to the customer team for them to start the journey.
So that whole cycle can be reduced by the automation.
So I would say NetApp plays a big role there,
no doubt about that because most of the IT organizations
are data driven today.
The SAP workloads are changing and you can't wait
for those change manually to be operated.
So these are all application driven workloads
which changes you know, which can adapt to all these
changing workloads and this is where we are going right now
in terms of automation.
>> Well thanks so much Jinesh for stopping by.
I wish we had more time but talking to us about what
CenturyLink is doing with SAP, with NetApp for example
to help customers on this arduous
digital transformation journey.
We appreciate your time.
>> Thank you so much I mean this is great, thank you,
enjoy rest of the day.
>> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE.
Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAP Sapphire 2018.
Thanks for watching.
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