>> Voiceover: Live, 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's your host, John Furrier.
>> Hey, welcome back everyone.
We are here live at SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP's big user conference.
This is theCube, SiliconANGLE's flagship program.
We go out to the events and extract
the signals from noise.
Day three of wall-to-wall coverage, this is day three.
We had awesome interviews, go to youtube.com/siliconangle
and look for the playlist of SAPPHIRE NOW,
it'd be great, great videos out there.
We would not be here if it wasn't for our sponsors,
so shout out to SAP Hana Cloud Platform,
Console Inc., Console Cloud, the Interconnect Companies,
for interconnecting the clouds, and, of course,
EMC Capgemini, thanks for your support.
Our next guest is Uddhav Gupta, who's the
Global Vice President for the SAP Platform-as-a-Service.
Great to see you, we'll shake hands.
>> Good to see you, John.
>> So, we have been so excited about Platform-as-a-Service
going back, man, almost when the Clouderati started.
You know, almost seven years ago,
when we started SiliconANGLE.
We saw pre-OpenStack, Amazon was already on a trajectory,
OpenStack kind of, Rackspace kind of bootstraps that,
and then the rest is history,
now you have Cloud Foundry,
all this stuff is coming together.
So, you guys have a big part of that developer ecosystem.
>> Yes, we do.
>> What do you do for the platforms-of-service for SAP,
and what are some of the things you're working on,
what should the audience know about that you're working on.
>> Absolutely, so, first of all,
thank you for having me on the show.
We at Hana Cloud Platform, is basically
a idea that we came up with to help our customers
solve the biggest problem of
complicated application development.
And when we spoke to the customers, the typical
thing that came back to us is,
I want to actually integrate applications, right?
I have incipient backing systems,
I have non-incipient backing systems,
how to bring these two systems together?
I typically build an application,
a mash-up for the audience.
The second scenario that we basically solve,
is, a lot of customers came back and said,
we want to just extend certain business processes
that are running on the back end, and you know,
build applications that actually
sit and extend these processes.
So, we started looking at all of that,
we said, okay, it's very clear,
that we want to simplify the core.
But we also wanted to go out and provide
a simplified application development stack,
so that people actually go out
and build these applications.
And that's what Hana Cloud Platform is all about.
>> So the approach is not so much come from the
infrastructure of the service,
but come down from the app.
Okay, well Larry Ellison, at Oracle, he said as well,
well, you come up from the hardware, they got SUN,
and then he comes down from the top,
and their middleware is Oracle, a similar approach.
And that's a great message, because that's his focus,
is obviously app, but they got SUN,
so they can kind of clean and they can book in
the middleware, if you will, or past layer.
How do you guys compare vis-a-vis that,
because you don't have any hardware.
>> Correct.
>> You got partners.
>> Correct.
>> Like EMC, then you got
the Vblock going back to the day.
>> Exactly.
>> How do you answer to that?
>> So we have always been agnostic in terms of hardware,
agnostic in terms of infrastructure.
So the angle that we're going with
is just like how we did with Hana.
We said, we'll build the Hana software,
and we'll have it available on multiple different platforms.
We are doing the same thing with the Hana Cloud Platform.
Today, we offered it off our own SAP data center.
The road map is to basically partner with
a number of infrastructure providers,
like Amazon, like Azio, like other
third-party hosting providers--
>> You'd okay the computers?
>> Yeah, completely.
So if you're actually looking at going ahead
and deploying our software on Cloud Form Read,
enabling it on OpenStack, so we can actually now
take it to all of our infrastructure partners,
and use them as suppliers.
That way, we can actually concentrate on
building a business Platform-as-a-Service layer,
concentrate on building the mechanics.
Building the intelligence of the Platform-as-a-Service,
and leave the infrastructure game
to the guys who are really good at that.
Which are Amazon, Azio, and a few others.
>> So, you guys have Hana, okay, Hana database as well,
the platform is Hana Cloud Platform,
so, back to the Oracle thing,
and I bring up Oracles there, we can relate to that.
They claim performance advantage, so Oracle on Oracle,
with SUN, has been optimized.
It's almost end-to-end stacked.
You guys worried about performance at all?
Can you share your thoughts on how you answer that?
>> Of course, I mean, if you look at
the whole team of Sapphire here,
that's been about running a business life.
You can't run a business life without having performance.
So performance is the core of everything that we're doing.
Whether it's running a database that's high-speed.
Whether it's simplifying the entire application stack,
the S/4Hana, running at high-speed.
It's also about an innovation cycle around it
that needs to also be high-speed.
And when we're building the Hana Cloud Platform,
we've actually look into those elements continuously,
and saying, how can we help application development
also run at high-performance?
This is around the computer.
This is around the database.
This is around the tool set that we actually
providing our partner ecosystem,
as well as the customers, to build
custom applications at really high speeds.
>> Okay, talk about the Hana Cloud Platform.
Expand, and take a minute to explain,
because, I think that, you know,
seeing on the opening day, you guys aren't
getting the kind of credit in the press
and in the market, although you're being successful
as the cloud.
Some people say, oh they have nothing.
Platform-as-a-service, it's just SAP ware.
Answer that, explain, take a minute to explain,
what you guys have done, in the market,
how it's different, and then it does work
for non-SAP customers.
So, kind of dice that out for us, share that.
Take a minute to explain that.
>> Absolutely, going to Sapphire, a lot of our customers
and a lot of the press, media, also thought
that Hana Cloud Platform is just for SAP.
Now, after two days of conversations with customers,
they quickly realize, that we're not just, like,
for SAP, we could actually be the Force.com
or the application platform for merging data
from SAP and non-SAP, right?
So that's the first revelation
a lot of the customers have got.
I find many of the customers that had this, aha moment,
when I was talking to them, and they're like,
"Oh, I can actually solve a number of issues with this.
"I can actually go out and provide a single
"application development layer across
"my entire backing system, which is SAP and non-SAP."
So we've seen a lot of that reaction.
>> So that's an integration game, too.
And the thing I would share were the folks at
my observation of theCube, and
I'd love to get your thoughts on this, is that,
it's not trying to win SAP end-to-end.
SAP plays well wherever the customer desires it, right?
So if they go to ERP, or not ERP.
If you want to come and and do, say, HR stuff.
And success factors.
You're still going to have a little bit of SAP,
but this is application layer at the
Hana Cloud Platform, is for the rest of the enterprise.
It's not to lock in for future SAP, right?
>> It's not a lock-in story here, right?
I'll give you an example.
We are doing some really crazy stuff
on Hana Cloud Platform, right.
You know the Superbowl that took place in San Francisco.
>> Of course, Superbowl 50.
>> SAP had a whole fan energy zone set up there,
where people were actually playing games.
And we are continuously streaming data from those games
into the Hana Cloud Platform, right?
Now, nothing to do with SAP, nothing to do
with anything that even closely SAP's associated with.
It's fan data coming to the Hana Cloud Platform.
And people seeing analytics on top of it, right?
We're having other partners also do similar stuff.
I'm talking to partners that are basically
going ahead and serving the utility companies,
but more on the utility to the consumers piece.
With the outlying customers to basically go and
create a aggregated view of the consumptions, right?
And this is a look at something
not what SAP's used to doing.
Bringing in the Hana Cloud Platform
is allowing them to do such things.
>> Alright, so my final question really is around Apple.
So, how does the Apple deal affect you guys in particular.
Because, you guys can't hide in the shadows anymore.
You got to go for- go big or go home
with Hana Cloud Platform.
So does that change your game in terms
if you go to market, is your budget increased?
I mean you got, the game is on.
The Apple deal puts the pressure on you guys
to take that relationship, and use it as a way
to get into, obviously means for your development.
Swift is a great programming language,
got a lot of traction.
So tell me, I mean, is it all in now?
I mean Apple is Apple that, hey, you got to go for it.
Go big or go home.
>> Yeah, so, it's definitely go big.
The other thing that we have with
this whole Apple relationship that we announced,
has also made a very beautiful point,
if you think about it, right?
There're certain applications that can be
web applications that you can still render
on a mobile device, sure.
You can make them extremely responsive,
you can do all of that kind of stuff.
But the beauty of the IOS and the relationship
that we built with Apple,
it allows you to start now building native applications
that run on the mobile, but consume
all the technical services that we have,
are made available in the Hana Cloud Platform.
>> And the data's critical there,
I mean, SAP's got ARP data, systems of record data.
And now you're expanding out to other engagement data,
non-SAP data by the way.
>> Exactly, and all the other technology services
that we're basically providing in the Hana Cloud Platform
with it's content, with it's data,
with it's integration, a whole bunch of stuff, right?
>> So is your budget doubled?
>> Well the budget is not doubled, definitely right.
>> Yeah but you have to, you have to run now
so it's pretty clear for you guys, right?
I mean, explain, is that the mandate?
I mean, because you guys have been kind of like,
silent run- I say silent run, not stealth, but
I mean you been, chipping away at it,
it's been a ground game for SAP Hana Cloud,
haven't seen a lot of stuff out there in the market.
It seems to me that now, the pressure's on.
So go knock it out of the park, right?
>> Absolutely, the focus on basically
building mobile applications, specific mobile applications,
for certain industries, is definitely coming back.
So a lot of investment is happening in that space
for sure, from SAP, from Apple,
also from our partners.
So that investment is definitely happening.
There's also a lot of traction that we are
basically putting on marketing that
uh, concept out, so that our partner,
the customers also get a true pat forward
and a grain in how they should
actually invest their resources.
>> What's you priorities this year?
Education, onboarding new--
>> Our priorities this year is getting
a whole bunch of developers to actually
start using the Hana Cloud Platform.
To that extent, what we've actually done is
we've gone ahead and created open SAP courses
that allows anybody to access education on
Hana Cloud Platform, absolutely free.
With the IOS relationship we've gone out and basically
created IOS academy.
A lot of people understand how to build IOS apps,
with the Hana Cloud Platform, thereby bridging
the 150,000 developers that are already in
the Hana Cloud Platform, the two million
developers of the SAP network, and the 30 million
developers of the Apple world,
all coming together to start building stuff
on the Hana Cloud Platform.
>> I'm sure you've got some internal debates,
like percentage of penetration within that 35 million,
I mean, not everyone's going to be interested
in enterprise programming but, a good slice
will look to build white spaces.
>> Absolutely, because, guess what?
You can only earn that much money
by building consumer apps.
The moment you are a developer and you
really want to earn serious money,
you basically start looking at building enterprise apps.
>> Final final question, because I have one more,
this is good conversation, uh,
where are the white spaces?
So the developers that are watching,
or people that are interested, in innovating on SAP,
where do you guys see the white spaces
that are low-hanging fruit right now,
that someone can get a position in here and work?
>> So, there're a number of those.
Uh, the very first one around building
industry-specific apps, right?
To a large part of the industry, UAX was our SAP gooey.
But now, everybody want to actually
start digitizing those processes.
Nobody actually wants to go into a static screen,
or a pre-defined screen.
They want it to be very responsive
to what they're doing at the moment.
It's alive, right?
So, building those apps is definitely a white space.
The second big white space is around
building industry content.
What I mean by industry content is,
a platform can basically provide you all the
platform capabilities that are required.
But you need a lot more of the content
and the technologies services.
This could be matching learning algorithms,
this could be actually predictive algorithms,
this could be data content that is coming in.
Building and providing data as a micro-service
within the platform is something that is
very interesting for us.
>> Thanks so much for coming on theCube,
I'll give you the final word Uddhav Gupta,
Global Vice President of SAP, Platform-as-a-Service.
What's the vibe of the show, you mentioned,
what's the hallway conversations that you're hearing.
You know, what's going on with the night,
certainly at night with all those events going on,
last night I went to bed early, watched the Warriors game.
Win by 30-something points.
Night before I was out til 1:30 doing some networking
to Lloyd Bardy, S. Ensher, EY, seeing all the SAP people.
Lot of chatter, what are you hearing?
What are you hearing in the hallways?
>> The vibe is very very positive.
People are starting to finally understand how
we are bringing all the Cloud acquisitions
that we made together.
People are starting to understand that
they have to move to the Cloud.
So the whole thing about the myth, whether we
move or do not move to the Cloud, it's now
kind of settled down.
People are understanding where SAP is with integration,
where SAP is with moving to the Cloud.
But, the beauty is, last year, same time,
the questions I was getting, was
is any of this real?
The question that we're getting now is,
how do I engage into it?
How do I start doing it?
So that transition's happened really beautifully.
Whether you think about S/4Hana,
whether you think about Hana Cloud Platform,
just in general, what's happening in the past
well is helping that quite a lot.
>> You guys have done a good job
and you've been kind of transitioning, now it's real.
You got a straight-and-narrow for developers.
I'm looking forward to tracking you guys
and seeing the progress.
Great hallway conversations,
of course the biggest conversation
was that Reggie Jackson was on theCube,
on day one and he was awesome, also
the great executives come on with great conversation.
Thanks so much for sharing your insight on theCube,
Hana Cloud Platform-as-a-Service.
We are live here in Orlando, you're watching theCube.