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covering AWS Summit New York, 2018, brought to you
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>> Welcome back.
We're live here in New York's theCUBE exclusive's coverage
of Amazon Web Services Summit 2018.
AWS taking over the cloud.
I'm Jeff Frick.
Our next guest is Ben Lingwood, CTO of Lemongrass,
doing SAP on AWS exclusively as part of your company.
Thanks for joining us.
>> My pleasure.
Thank you for having me.
>> So I heard rumors, many many years ago,
I was at SAP Sapphire that SAP had the cloud
going at that time, trying to get it going.
But a lot of their pre-sales were being done on Amazon
and one of the internal SAP guys said to me,
"Damn, this Amazon thing is pretty damn good
"for SAP sales."
And it really an organic shadow IT pre-sales thing.
To now, there's a lot of business.
SAP's multi-cloud, you handle the AWS.
How has the cloud changed SAP?
>> It's been a real revolution in the way that SAP
is run and operated.
If you traditionally look at SAP, it's normally been
quite a monolithic system.
It's been the system that's been always on,
it's a system that you don't touch 'cause it's running
your core finance, your core systems.
So, what the cloud has enabled is really
agility into that system, the world of DevOps.
So, not maintaining huge amounts of infrastructure
that you don't need all the time
for projects, and for sandboxes,
and for those type of environments.
Gives you the flexibility to use what you need,
when you need, give that utility modeling experience
with both billing and compute.
And then lastly, it's gives you that flexibility
so that you can adopt new SAP technology
that much quicker, as well.
>> Can you give some examples of some customers
that have been successful with cloud?
And what's been the secret formula,
what's been the success linkage to make SAP
more agile, more versatile, more performing?
>> Yeah, let me give you a couple of examples.
So, we've just done one project
for a very large beer company that have gone live.
And that was really around the DevOps experience.
So, this was an organization that had
a significant footprint
of non-production systems: sandboxes and project systems,
and all the other systems that you collect through
running large projects for large businesses,
and keeping those on all the time.
So, what happened with this project in particular
was we got rid of them.
Why do you need to maintain all of those systems
when you're only using them for a few months of the year?
Or you're not using them over the weekend?
Or your project team are going home at 5:00
and you don't need them overnight?
So, by bringing in that DevOps culture,
putting in the technology, and what we do is
we bring in the best of AWS automation technology,
with SAP best practice and SAP architecture,
and that allows the customer to build systems
when they need them, on demand, and within hours
of actually when they need to use them.
And then we're they're not using them, turn them off.
>> So, Ben, this sounds so oil and water to people
that aren't familiar with what you do.
Think of SAP, think long implementation cycles,
law of integration, and then, like you said,
you build it, you lock it down, and the thing just runs.
So, I'm curious from your clients point of view,
what is the kind of twinkle in their eye
to see that they can both use this hardcore,
super important production systems,
but still start to get some agility out of this AWS cloud.
They must be like, "How the heck are we going to
"put these two things together?"
>> Yeah, yeah. >> So how do start generally,
they're obvsiously not lifting, shifting their whole
manufacturing system and sticking it at AWS.
Are there kind of pieces and best practices
that enable them to use the two together well?
>> So, absolutely.
So, the first part of your question is absolutely designed
to be a hybrid cloud.
So, what runs in Amazon is an extension
of what's on premise.
No problem at all.
And you tend to find there's a big ecosystem
of connections, of interfaces.
So the good news is those can continue the run
exactly the same they they do today.
So, great from disruption perspective.
Where you tend to find where customers are looking
at Amazon, it's a compelling reason.
So, I need to by new hardware.
I need to get out of a data center.
I've heard about this cloud organization.
My cost of running my SAP system is significant.
I'm spending, it's not uncommon for me to be spending
60%-70% of that budget on keeping the lights on.
Patching and maintaining and all those back office things
that just consume huge amounts of time,
huge amounts of money, stops companies
from being able to do agile developments.
So, bring it in to Amazon,
what we specialize in is automation first.
So, we can automate patching system,
we can automate operating system patchings,
we can do disaster recovery with a mouse click,
I can extend a system in a mouse click.
So, those sort of things that would typically
taking weeks and weeks and weeks and
slowing organizations down to result.
That tends to be the golden bullet
that really drives the discussion there.
>> That's the engagement life cycle look like?
I mean, obviously speed is critical.
We're hearing projects, whether it's,
I've heard public sector projects that AWS is running,
years to weeks.
We heard earlier today financial services, three months,
18 months previously, years before that.
So, years, months, weeks.
What do some of the deployments look like for you guys
in these large SAP environments, scoping them, time-wise?
>> It all depends on the size and share.
What we like to do like to do is
put our money where our mouth is.
So, we like to run a proof of concept to go,
right, what concerns you?
What hurts you?
What are your problems in your IT estate?
Okay, let's take that and let's do a proof of concept.
And what we want to do, we want to do that inside a month.
We want to prove them-- >> Inside a month.
>> Inside a month.
>> Which they must be just rolling their eyes
when you say that for an SAP project.
>> Yeah, exactly.
Because when you think of the world
of Amazon, a server is a line of code.
I don't have to buy a system, rack it, stack it,
install it, get the specialist guys in,
get the security, so, sort of maybe.
So, a line of--
>> They're not used to that.
Years ago it was like, we're going to milk you
for tons of cash.
We're multi, we're going to take eight weeks to do an audit.
>> Yeah.
And you know what?
That's a very important point because, actually,
the cultural change is as much of a challenge
as everything because it's the thing that was
the slowest moving component is now the fastest moving.
And you know what?
Customers are not ready for that.
So, the governor's change of, hang on.
I don't need to buy a server and depreciate it
for five years, I can be billed by the minute.
How do I do that?
>> What's the biggest learnings that you've learned
as an individual in the industry, not so much as
with Lemongrass, maybe that could help give some
color commentary, if you look back at the past
five to 10 years, maybe just the past five?
What are the big learnings that you've personally
walked away with the cloud?
What's the big impact?
What's the ah-ha?
Where have you seen surprises, unexpected, expected things?
What's your big takeaway?
>> I think that the big takeaway is not viewing the cloud
as infrastructure service.
Not viewing it just as another way of getting
affectively dumb 10.
The cloud is way more than that.
So, yes it fixes that the problem of instant infrastructure,
but don't, for God's sake, don't treat it just
as dumb infrastructure, and comparing that with
how much does it cost to buy a server?
Yeah, you're missing the point completely.
What companies should be looking at is
what agility does an Amazon-based system,
a cloud-based system give me on top
that allows me then to drive the efficiencies
across the ecosystem.
Because, like I said, the main cost of running these systems
tends to be the maintenance, the operations,
the patching, the infrastructure.
So, that's the key thing I would say--
>> Why should customers work with you?
What attracts people to your business?
Obviously SAP on Amazon, also the agility.
Is it because they want to
actually create a developer capability?
Is it serve existing developers?
It is more functionality?
What are the main reasons that you're engaged
by these big companies?
>> We're very simple people.
And I meant that in a very good way, in that
we only do one thing and we do one thing well,
which is we do SAP on Amazon.
So, most of us in the organization, myself included
for over 20 years working in the SAP ecosystem,
and you're taking that dark art,
that's it's very complex sort of applications,
and infrastructures, and a lot of
moving innovation within SAP,
and you're taking that with Amazon,
which again, as we all know, every time you blink,
Amazon are making something new.
I mean, look behind me.
There's a huge ecosystem, a huge dinamo, of things
that are just being released behind us right now.
>> So new capabilities--
>> Bringing those together.
>> So, the customers benefit, really in their minds eye is,
okay, I don't want to throw away SAP,
because I have so much invested in it.
It's like plumbing.
It's like pipes in the ground.
They want to take advantage of new cloud native things.
Is that the real goal?
>> It's bringing those two dark arts together.
So, Lemongrass brings together those two best practices
and forms that together into automated, reputable
architecture, best practices, and then really,
where we see things that customers are doing repetitively
over and over again, we automate first.
That's our strategy.
We automate first.
That's what we do.
>> And what's the business outlook look like,
in terms of trend data?
Is it like more, faster, accelerated clients
are moving over?
How would you look at the growth of that SAP on AWS?
It's happening more or less often?
More often?
Growth?
What can you share-- >> Prolifically.
I mean, I had a major go-live this weekend in the US.
So, just an example on that, that happened comfortably
under the time that we estimated before.
So, I think the ice is broken.
People are now not scared of using what they see as
public cloud services to run their crown jewels,
their enterprise application.
So, the confidence is in the marketplace.
People are now realizing it's probably more secure
and more sophisticated than anything
they could do on premise.
Okay so, don't try and keep up with it,
adopt it, embrace it.
And then the third thing, I think, when you're focusing
on the wham, as in on the agenda there, is
the speed of innovation.
So, only a few months ago in Sapphire,
they released the next X2 series.
So, looking at those very large capabilities as well,
the nine, 12, 20-terabyte, maybe in the future tie systems.
So, the enterprise scale is also there.
>> Right.
I'm just curious as you've looked around
at the ecosystem here, and Amazon shows are amazing.
Not only is there a lot of booths,
there's a lot of people at every booth.
Is that a way, is what you do a way
to leverage this ecosystem?
Obviously, Sapphire's a huge show,
been around forever, very successful.
SAP's got a great ecosystem.
But this is a different ecosystem.
Different vibe, different speed, different application.
Are you being able to blend this AWS ecosystem
and innovation into this core infrastructure at SAP?
>> Great question, great question.
So you tend to find with SAP that it comes,
it's the hub maybe, but there's a whole peripheral set
of IT solutions out there.
So, absolutely.
Let me give you an example of that.
So, data links.
SAP typically runs very large data systems.
And what Amazon gives you the capability to do is,
potentially in that space, take that data out into S3,
looking at Lambda, looking at SageMaker,
other automated technologies like that where you can
actually natively run big date transformation
for SAP data and non-SAP data.
So, if you're a betting man,
and you want to put your enterprise into an innovative space
that covers, not only SAP, but any other IT area
that you could possibly think of,
there's a whole disruptive technology,
booths set behind us, that are churning out some
really amazing things. >> Yeah, that's great.
>> What's the biggest success that you could point to
that you're most proud of with deployments you've done?
>> I think that the things we're most proud of is
what we bring with automation.
So, basically what we're doing now to the company
was my job, what I used to do, only 10 years ago.
I've made myself redundant from 10 years ago.
So, bringing that level of automation now
where you can build an SAP system in a mouse click,
or I can ask Alexa to build it for me.
We got rat running in the booth.
Who'd have thought that?
So I can ask Alexa--
>> I don't know if I want Alexa--
it's like, you know, go get me something
at the grocery store and it buys Whole Foods.
I don't know if I-- >> Alexa, buy SAP.
>> Yeah, yeah.
Don't ask that one.
Extreme example, but that level of automation,
that's working, that's life,
customers are using that sort of functionality,
which only five, six years ago, would have been
a hankering solution.
So, it's huge, huge acceleration.
>> Well, we have covered SAP in the past.
We really haven't been engaging
with the corporate team much recently.
I think we've had Sapphire, we're through NetApp recently,
but I can tell you that the one group that we do like
at SAP is Dan Lahl's group, and they're managing
the SAP cloud platform.
'Cause they had some HANA cloud plats,
some weird bad naming going on, and confusing.
But, there's a multi-cloud initiative that I think
is quite brilliant for SAP.
And I think that they're not trying to be Oracle.
Oracle's saying, we have the cloud, come here.
I think Oracle will see how that turns out.
I think SAP is playing it smart.
They're going to be embedded as a service layer
across all clouds, and let their ecosystem
take advantage of it.
Do you see it the same way?
Is that kind of the strategy?
>> Absolutely right.
Yeah, so, to survive, and SAP's super smart on that, is,
there was a race to see who could do the best
and fastest infrastructure on the planet.
And, you know, there's the big three players
and Amazon absolutely up front on that,
that could provide those sorts of services.
So, absolutely.
It allows SAP to focus on what they do best,
which is world-class enterprise software.
>> And give their customers headroom.
BMWare did a deal with AWS.
I thought that was a great tell-sign to your point
about, there's a lot of cloud goodness out there.
If you try to cube a monolithic to dying strategy.
>> And it's symbiotic.
So you mentioned SAP earlier.
And guess what?
They're deploying that as Amazon as well.
So, the ecosystem is revolving around these
hyper scale platforms.
>> And the speed and benefits are just, again,
off the charts.
Economics are just driving prices down,
functionality up, new rolls of data,
just cost conversion, just massive benefits.
>> You touch on a good point there.
So, economy.
So, what we do is we sit with every customer every month
and I can pretty much guarantee every month
I can find an efficiency.
So, something new's come out.
There's a cheaper way of doing it.
You've bought out a new range of service from Amazon
that we can adopt.
Every month we're seeing that innovation
and we can pass that straight back to the customer.
So the curve is always going down.
>> And Blockchain's right around the corner.
You know you're doing well when AI and Blockchain
are in the conversation.
It's going to be a big, big migration
that's a little big hyped up right now, as you know.
Ben, thanks for coming on theCUBE.
Appreciate it. >> My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
>> CUBE coverage here on the ground,
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I'm Jeff Frick.
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We'll be right back.
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