- [Voiceover] It's theCUBE
covering Sapphire Now.
Headlines sponsored by SAP HANA Cloud,
the leader in platform as a service.
With support from Console Inc.,
the cloud internet company.
Now, here are your hosts:
John Furrier and Peter Burris.
- Okay, welcome back, everyone.
We are here live in Orlando, Florida,
for exclusive coverage of SAP Sapphire Now.
This is theCUBE's SiliconANGLE's flagship program.
We go out to the events and extract
the signal from the noise.
I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris.
I wanna thank our sponsors for allowing us
to get down here, SAP HANA Cloud Platform,
Console Inc., Capgemini, and EMC,
thanks so much for supporting us.
Our next guest is Ifran Khan,
who is the SVP General Manager
of digital enterprise platforms which includes
HANA, end-to-end.
Welcome back to theCUBE.
- Thank you. - [John] Good to see you.
- Lovely to be back here again.
- [John] So, you know theCUBE history.
We go way back, we've done pretty much every Hadoop World
up until 2013, now we have an event the same day,
week Estrada, New York, NSV,
and we've been to every Sapphire since 2010
except for 2014, 2015.
We had a little conflict of events,
but it's been great.
It's been big data.
I remember Bill McDermott got up there
when HANA was announced, kinda,
or pre-built before Hadoop hit.
So, you had HANA coming out of the oven,
Hadoop hits the scene,
Hadoop gets all the press,
HANA's now rolling, so then you roll forward
to four more years, we're here.
What's your take on this, because it's been
an interesting shift.
Hadoop, some are saying, is hard to use,
total costs of ownership.
Now, HANA's rising, Hadoop is sliding.
That's my opinion, but what's your opinion?
- Well, that's a well, sort of, summarized
history lesson there, so to speak.
Well, firstly, great to be on theCUBE again.
It's always lovely to see you gentlemen here,
you do a wonderful job.
What I'd perhaps just highlight
is maybe some of they key milestones
that I've observed over the last four or five years.
Ironically, 2010 when I arrived at SAP,
when the entire, sort of if you like,
trajectory of HANA started going in that direction,
and Hadoop was sort of there, but it was maybe petering out
a little bit because it was the unknown,
the uncertainty of scale in whether or not
this is going to be only batch
or whether it's gonna ever become real-time.
So, I would maybe make the two or three
milestones from the SAP side.
HANA started off as a disruptive technology,
which was perhaps conceived as being a response
to a lot of internal challenges that we were running into
using the systems of record of yester-era.
They were incapable of dealing with SAP applications,
incapable of giving us what we now refer to as
a digital core, and that were incapable of giving our
customers truly what they needed.
As a response, HANA was introduced into the market,
but it wasn't limited in scope to the,
if you like the historical baggage of the relational era,
or even the Hadoop era, so to speak.
It was completely new imagined technologies
built around in-memory computing,
a columnar architecture, and therefore
it gave us an opportunity to project
ultimately what we could achieve
with this as a foundation.
So, HANA came into the market
focusing on analytics to start with,
going full circle into being able to do
transactionality, as well,
and where we are today?
I think Hadoop is now being recognized,
I would say probably as a de facto data operating system.
So, HDFS is a very significant sort of extension to
most IT organizations, but it's still lacking
the compute capabilities.
This is what's given their eyes a spark,
and of course with HANA,
HANA isn't, within itself, a very significant
computing engine. - [John] And Vora.
And Vora a-- - [Ifran] Of course,
and Vora, as well.
Now you're finishing off my sentences. Thank you.
- (laughs) This is what theCUBE is all about,
we got a good cadence going here.
Alright, so but now the challenge.
HANA's also, by the way, was super fast when it came out,
but then it didn't really fire in my opinion.
It's swim-lane.
It seems now, it's so clear
that the fruit is coming off the tree, now.
You're seeing it blossom beautifully.
You got S/4 HANA, you got the core...
Explain that because people get confused.
Am I buying HANA Cloud, am I buying HANA Cloud Platform?
Share how this is all segmented to the buyer,
to the customer, to the customer.
- Sure, I mean firstly, SAP applications
need to have a system of record.
HANA is a system of record.
It has a database capability, but ultimately HANA
is not just a database.
It's an entire platform with integration,
and application services, and, of course,
with data services.
Now, as a consequence, when we talk about
the HANA Cloud Platform,
this is taking HANA as a core technology,
as a platform,
embedding it inside of a cloud deployment environment
called a HANA Cloud Platform.
It gives on opportunity where customers are
perhaps implementing on premise S/4,
or even in a public S/4 instance,
an opportunity to extend those applications
as perhaps they may need or require to do so
for their business requirements.
So, in layman's terms, you have a system of record
requirement with SAP applications, that is HANA.
It is only HANA now in the case of S/4.
And in order to extend the application
as customers want to customize those applications,
there is one definitive extension venue,
and that's called the HANA Cloud Platform.
- [John] And that mainly is for developers, too.
I call it the developer cloud,
for lack of a better description or a more generic one.
That's the cloud foundry.
Basically the platform is a service that is actually
bolting on, I guess a developer on-ramp, if you will.
Is that a safe way to look at it?
- [Ifran] Yeah, I mean I think the developer
interaction point with SAP now certainly becomes HCP,
but it also is a significant ecosystem enabler, as well.
Only last week, or week-before-last in fact,
we announced the relationship with Apple,
which is a phenomenal extension of what we do
with business applications,
and HCP is the definitive venue
for the Apple relationship in effect.
- So, tell us a little bit about
borrowing or building upon that.
What is increasingly...
How should an executive,
when I think about digitalization,
how should they think about it?
Is this something that is a new set of channels,
or the ability to reach new customers,
or is there something for fundamental going on here?
Is it really about trying to translate more
of your business into data in a way that it's accessible
so it can be put to use and put to work
in more and different ways?
- Sure, it's a great question.
So, what is digitalization?
Well, firstly, it's not new.
I mean, SAP didn't invent digitalization,
but I think we know a fair bit about where digitalization
is gonna take many businesses
in the next three to five years.
So, I would say that there's five prevailing trends
that are fueling the need to go digital.
The first thing is about hyperconnectivity.
If we understand that data and information
is not only just consumed, it's created in a variety
of places, and geographically
just about anywhere now is connected.
I mean, in fact, I read one statistic that 90 percent
of the world's inhabitable land masses
have either cellular or wireless reception.
So, truly, we're hyperconnected.
The second thing is about the scale of the cloud, right?
The cloud gives us compute, not just on the desktop,
but anywhere; and by definition of anywhere,
we're saying if you have a smart appliance
at an edge, that is, in fact, supercomputing
because it gives you an extension to be able to get
to any compute device.
And then you've got cloud,
and on top of which, you have cyber-security,
and a variety of other things like IOT.
These things are all fueling the need
to become digitally aware enterprises,
and what's ultimately happening is that
business transformation is happening
because somebody without any premises,
without any assets, comes along and disrupts a business.
In fact, one study from Capgemini and, of course, from MIT
back in 2013, was revealing that
in the year 2,000 and 20, 2020 rather,
out of the SMP 500, approximately 40 percent
of the businesses are going to cease to exist.
For the simple reason, those business transformations
that are going on disrupting their classical business models
are gonna change the way that they operate.
So, I would just, in a concatenated way
of answering your question,
digital transformation at the executive level
is about, not just surviving, it's about thriving.
It's about taking advantage of the digital trends.
It's about making sure that,
as you reinvent your businesses, you're not just
looking at what you do today.
You're always looking at that as a line
that's been deprecated.
What are you going to do in addition to that?
That's where your growth is going to come from,
and SAP's all about helping customers
become digitally aware and transform their organizations.
- [Paul] So, you're having conversations with customers
all the time about the evolution
of data management technologies,
and your argument being is that HANA
is more advanced, a columnar database in memory,
speed, more complexity in the IO,
all kinds of wonderful things that it makes possible
can then be reflected in more complex,
or more rich, value creating applications.
But, the data is often undervalued.
- [Ifran] Of course. - The data itself.
We haven't figured out how to look at that data,
and start treating it literally as capital.
We talk about a business problem,
we talk about how much money we wanna put there,
how much people we wanna put there,
but we don't yet talk about how much data
is gonna be required either to go there and make it work,
or that we're gonna capture out of it.
How are you working with customers
to think that problem through?
Are they thinking it through differently in your experience?
- Yeah, that's a great question.
So, firstly, if I was to look at their
value association with data,
we can borrow from the airline industry
perhaps as an analogy.
If you look at data, it's very equivalent to passengers.
The businesses that we typically operate on
are working on first and business class data.
They've actually made significant investments
around how to securely store, access, process, manage
all of this business class and first class data.
But, there's an economy class of data
which is significant and very pervasive,
and if you look at it from the airline's point of view,
an economy class individual passenger
doesn't really equate to an awful lot,
but if you aggregate all the economy class passengers,
it's significant.
It's actually more than your business
and first class revenue, so to speak.
So, consequently, large organizations have to start
looking at data, monetizing the data,
and not ignoring all of the noise signals
that come out of the sensors,
out of the various machinery,
and making sure that they can aggregate that data,
and build context around it.
So, we have to start thinking along those ways.
- [John] Yes, I love that analogy, so good.
But, let's take that one step further.
I wanna make sure I go on the right plane, right?
So, one, that's the data aware.
So, digital assets is the data,
so evaluation techniques come into play,
but having a horizontally traversal data plane
really, in real time, is a big thing
because, not only do I go through security,
put my shoes through, my laptop out, that's just IT.
The plane is where the action is.
I wanna be on the right plane.
That's making data aware,
the alchemy behind it,
that's the trick.
What's your thoughts on that
because this is a cutting area.
You hear AI ontolgies and stuff going on there now,
machine learning, certainly.
Surely not advancing to the point
where it's really working yet.
It's getting there, but what's your thoughts on all this?
- Yeah, so I think the vehicle that you're referring to,
whether it's a plane or whatever
the mode of transportation is,
at a metaphor level, we have to understand that
there is a value in association with making decisions
at the right time when you have all
the information that you need,
and by definition, we have created a culture in IT
where we segregate data.
We create this almost two swim lane approach.
This is my now data, this is my transactional data,
and here's my data that will then
feed into some other environment,
and I may look to analyze it after the event.
Now, getting back to the HANA philosophy from day one,
it was about creating a simplified model
where you can do live analytics on transactional data.
This is a big, significant shift.
So, using your aircraft analogy,
as I'm on there, I don't want to suddenly worry about
I didn't pick up my magazine from Duty Free or whatever,
from the newspaper stand.
I've got no content now, I can't do anything.
Alright, for the next nine hours, I'm on a plane now
and I've got nothing to do.
I've got no internet, I've got no connectivity.
The idea is that you wanna have all of the right information
readily available and make real time decisions.
That calls for simplified architectures all about HANA.
- We're getting the signal here.
I know you're super busy.
Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE.
I wanna get one final question in.
What's your vision around your plans?
I'll say it's cutting-edge, you get a great area,
ecosystem's developing nicely.
What's your goals for the next year?
What are you looking to do?
What are your key KPI's?
What are you trying to knock down this year?
What's your plans?
- I mean, first and foremost,
we've spent an awful lot of time talking about
SAP transformations
and around SAP customer landscape transformations.
S/4 is all about that.
That is a digital core.
The translation of digital core to SAP
should not be inhibiting other customers
who don't have an SAP transaction or application foundation.
We want to be able to take SAP to every single platform
usage out there and most customers will have a need
for HANA-like technology.
So, the top of my agenda is
let's increase the full use requirements
and actual value of HANA,
and we're seeing an awful lot of traction there.
The second thing is, we're now driving
towards the cloud.
HCP is the definitive venue not just for the ecosystem,
for the developer and also for the
traditional SAP customers,
and we're gonna be promoting an awful lot
more exciting relationships,
and I'd love to be able to speak to you again in the future
about how the evolution is taking place.
- [John] We wish we had more time.
You're a super guest, great insight.
Thank you for sharing the data here
- [Ifran] Thank you for having me.
- [John] On theCUBE.
We'll be right back with more live coverage
here inside the cube at Sapphire Now.
You're watching theCUBE.
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