>> Be a relationship.
It's not like you guys are johnny-come-lately
on Amazon Web Services.
Can you just quickly give some color on the relationship
with AWS and what it means with respect
to HANA Enterprise Cloud.
>> Absolutely, and I think that you are spot on here.
I think the relationship between SAP
and Amazon Web Services dates quite some years back,
all the way to Amazon Web Services being a participant,
especially with their teams, their architects,
sitting side by side with SAP in Walldorf
to conduct a lot of these validations,
to conduct a lot of these certifications,
that took place, so I think that level
of collaboration is basically almost coming to (mumble).
When you look at some of these offerings
that come out there.
I think also the way that you see (mumbles)
otherwise that has been built specifically
for those kind of HANA workloads.
That clearly will happen only if these two companies
are working extremely closely together
but not just from a go-to-market perspective,
but more importantly, from an engineering
and from development perspective.
>> Yeah.
>> Sanjay: Having that voice within
the HANA development organization
ensures that we are actually representing the wants
of the customer around consumption patterns
that we know for a fact are going to take place
on the (mumbles) as well.
>> Congratulations on that Amazon relationship.
It's always good to know it's not a--
Just to clarify, I want to see if you can just verify
as a source, since I have you on the phone here,
and you're senior vice president.
Is it true, I've heard, I just want to confirm with you.
I've heard that the Amazon relationship
has always been there for four years,
but a lot of the stuff that has come out of the announcement
that you announced this week was already going on
independently with customers and third parties.
You guys are now formalizing that with official teams
and joint development. Is that correct?
>> Sanjay: So I think, like I mentioned,
the engineering relationship between SAP and Amazon
(mumbles) for quite some time now.
I think we would not have made decisions.
In fact, even before, the HANA Enterprise Cloud
managed services (mumbles) universally offered,
based on these certified workloads,
based on these certified (mumbles),
there was an option for customers to go and deploy
some of their SAP systems, not just test and development
but also product assistants directly
in the Amazon Web Services Cloud.
What the HAC, also in our managed (mumbles) offers,
is it's now SAP putting some of these workloads
directly in the AWS environment and helping the customers
manage all of this from an end-to-end perspective.
>> So that's the key, the difference, if I get this right,
is before it wasn't fully end to end because you didn't have
your piece there, but you were there anyway
with the engineers, so is that, and am I getting that right?
It seems like you've always been there with engineering,
but now there's so much more formal relationships,
and that should ease things up, is that correct?
>> Sanjay: Yes, so I think the difference in the past,
John, was it was pretty much up to the customer
to manage the entire transition,
whether it was around provisioning,
whether it was around administration,
whether it was around patching,
whether it was around upgrades.
All of that stuff was pretty much entirely done
in the domain of the customer,
and the customer was responsible for doing that themselves.
With this offering, what SAP is doing is SAP is telling
the customers, we are going to stand up these environments
for you in AWS, and we are going to manage it
end to end for you, and that includes the entire suite
of managed services that goes around managing
a HANA-based system, and obviously SAP as the native vendor
of these products, have a very specific point of view
on what constitutes or what makes
a best-run HANA application.
>> And just to close the loop on that,
what you just said is what you call
managed public cloud model.
>> Sanjay: Correct.
>> That's the offering.
Okay, great, well thanks for clarifying that.
I wanted to make sure I got that on the record.
I think that's kind of what...
I thought you said it the best.
I'll just plagiarize what you just said
and put that in my writeup on that.
I'll source you on that, of course.
>> Sanjay: Perfect.
>> Final question. What's the vibe of the show?
Every year I come out of Sapphire.
This is our first year we haven't been there
in seven years.
Usually a theme pops up.
You mentioned convergence.
Is that the top level theme?
And the second part of the question is,
Hasso always a great motivating relevant speech,
but he also kind of connects the dots,
or puts the dots out there to be connected.
He kind of teases next year in his vision.
He always has his point of view,
which a lot of people watch in the industry
as kind of a bellwether for next year.
>> Sanjay: Correct.
>> So what's the theme this year,
and what's the bellwether vibe
that Hasso is telegraphing.
>> Sanjay: I think there are at least a couple of things
that stood out for me, and I think, by the way,
it was one of the most brilliant or most inspiring
keynotes that I heard personally from Hasso.
I think the one thing that stood out for me
is the amount of time or the amount of effort
and the way that we actually build user interfaces.
I think there is absolutely a radically different approach
that I think we need to take.
We need to be spending far far more time
building out those user interfaces
and making it a lot more intuitive
and absolutely Sesame Street simple.
I think that's where we need to focus on, number one.
The other key item that he did touch upon
was the topic of integration.
I think the new reality is the one of multi-cloud solution,
the hybrid reality.
I think for all these things to come together
in a sensible fashion, integration becomes
more and more key.
I think he even quoted something to the extent,
saying almost 40% of our development folks
are now working directly on
some of these integration topics, which is,
I think, a guesstimate due to the scale and the value
that integration is going to play,
especially when he talks about both SAP
and non-SAP applications going forward.
So I think these are kind of one or two items
that stood out for me, and of course,
the big announcement, specifically around SAP Leonardo
and the tool set.
Obviously the story around the Big Data and analytics.
I think these were the key stand-outs, especially for me,
as far as the keynote.
>> Sanjay, thank you for spending the time this morning
here on the West Coast but also early morning
for you guys, or late morning for you guys in Orlando.
Thanks for sharing the insight from on the ground
in Orlando at SAP, Sapphire Now.
Sanjay Kulkarni who is the global head of architecture
and advisory for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.
Congratulations on the Amazon announcement.
That adds to your portfolio of Cloud,
and congratulations on the CenturyLink-Cisco alliance
as well, we covered that as well.
Thanks so much for spending the time.
This is TheCUBE coverage of Sapphire Now,
day three, from Palo Alto and Orlando.
We'll be back with more coverage after this short break.
Stay with us.
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