Sam Ramji’s keynote at the Sapphire Partner Conference

 

This morning Sam Ramji is giving one of the opening keynotes at the Sapphire Partner Conference, an event hosted by SAP and ASUG. Here’s a preview of what he’s going to tell the audience about Cloud Foundry.

1. Cloud Foundry. Can you talk briefly about Cloud Foundry, the company and the open ecosystem? What is its philosophy?
   • Cloud Foundry is a non-profit foundation that supports the open global development of the Cloud Foundry open source software. We believe in a global ecosystem that gains strength through openness. We believe that there should be low barriers to entry, high standards for quality, and an ethical focus on fairness across developers, vendors, and customers.
   • We represent a broad community of companies and developers that includes SAP, VMware, HPE, IBM, GE, Cisco, VMware, EMC and many more; most important to me our responsibility to represent the voice of the customer. Many of our members are enterprises who use Cloud Foundry as their digital platform.
2. With the announcement at SAPPHIRE, SAP is endorsing an open platform ecosystem. What is the value of having an open ecosystem for customers, partners and developers?
   • It’s been proven that open economies grow faster. While we may think of a platform as technical construct, it is more powerful as an economic construct.
   • Openness to new ideas, new applications, and new companies drives a virtuous cycle: as the platform gains more customers, it attracts more developers and vendors; those developers build new things that in turn attract more customers, who are also interested in other goods and services on the platform.
   • This flywheel turns faster and faster, and benefits all players over time. It’s a positive-sum game. The more players, the better everyone does.
   • SAP’s bold decision to pour your effort into this open ecosystem is a boon for every customer, partner, and developer. We’re tremendously excited.
3. How can this audience of SAP Partners take part in and commercialize this opportunity?
   • Hana Cloud Platform is built on Cloud Foundry, and SAP is a strong contributor to the Cloud Foundry codebase and ecosystem. SAP Partners are in the same changing world that we have all built Cloud Foundry for cloud computing that drives business value.
   • I suggest three steps:
     • The first step is to recognize the existence of Cloud Foundry as a multi-cloud, multi-vendor ecosystem. This ecosystem is here to stay.
     • The second step is to define how your current software and services will be adapted to Hana Cloud Platform – and from there, creating new value.
     • The third step is to plan the shifts in your monetization model as your customers move to multi-cloud – you must sell how they want to buy and charge how they want to pay.
4. Can you talk about Cloud from a market opportunity perspective and why is an IP based platform business important for a successful Cloud journey? Where in your opinion are we in the Cloud journey and why are some Cloud ISV re-evaluating their platform choices?
   • We are in the very beginning of Cloud Computing. Let’s talk about a few numbers. The overall IT industry is a $1.7T annual market and still growing. Over the last three years, we have also seen major shifts in technology spending among successful companies – for example, Nike cut their billion-dollar advertising budget by 80% and transferred that money to their digital platform, where they get much better business returns. Going back to IT as a whole and where we are in Cloud Computing: it’s very impressive that Amazon has achieved $10B in revenues. Compare that the $1.7T in annual spending and you can see how much opportunity there is. We’re not even on the one-yard line.
   • That opportunity is NOT going to be evenly distributed. The outsized gains are going to those companies who have their own Intellectual Property: knowledge of how to serve the unique needs of specific industries and regions (Industry 4.0 style offerings); and the ability to scale that knowledge across a global market through a platform.
   • When you’re an ISV choosing a platform, you need to evaluate three things: platform technology capability, platform market reach, and platform revenue. Let’s take those three in turn.
     • First, technology: can you write in any language your developers want? Can you support continuous innovation? Do you have world-class data analytics?
     • Second, market reach: does the platform have thousands of customers already – who you can target through the platform and the platform’s vendor?
     • Third, revenue: are the platform’s customers willing to spend money? is this growing over time? can you jointly market and sell with other platform partners?
   • We’ve seen clearly that enterprises are already embracing multi-cloud. Gartner Research says the average enterprise is using 4.6 clouds already; each cloud has its own strength. What companies like Allstate, GE, JPMC, Kaiser, Ford, Lockheed, and others want a digital platform they can run on multiple clouds – that is why they have chosen Cloud Foundry. Cloud Foundry customers combined with SAP Hana Cloud Platform represent a tremendous opportunity for ISVs.
5. What role does Digital Transformation and Industry Best Practice have in the platform opportunity to drive additional customer value?
   • At the heart of digital transformation lies continuous delivery. You cannot have one without the other. The end-state of digital transformation is a business system that allows the enterprise to be a sense-and response organization: sensing shifts in customer needs and responding in hours or days. Imagine having a wonderful strategy and a beautiful product – that you have to update on an annual cycle? The competition will beat you on raw speed of iteration. The result won’t be digital transformation – it will be bankruptcy.
   • To achieve continuous delivery at the scale of an enterprise requires a platform built for developers and operators to work together.
   • So far, most talk of continuous delivery has focused on bespoke apps, but we are entering an era of packaged apps for cloud computing. Imagine if enterprise software was as beautiful and satisfying as mobile apps: search for what you need, download, and run. Three taps. Tens of thousands of ISVs, each producing apps that are simple AND powerful. Millions of customers. That is the world we are building with Cloud Foundry.
6. You have a breakout later …
   • I’ll be moderating a panel with executives from Egnyte, Conga, Apigee, and Mindtouch where we’ll get into the tough details and lessons learned in building apps and channels for multi-cloud.