SUSECON 2019 Wednesday Keynote Thomas Di Giacomo and Dan Lahl from SAP

And with that, I'd like to invite a critical partner who shares this vision. Please join me in welcoming Vice President of Product Marketing for SAP, Dan Lahl.

Good morning, Dr. T. How are you?

Okay, and normally I say SUSE, you know, we're SUSE-ing off, but we have, maybe it's SUSE. You're forgiven. Oh, there you go. Okay, so you're not only coming with that, you're also coming with a couple of videos showing some of the recent customer stories and great things that you've done, right?

T-Systems is fully committed to deliver tangible business value to our customers, and for sure they can benefit from our experience. We are one of the largest SAP hosting providers worldwide and we support 7 million users as well as more than 800 terabyte HANA databases. More than 4,000 experts worldwide ensure that we can deliver innovative SAP end-to-end services and solutions in time, in quality, to over 600 customers worldwide. T-Systems is supporting our customers during their journey into the digital transformation. Together with a partnership where we also make use of the SUSE frameworks like SUSE Cloud Application Platform to ensure similar reliability in these frameworks as we know it from our traditional services. We run today, based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, the largest HANA systems globally, up to 36 terabytes for one single database system, with the reliability just as the traditional databases we know 20 years ago. And this is really something what makes us proud. T-Systems is committed to deliver quality services based on our SAP outreach methodology. In that regard, we highly appreciate the long-term partnership that we have with SUSE for years, because they allow us to deliver in time, in quality, services seamlessly integrated to our customers. We support this by giving our customers a cloud foundation where they can deploy their applications according to their needs. Closely connected to the services of T-Systems, we are one, with no latency and high reliability. T-Systems, SUSE is our kind of partner.

At Symmetry, our focus is on SAP technology. Whether that's from a consulting standpoint or from a cloud hosting perspective, we rely on SUSE and HPE to provide us with performance, stability, scalability, and reliability. Symmetry's customers tend to come to us when they're looking for experts in the SAP technical space. They're looking for a service provider and a cloud provider that can offer them the technical expertise, the ability to care and feed their most mission-critical systems, and they're looking for a stable, high-touch cloud hosting environment that is purpose-built for SAP workloads. That is our focus. It has been, and it will be into the future. As an example of one of our more successful implementations and migrations to our cloud, we worked with New England Biolabs. We have a long-standing relationship with New England Biolabs, providing SAP technical managed services. And when it came time for them to find a cloud hosting provider, it was a natural fit. HPE and SUSE gave us the capability to give them the high-compute platform that they were looking for, something that they could run their mission-critical business on. The deployment was very successful. A subsequent S/4HANA upgrade was also a highly successful project that again was facilitated, due in large part, to the scalable platform that we deployed them. We knew exactly how to care for and feed these mission-critical systems in these SAP landscapes. We had the expertise to build and deploy our own proprietary cloud hosting environment. With the help of HPE, we moved into that space primarily to give our customers a better hosting experience, and that early hosting effort grew into what is now our cloud today. Layer SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as our operating system of choice on top of that, and you get a very natural, high-performing platform tailor-made for SAP workloads. At Symmetry, we realized that the cloud dynamic has changed. What cloud was five years ago isn't what it is today. What it is today isn't what it will be three years from where we stand. HPE and SUSE positioned us to grow into that space and into the demands of our customers. We feel confident that we've chosen the right technology partners to position us for the future.

So Thomas, those are just great examples of SUSE and SAP working together with our partners to help customers move to the cloud with our applications. And you guys are a key component of that. I'll also add that I'm happy that Symmetry wasn't talking about Theranos — they were talking about Biolabs. So that's a good thing. Nobody gets that one, okay? Because they haven't seen The Inventor on HBO or watched that movie. It's amazing. So yeah, great examples. Can you tell me and tell us a bit more about what's the general philosophy of SAP to help customers achieve their transformation and grow their business? How do you approach that today compared to maybe...

And we discussed that Saturday night, and you mentioned something that was quite fascinating to me, is that it's not about providing just a solution, but you go to the customers who gets innovation or co-creation type of labs. How does that work?

Now that's the transformation that makes sense for that...

Yeah, well, a couple of years ago, if you said My Kind of Open, SAP would be My Kind of Closed. We were a walled garden, okay, and not invented here. But we have really done a 180. And as you know, Thomas, you serve on the board of Cloud Foundry Foundation with SAP. We actually helped put the Cloud Foundry Foundation together with Pivotal and other companies, and we're actually the second-largest contributor to the Cloud Foundry Foundation. We just don't consume the Cloud Foundry technology that gives us multi-cloud — we're the second-largest contributor. And we worked with you and with IBM on what you talked about earlier — the containerization of Cloud Foundry, giving that developer experience inside a container deployed anywhere. That's real. Awesome. IBM doing the work of pulling out BOSH and replacing Kubernetes as the orchestration engine. Our component in that was to build the Service Broker API so you can have services talk to clouds within clouds, between clouds. So you have the services talking together. So a great project.

Oh yeah. So we have this really cool project called Gardener. What we found as we were implementing our services and delivering them to our customers in Kubernetes is that, yes, Kubernetes is awesome, but it's tough to scale clusters. And so we put together this open-source project called Gardener that allows you to scale up to thousands of Kubernetes clusters. And we have some technologies and some HA and disaster recovery capabilities built into the product. And we have put that forward to CNCF, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, as a project. Yeah, and so that's pretty exciting. And I have a lot of examples of open-source projects that you're doing, from contributing to CNCF, which itself is key.

Okay, so, I think if we get down halfway through the bottle, we can get on the phone with Hasso Plattner and see if he's open to that. I go back to Germany and...

Yeah, so I think it's kind of the following — that theme of doing digital transformation a project at a time on what's most important to you. So I'll give you two examples. One is the San Francisco 49ers. They just built a new stadium a couple of years ago and they wanted to be the best venue for sporting events in the world. So what they did is they put together an integrated system that tracks real-time information coming in from a bunch of different touchpoints for people utilizing the park — whether that be parking systems, admission systems, concession systems, souvenir systems, gating systems. They're tracking in real-time what's happening around Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara and they're making real-time decisions: do we need to direct people to a different gate, do we need to put more people on a gate that's getting crowded, do we need to push parking in a different way? They can make real-time decisions in the context of what they're doing during game day, in real time. And they only have 10 opportunities to do this — that's the number of games the 49ers play. They have to get it right, so it's massive. And again, that was a design thinking process that we went through with the 49ers to do that. The second example is Bumblebee Seafood. So if you're a Bumblebee tuna fan, they're going to be putting on every can of tuna a QR code that you can scan, and it will tell you exactly where that tuna was caught, what village, what are the sustainable things they're doing to track that. And you can track using blockchain technology — on tuna, believe it or not — blockchain technology to track from the line to the table and give you a seamless experience so you know that you're buying a fair trade product.

Well, not Bumblebee, I hope. I hope it's some other brand. Yeah, but what a great application of technology to be able to track your guaranteed fair-trade tuna all the way through, from the strand right onto a table.

Yeah, we actually took your video crew. Yeah, it's awesome, by the way. And we took your band and we actually came up with a whole new song. We moved them over to Waldorf, and it's not my style of song, but some people will relate to it. But it's a brand new song that we put together. And they didn't allow me in the video because I'm not smart enough. So you'll see that. Let's roll the video. That's from the video, and let's go and drink that together. Great. We'll open that. Thank you.