With the volatile tech market, finding any way to add stability to an enterprise’s operations can be a major boost to revenue and operational efficiency, so when a full platform for doing so emerges, companies are quick to take notice.

Marc Geall, SVP and GM of HANA Cloud Platform Partner Innovation at SAP SE, met with John Furrier and Peter BurrisJohn Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to discuss the HANA cloud platform, SAP’s other utilities and the customer engagement process.

More than agile

Geall described the key dynamic for SAP’s ecosystem as “timing,” particularly with the current growth in focus on agility, multi-lane development and the acceleration of development cycles. “We have that agility layer,” he said. “We have that ability to enable customers and partners to innovate very, very quickly and deliver incremental value to their customers.”

Also examined as a contributing factor to the success was SAP’s flexibility and non-monolithic organizational structure. As Geall put it, “I think we have three business models. We have a platform business model, we have an application business model, and we have a network business model.” By employing each of these appropriately, SAP has been able to break further into areas where a singular approach would have left them struggling.

Partners in platforming

Geall also discussed how partnering with other companies had yielded benefits to each side, and driven those partnerships further. “If we are ostensibly an applications business, then we want the platform to have partners build into whitespace where we don’t have the skills or the expertise or the resource to do it,” he said. “Platform is really a way of augmenting our own capabilities and taking advantage of the innovation in the ecosystem.”

Looking toward SAP’s overall aims in the market right now, Geall tied them to the massive move toward digitization being embraced by so many enterprises. “The goal is to say, ‘Look, this digital transformation is happening. A lot of that means you need to extend use-cases, you need to rethink and redesign use-cases, you want to do that from where all the data is.’”

Geall added, “What we do is provide insights to partners so they build the right app in the right way.”

Harnessing disruption

“I think the fundamental disruptor that we’re seeing is this digital transformation,” Geall said. “I think there’s disruption everywhere. I think historically it was very difficult to leverage a platform or technology to support that; in many ways, it hindered.”

That difficulty is being broken down, though, as companies come to terms with this continued state of affairs. “I think what’s interesting is that partners understand that they’re going through their own transformation,” he concluded.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of SAP Sapphire 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE