They are commonly known today as hyperscalers, massive technology companies such as Google LLC, Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. that have carved out significant market positions in public cloud and related services. And while cloud dominance is a primary goal, the leading hyperscalers have designs for a much larger prize: developing the world’s technology infrastructure for use by billions of people.

Google Cloud’s partnership with SAP AG offers a glimpse into where the hyperscale movement may lead. A flurry of new announcements involving Google and SAP this month included several updates designed to help enterprises run workloads seamlessly on Google Cloud Platform and new tools for developers to build native Android applications for SAP SE services.

Yet, beneath the marketing hype lies a bigger motive, one that could have a significant impact in shaping the technology landscape for years to come. “All of the hyperscalers host SAP systems,” said Paul Young (pictured), director of SAP Go to Market at Google. “We want to do something that’s better than that.”

Young spoke with Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), principal at The CTO Advisor, during the SAP Sapphire Now event in Orlando, Florida. They discussed Young’s perception of the hyperscale world, use cases for Google’s technology in combination with SAP’s platform, the impact of artificial intelligence tools in cloud-based applications, and the potential for more innovation based on increased bandwidth. (* Disclosure below.)

This week theCUBE features Paul Young as its Guest of the Week.

A different view of the tech world

The Google executive is in a position to understand market motivation for both Google and SAP, having served 19 years guiding business strategy at SAP before joining his current employer just a few months ago. Working with the major hyperscalers to streamline cloud adoption for SAP’s customers was a major part of the job.

“When you actually work with [hyperscalers], you discover they are different,” Young said. “They approach the world differently, and they all have different business models.”

An example of how Google is approaching the enterprise cloud services model can be seen in the integration of AI for invoice processing by Deloitte LLP. With SAP on Google Cloud Platform, Deloitte built an automated recognition-based model that could spot anomalies in the paper flow for an accounts payable department.

The groundwork for the project was laid a year ago when Google and SAP announced plans to combine business processing expertise with machine learning services. “We taught the AI system to do data entry in SAP,” Young said. “It learns what an invoice is, it learns how to process that, and then suddenly it can do complete data entry. This is the sort of thing Google does just to test the limits.”

Google is also testing limits in the pharmaceutical industry. At the Sapphire Now event in Orlando, Google Cloud personnel showcased integrated machine learning and AI with visual images from boxes containing pharmaceutical products.

While box-scanning technology has been around for quite a while, this particular demonstration added a new twist. Instead of merely counting the boxes, Google’s technology actually read what was printed on them and evaluated the overall condition.

“It knows from SAP what’s supposed to be manufactured,” Young said. “It also knows what a good box looks like and what a damaged box looks like.”

The process of cloud migration is undergoing a transformation as well. In May, Google announced the acquisition of the Israeli startup Velostrata Inc. The goal behind Velostrata’s technology is to make the migration of virtual machine-based databases and enterprise applications faster and easier.

Tuned for Google Cloud, the migration tool analyzes size capacity needed in cloud, notifies the user of available options, and then generates the shift with a Google user ID and password. “It will build the security, build the application service, and begin a migration for you automatically,” Young said. “Between 30 minutes and two hours later, you will have a running version of your SAP system in the cloud.”

Beefed-up advertising analytics

The coin of the realm in enterprise computing continues to be data — the more the better. Last year, it was announced that the SAP HANA relational database management system could now combine data from Google BigQuery, an analytics-equipped enterprise data warehouse.

The partnership between the two companies opened an opportunity to bridge massive data sets to SAP HANA. This could have implications for future decisions in the world of online advertising.

“I can tell you all the ads you currently run at Google, what’s been watched and what’s been viewed, anonymized in clusters … and directly load it to BigQuery and join it to SAP,” Young explained. “When I add in AI to that, the potential is incredible. We’ve only just started.”

Automated invoice processing … text reading on boxes … massive data set analytics. What’s next for the hyperscaler? The answer may lie in Google’s significant bandwidth capacity.

Although it has not achieved a level of success many anticipated, Google still owns major fiber-optic infrastructure, with “fiber huts” in cities such as Atlanta, Georgia, which can each supply gigabit speeds to upwards of 30,000 homes. Much of this fiber sits “dark” or unused, but it has the capacity to make a major impact on available bandwidth, according to Young.

“We own dark fiber that’s equivalent to about four times the entire capacity of the internet,” Young said. “So my ability to deliver to customers at scale and at performance levels is just unchallenged in this space. Google is just on a different scale from everybody.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the SAP Sapphire Now event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for SAP Sapphire Now. Neither NetApp Inc., which sponsored theCUBE’s coverage of the event, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE