The SAP Industry Cloud organization launched in 2014 to combine the company’s well-established industry strength and authority to develop industry-based cloud roadmaps to help the enterprise gain the speed and agility to simplify and transform business processes.

Pat Bakey, president of Industry Cloud at SAP SE, a first-time visitor on theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, joined cohosts John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris) to explain how the organization will fundamentally change the way SAP does business.

The core of the cloud

“When we talk about digitization, what customers are looking for today, it’s value and speed and agility,” according to Bakey. “So the industry part of the equation is all about value.” His mission is to convey the value of the company’s innovations by providing customers with the confidence to invest in an innovation agenda.

“In yesterday’s business, your strength was in ownership of assets. The strength today is attributed … to these companies’ (ability) to compete on speed, innovation and agility,” maintained Bakey.

Your customer’s customer

One common strategy that every customer in every industry is pursuing, according to Bakey is getting close to the customer. “This is important and may seem rather simplistic, but it’s easy to say and hard to do,” Bakey said.

SAP is guiding its customers to understand what their customers and their customers’ customers are doing. Bakey said that this is causing the blurring of industries as companies begin to cross boundaries based on what they do. “Digital defies gravity, it defies boundaries … and that is why you see this blurring of boundaries in a cross-industry place,” he noted.

Setting the table for digitization

The SAP Industry Cloud organization sits at the table of innovation and growth and generally the whole board and enterprise relies on Bakey’s team to offer deep industry expertise. He feels it is less about assets and more about delivering insight and business model innovation in order to compete.

Acknowledging that the world of digitization and massive innovation cannot come from one source, he asserted, “We need to be the catalyst when it comes to defining what is remarkable about our technology, solve business problems, but then we have to enable a massive ecosystem to innovate.”

Sharing the Apple

When discussing the Apple and SAP partnership, Bakey said, “It’s a step change on how these two great companies believe work will be done in the digital world. We will bring the best of a consumer user experience with the best of a business insight experience together.”

He believes that the iOS mobile platform is severely underutilized in the enterprise and the future roadmap is to enable the SDK ecosystem where the real innovation lies.

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