Two tech giants; one partnership; 20 months in the making. The deal with Apple was one of the biggest announcements in SAP SE’s history, and it’s rapidly generating hype.

Akash Agarwal, GVP of Enterprise Mobile at SAP’s Mobile Business Unit, said, “Bill McDermott [CEO of SAP] quoted on Monday, we got something in the order of 4 billion press hits” in 32 hours following the announcement.

Peter Burris (@plburris), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, got right down to business with Agarwal and asked what we can expect to see from the partnership in the coming months. If Agarwal’s repeated use of words like “beautiful” and “magical” are any indication, perhaps it will live up to the hype.

Next-gen enterprise

Agarwal said there are 2.5 million developers on the HANA platform, and, “Immediately, all those developers will have access to this SDK from which they can build out beautiful iOS experiences.”

And then there’s the other side of the coin. “There are 11 million Apple developers out there that have been primarily focused on building consumer applications,” Agarwal said. “And now they will have the opportunity to build applications in and around the SAP ecosystem.”

The synthesis is all about bringing what we’ve come to expect from Apple to industries — like retail, asset maintenance, service and healthcare.

Despite some experimenting here and there, Agarwal stated, “We haven’t seen the total consumerization of enterprise.” Together with Apple, SAP will now try to get us there.

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