Where a software application physically runs is becoming less important in the public cloud era, stealing the crown from on-premise infrastructure. As information technology infrastructure becomes a nameless commodity, the real money is moving to software services, according to Dan Lahl (pictured), vice president of product marketing at SAP SE.

“Our view is, we’re going to be a software company. We’re not going to play at the hardware layer,” Lahl said.

Lahl spoke to John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile live-streaming studio, at SiliconANGLE’s Palo Alto, California, studio. They talked about SAP’s business strategy, the infrastructure market, managing cloud workloads and SAP’s online marketplace, as well as news from this week’s SAP Sapphire Now conference in Orlando, Florida. (* Disclosure below.)

Services, integration, data

Plans are in the works to run the SAP cloud platform not just in SAP data centers, but over AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform data centers. The goal is to live above the fray of the infrastructure wars. The old way to buy infrastructure is dead, Lahl stated. For SAP, the best move was to let the customer choose their hyperscale vendor, then give the customer great software business services above those layers.

Meanwhile, hybrid cloud will be an ongoing concern thanks to legacy systems. The strategy there is to provide integration services. If a company wants to connect an in-cloud business process to an on-premise system, SAP will do that, Lahl explained.

To help, the company is exposing more APIs and adding APIs for specific business functions. “Integration is huge, and we’ve been in data services, as well, so if you want to move data to the cloud, we’re providing services to do that too,” Lahl said.

Following the software theme, SAP is also extending the value of its SAP App Center. It announced the ability to discover, try, buy and use right off the App Center. Further, they’ll manage the applications for the customer, according to Lahl.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of SAP SAPPHIRENOW. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for SAP SAPPHIRENOW. Neither SAP nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE