“Digital transformation” is a term on everyone’s minds in Silicon Valley lately. We are all at some phase or another in this transformation. But what if you are a startup? Do you need to “transform” in the same way a legacy company does? What does the transformation mean for companies starting at different points?

Prakash Darji, SVP and GM of Platform as a Service at SAP SE, told John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, that “digital transformation” is an overloaded term. He then attempted to divide it into two main areas.

“There are companies that are building modern applications, right. Uber’s always the overused example of just building something that makes an experience easy. And all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes you don’t have to worry about,” said Darji. This is the category into which cloud-native applications tend to fall. “It’s a characteristic of what I would call a modern application,” he said.

Legacy metamorphosis

He said the term “transformation” applies more aptly to older companies that want to enter the digital age without scrapping everything they’ve built over the years.

“What we’re doing with Hana Cloud Platform is we said, ‘How do we allow people to leverage the assets that they already have — whether it be back-office assets or application assets — and modernize them?'”

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