For the past five years or so, enterprise customers have been looking to go beyond legacy software solutions from SAP SE, but that has been a challenge for SAP the company, according to John Furrier (@furrier) (pictured), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio.

While SAP has always had great messaging and never wavered from its mission of powering the speed of business with great software solutions, it was missing a step — that of aligning with cloud-native platforms, Furrier stated. It needed to cater to a new class of developer, different from the in-house SAP people, and the company also needed to embrace machine learning and artificial intelligence.

“These old incumbents like SAP, they have to transform their culture, get relevant, and get real,” Furrier said. He believes SAP is now on the right path, with the recent announcements of two new cloud environments, a partnership with Google Cloud and the expansion of the SAP Leonardo Innovation Portfolio.

Furrier and co-host Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick) broadcast live from SiliconANGLE’s Palo Alto, California, studio during the SAP Sapphire Now event, which is being held in Orlando, Florida, this week, to discuss the messages delivered in the day 1 keynote and SAP’s multi-cloud strategy going forward. (* Disclosure below.)

Customer choice in the cloud

One of the biggest stories coming from the event’s day 1 keynote was the announcement of the SAP Cloud Platform, providing an environment for developers, and the SAP Hana Enterprise Cloud, providing a delivery mechanism for organizations. Furrier said that this is SAP’s new bet, bringing together two worlds: cloud-native with the SAP ecosystem.

Additionally, SAP wants to put its platform as a service in different major clouds — AWS, Azure, and now Google — so that its legacy is on-prem and in whichever cloud the customer changes, Furrier and Frick explained.

The new agreement with SAP co-locating in Google Cloud allows customers to take advantage of Google capabilities, such as Tensor Flow for machine learning.

“At the end of the day, it’s about choice,” Frick observed.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE