 giving to them at no charge whatsoever and we think that by itself can be extremely valuable. Just being associated with a company like ours having SAP on their banner, we believe adds substantial value to it. We would love to for the right kind of startups, the marvel is to explore options where we could actually carry them on SAP paper and have our magnificent 25,000 person field team go out and sell to our customers. We're still a few months away from that happening but that would be a marvelous goal. What do you think is the biggest traction with this program? What's the early returns looking like in terms of that profile, kinds of companies? Well what we found is out of the 10 companies we're working with right now almost all of them are in areas which fall into SAP sweet spot of enterprise software but are very orthogonal use cases. They're very different from anything that we ourselves would be likely to look at but we think adds significant value to our customers. So that for us has been a big learning experience. Beyond that we see that for before the start of their POC stage they've actually built a Pufo concept and they have very big name customers who have already expressed interest in HANA and in their solution just based on this. So at the end of the day our very selfish interest in this is that build cool stuff other companies will want to buy it and when they buy it it will drive HANA sales along with it. Outside of resources what else are you guys getting out of this? Just kind of helping the ecosystem grow? Would you get a free look at the company? Do they give a non-disclosure with the companies? We do have non-disclosures with the company but our goal eventually is it comes down. I mentioned it in a different context earlier it's the whole Betamax VHS story that we've got a great platform but unless we've got content on top of it which in this case are applications we're going to lose out in the platform game. We have to drive the message out there that HANA is a marvelous platform which does very very cool things but we need to have those applications on top and SAP even though we're 60,000 people cannot build all of them we need companies like this. And the startups you're working with are primarily funded startups they've received some kind of they range yeah they range between the seed stage and I'd say series A anything past that we feel that they get too big to really engage in this program anything less than that and we don't we don't think we're ready for that yet. There's been discussions around this go-to market exactly there is there is a program called the lighthouse program which is run out of the ecosystems group so this program is actually run out of Vishal's organization which is technology and innovation platforms so it's very much an innovation focused program these cells have always been very geeky on the cutting edge of things. Can we do that in a good way? Oh no no no I'm completely with you. So essentially what this is is kind of a peer community that you guys are putting together so to track the alpha entrepreneur so you can learn too. Absolutely we were actually in a meeting we were very fortunate to get a one-hour meeting with Hasso and Vishal last night and it was great because we came in and Hasso's admin told us he's really really tired he'll probably give you five minutes and then leave and you know Hasso himself is also very very technical he came in he started talking to these guys he ended up staying past his original time for an hour and a half and they they just were completely enthralled with the whole idea of what these startups are doing there's a specific comment that Hasso made when leaving the meeting which I thought is captured the whole idea he turned to Vishal and said Vishal what these guys are doing are three years ahead of what our customers would want to do so if we have to get a strategic competitive advantage we need to engage with them so that our product is three years ahead of what our customers want. Can you tell us which company well there are lots of companies who we love to compete with. So how do you you talk about the lighthouse program how do you hand off going from the the startup focus program to the lighthouse program. We don't actually hand off their two parallel programs aimed at two different demographics. Well I mean this is new so you're really not right this is brand new. Yeah I mean our goal is at the end of it what's your vision there because you said once they get to a certain size then they're sort of not candidates or is that different will you cultivate them through. Exactly our goal is to take them our our goal is to take them from from the very inception where they express interest in HANA to the point where they actually have a commercial product on HANA. Yeah okay how they grow the the company and organization beyond that is of course up to them. The lighthouse program is designed it's a great program is designed more for the larger system integrators and ISVs okay with more immediate near-term revenue potential. So there's no handoff you captured the flag when they hit achieve a certain mass and are out going to market and selling and working with you guys in the field. Exactly. And you're basically done and you're onto the you know. Exactly. Another startup okay good. All right listen we're getting the sign we've got to we've got to break a cost of thank you very much. Thank you David. I'm glad we could make this happen. Thank you very much okay startup program excellent idea obviously ecosystem is a theme Dave within SAP and we're bringing all the action to you from Orlando this is the Cube. We'll be right back with our next guest after this break.