 First up we have Mark Thienpont who's a lead expert on BI and HANA and he's representing Delaware Consulting, the company he's worked for and he's gonna come up and talk about transformation and what that means for your applications. Come on up Mark. Changing the format up, we're gonna sit down. Well thank you for joining us here in Basil. Thrilled to be here. Excited to have Delaware here. You've got a lot of things planned. We heard a little bit from Mark earlier on SAP and all the work that SAP is doing to transform both their organization but their partners. What does that mean for a company like Delaware? Maybe walk us through a little bit about what Delaware Consulting does. Delaware has is the mission over the last 15 years actually to implement vendor software like from SAP and from Microsoft at customers. So we are an integration partner for a lot of that one. So if you see that SAP is now moving towards Cloud Foundry, naturally we will follow that that kind of thing with the products that SAP is delivering. So that means a lot to us to be much more open sourced as a kind so that we can also use all those challenging new languages and challenging new databases around that we were not able to do before. So I'm happy to see that in the last one year that I worked with SAP products actually that they moved from well open source we don't want to have it to open source that's going to be our standards so that's that's quite cool to see. So that must be exciting for your customers as well as your engagement involvement in the open source communities. Well what we see coming is the last year specifically we see a lot of requests for innovation actually. So customers come to us can say help us out for certain cases and we have a two-fold. Customers that actually already have ideas what they want to do. Last week we had a customer still running on a mainframe for Christ's sake and they wanted to do something with blockchain so help us out. Mainframe to blockchain that's a great thing. That's a transformation. So we have those kind of customers who have ideas and we have a bunch of customers who don't have ideas and we help them out also like where do you start your transformation what is possible etc etc and well the open open cloud platform will give us a lot of possibilities over there. Well walk us through the process then if I am on a mainframe today and I want to start using cloud native technologies or blockchain what does that process look like and how does Delaware consulting help them get there. Well we have we have a three-fold of possibilities there what we do today is actually bring our customers together we have 450 active customers we selected some of them that wanted to join a community this year and we call it the Dell 20 Delaware 20 innovation customers and we bring them together every month to sit together to talk about their their problems what they want to innovate in their business process and actually they select them for themselves the three best scenarios that we actually work out for them. So that's one scenario that we could use. We actually last week also installed a new service that's called innovation as a service so then we work with the customer itself and try to think about how do you redesign actually your business model. So just starting from an ideation kind of concept working it through like okay this is the prioritization we work about and we easily build pox and mock-ups and stuff like that. That's a very interesting way to go through just think about if you have guys still having a mainframe you know you can imagine that those kind of people still are kind of old-fashioned in the kind of way how do we make the ideation happen and you just want to sit together with the decision-takers and try to do design thinking you know you drag along a lot of paper and the postage kind of thing and you start breaking it up the concrete walls need to drop off. Most of the time that's working quite well there's a very interesting kind of conversation that you have there after a few days you come up with very new things just think outside the box let's say and if it doesn't work we even have an actor on our payroll who can loosen up things a little bit so we even go that far. We should have brought one today. I'm excited about things. And last of all we are thinking about a mobile kind of truck that we have everything installed just to give ideas what is possible so that you have a wall with touch screens that you can work with internet of things that is being installed etc etc so that in a five-day period we could actually build a mock-up based on their ideas so that's a little bit the way that we are working today. That's great so you're taking them from I you know I want an idea to an idea quickly. Yeah that's going pretty fast. Now one of the experiments that we did and I was quite quite happy that I saw on the blackboard here the idea of well you need to have a landscape you need to have the technology but you also have to change the culture and your business model. We wanted it and the diversity of the people involved. We wanted to do an experiment with just put a data scientist and a technical guy knowing the business a lot so a business consultant data scientist and a millennial in one office just for a day and a half and give them the assignment you build something completely out of the blue doesn't matter which language you use they use JavaScript so that was cool and they come up with a very bright idea so just saying like if you see that the development that the data scientist was doing while they were discussing you know the interaction between you see things moving on a screen versus I have a new business model idea is quite great so that's actually the way we are going you're building while we are making the ideation. The combination of Cloud Foundry as a platform with all the new possibilities and all the new tools that as a piece delivering out of the box which is very easy to customize and wrap it up you know the self-service kind of part and I yeah I want want to thank them also for some data help that they just launched a couple of weeks ago this is something that's quite amazing it's very rapidly that you can deliver something that they say yeah that's a quite thing to work from there actually. Well as we think about you know once you have the idea and you start thinking about the ideation past that but I think what's also important you pointed out is really taking an idea and put it into making it a reality and put it in put it in it out there as we think about applications and cloud native application architectures what is the role that you see both your company but where do you see that go and in the impact that has on an organization? For us it will be mostly we will follow what SAP is doing and we are not really software vendors and ourselves but I see that changing right now we are really working with customer cases the payer for the time that we spent and then that's their property but I think that will change over time I think we will make it more broad bring customers together have the same ideas and maybe propose something that we can sell to a broader community so for us that that might have a severe impact altogether. For the cloud kind of part for innovation that we did the last couple of years it was most of the time that we proposed we go to sub-cloud platform or to Microsoft we always have also the Azure kind of thing alongside for customers that want to go that way there are still a few that just say no okay we were alongside that one but most of the customers are really pleased to have the cloud as a solution for that one and we actually also mingled them we just mingle sub-customers with Microsoft and even have a hybrid kind of solution for that. Looks like cloud is here to stay. Yeah definitely. It's a thing. A good thing. As we wrap up where do you see the next 12 months taking you with you know cloud platform now being out there and you know your portfolio evolving where do you see the next 12 months going? I will think about the new products that SAP is now delivering on cloud platform I think there will be a huge roadmap and demo kind of thing and with that innovation truck rolling over I think that will be my main activity for the next 12 months just make demos make mock-ups and just start kicking off the innovation kind of part. There's a lot of thing in IoT because just onboarding the digital twin is the first step you have to do but think what you can do afterwards with machine learning combining the system of records and visual integration and stuff like that. I think that will be about it for the next 12 months actually. This will give a lot of plan for this year. Great isn't it? Well thank you so much for joining us Mark here on stage in Basel. We appreciate you coming by. Thanks for having me. Thank you.