 Our next guest is Oliver Boosman, who's the CIO of SAP. Super busy guy, took some time out of his schedule to meet with us and share his best practices. Oliver, nice to meet you. Welcome to theCUBE. Have a seat, relax. We're going to ask some easy questions for you, like how the hell do you run a billion dollar business on a tablet? Okay, come on, you know. Easy questions, hard answer. Yeah, your co-CEO, Jim Schnabe, it was on last night at gray time. We've had Bill McDermott on theCUBE before. And we want to sit down and just have a conversation with you about some of the things. This is not the can see NBC, you know, you don't have to go to your sound bites, but you know, you could tell us, share with us. You saw me at the NBC press here. Yeah, so you're getting wired up, the stick and stuff down your back. Oh, we know what goes on inside. That's so uncomfortable, very uncomfortable shoot. You get three minutes on the air, come on. Here, we want to spend some time with you. So the first question is, obviously SAP is changing, transforming, pushing life cycles on their software down from, you know, a year to six months, maybe faster, changing into the cloud, mobility, a complete re-architecture, transformation, changing the engine out in the plane in mid-air. You have to implement all this stuff. I'm sure the marching orders down. Hey, we eat our own dog food. Can you implement this first? Yeah, I think, you know, I like more drinking my own champagne. It's more tasteful, more enjoyable. And, you know, with both CEOs, you know, we see a huge amount of innovation coming through. And the expectation from both of them is, we have to be our first customer. And so we established this SAP Runs SAP in mapping our IT organization, the key guys with the product organization and see what's on the product roadmap. Can we leverage that together with the business because there has to be a business value also to go there and try to be a ramp up customer, I mean six to eight months before general availability. And we did this last year over 25 times and in certain topics like in memory, we are even alpha. So we were one of the first one using this in memory technology. And so there's definitely an expectation also that we are changing the way how we implement. So we are also going for agile, scrum approaches to go also for smaller duration instead of 12 months. So that's the same expectation that Jim has also for the product. SAP is known in the tech circles. But outside the tech circles, I mean you guys aren't really well known in the consumer side. Obviously you're a big brand, you're bigger than Disney on the market cap basis from what I'm hearing and seeing and you're getting the word out. You're essentially talking about a consumer message, what I'm hearing up there, fast, mobile. It's a consumerization kind of mindset. So as an IT guy who has to implement this, you have to be the first guinea pig and are drinking your own champagne or drinking your own beer if you're from Germany. You know, so how do you do that? Okay, how do you, and one, tell us on the operating side, your costs, are they more operating costs? How are you trimming down your op costs? So this is the challenge of IT, consumerization. Absolutely, I think first of all, as a CEO of a high-tech company, you have to be part of the first mover or even sometimes you have to figure out what's the next move is. And then you have to do it fast. In this case, I already saw, we already saw a beginning of 2010 with the tablet devices and then also other devices coming in our world from the consumer side, you have two choices. You can drive that, drive the implementation, drive the discussion, staying on top, or you do nothing and then the business is bypassing you. There's no question about it because a lot of businesses, our lines of business are so sophisticated that you can buy services, cloud services, or that could easily provide that service. So my recommendation on the consumer side, get ready and think about, from a mobile strategy point of view, how can I enable consumer devices in the corporate world? And we did this, the iPad to help us, we're ready with the European launch in May, end of May. And then we moved also into, with the acquisition of Cybiz into device management tools to have an end-to-end operation and then also be device agnostic. That's another message also for my folks out there is there will be no, not only one device, there will be multiple devices, the change of new devices or new devices coming up will even increase. So thinking about how can I enable those consumer devices in a rapid way, but still secure and professional. Yeah, hold on Dave, one more question. So IT has a scorecard, used to be how many PCs are connected to the desktop, what applications are running. Now with the mobile message, mobile's the new desktop, as Bill McDermott said, mobility of the iPad and the iPhone are great benchmarks for IT because if it can run on an iPhone, if it can run on a tablet, then it's really working. But that's hard to do, right? You're going to need virtualization, you need to have good transport, really good low-latency apps at the edge, basically serving up at the edge. So how do you get there? You guys are showing that message here. How do you make the iPad, the iPhone, and Android devices sing like that well technically? Because that's ultimately like the eye candy. I think, again, the first step is, those are consumer devices, you have to manage them end-to-end. And with the Apple device, Android, there is no device management there. So security, asset management, managing this end-to-end is absolutely because in the moment you put customer data out there and somebody lose the device, you have a reputation risk. That's number one. Number two is the number one use case for tablet devices right now is mobile business intelligence. Because the devices are super for easy access to data, consumption of data, making fast decision. So we put our critical dashboards on the tablet like the whole sales pipeline management, opportunity management, financial, et cetera, so that decision makers have access to this information. So here is another extension of the story. I think that's a home run. I personally, just from my editorial perspective, that is the angle. That is the core issue right now is how do you use the device for business advantage? People want to know a little bit more detail on how you do that. You've got these legacy applications. They don't just run on the iPad. You're using new tools, new platforms, new frameworks. I can easily, the quick win for that because in our environment, we have all our dashboards on business objects, tools, et cetera. With the business explorer on the iPad and also on other devices, you can transform those reports in few days and put them on the iPad. That's the quick win because then you have access to business critical information here. So the next level is, and we moved our CRM system with three terabyte of data, 650,000 opportunities into an in-memory appliance. Nowadays, no restriction anymore. From a data perspective, you have access to that and analyze here real-time where is my business and if you see immediately updates if there's a business close in North America and Asia and use this information to drive your resource allocation decision making. So the whole sales management is on that platform and drive that business because they have full visibility consistent and have online access everywhere there. Do you have the equivalent of an app store or are your customers asking for an app store? Yeah, there are two choices. Number one choices is with the Cybers Afarrier, you have an app store, how to push and pull apps into devices. That's important because a lot of customers are restricting access to iTunes, that's the mobile. The second is you heard today the app store announcement and the business by design. This will be also the app store going forward for mobile apps. So the app store for other software products of SAP going forward. So when I think of the app store, of course you think of Apple and you think of application suppliers like Zynga. Okay, so in this equation, and I wonder what you would advise Shinahabe and McDermott as a CIO, is SAP or should SAP be the Apple platform? Should it be the Zynga application or both? I think both, I think from my perspective, I think there's a huge potential to be the iTunes in the enterprise business. And across the different, but even broader, because you have different categories of application, different delivery models. So from that perspective, I think there's a huge opportunity there. And in talking to my peers and looking at that, we need more and more also, not only access to those applications, we need also an internal app store for the employees to pick and choose. And that's something I think is a great opportunity. Oliver, what is the most amazing thing that you've done last year? The amazing thing? The most amazing thing you've done in terms of the IT, because you're drinking your own beer, you're making beer or champagne, you're playing with a lot of technology and you've got a lot of challenges. I mean, you have to essentially manage the air plane is flying and you're changing the engine. You have guinea pig for all the technology and you have to report back to the business units. You're a key player in the engine. I think that's an important learning also for me is you can be a functional CAO, running your business, infrastructure application, managers, vendors, service levels. You can also help to transform the business. But the worst case is you work seven days, 24 hours in the black box and nobody realized the value. I think the new type of CAO has to be thinking about how can I enable the business to be part of the business? So be part of the go-to market model of SAP to help them drive innovation to be feedback and also share experiences and utilizing social media to intact with different people. Because if you follow me on Twitter with SAP CAO of over 1,000 people following me, I have a blog. SAP CIO is your Twitter handle. SAP CIO is my Twitter account. What's your personal Twitter handle? I'm private. That's it, right? That's it, SAP CIO and there's also a blog, SAP.com slash CIO and that's a different way of communication because there is no border to access to talk to me, you know, customers, employees. And yesterday we reached over 120,000 people yesterday on our broadcast and this is a new channel. And that's the way to communicate. Right, McDermot was talking about reaching 100,000. We said we're going to reach 100,000. So he doubled that number. Absolutely. The other mention he validated social media. He blocks also this 100,000 with folks out of Europe and I believe, and by the way, with the tablet, I think my communication behavior as an executive has changed because it's easy. You know, you have to understand what are the market trends. You have to, especially in the high tech and you know, with the apps out there that you can scan 50, 60 RSS feed and scan every night what's going on there. Plus you follow certain thought leader on Twitter what they are sharing about SAP. You can share, comment and be active out there. So I wouldn't do this with my laptop because the integration of social media here is much easier and I have only two clicks out there so it's part of my daily routine. It's a new connected distributed network. Absolutely, it's totally a network and the core message that Schnabe was talking about was the collaboration and that's changing the face of IT. So I mean, there's a people equation in all this, right? I mean, you have a people equation both on the extraction of knowledge from the marketplace but internal to IT, there's been kind of a 10 year, I don't say cloud around IT, there's just haven't been much innovation and if you've been working in IT for the past 10 years it's been like do more with less and also now we've got this renaissance of innovation and people are excited, they're excited about big data, they're excited about what we call fast data, they're excited about mobility, they find apps and frameworks and so there's a huge sea change of mindset. And it's changing the role of the CIO, isn't it? Absolutely, and I think- Share with us your views on that. My first of view is I think you have to be part of that. You have to be in the driver's seat and bravely thinking about few people in your team that can work on those topics to enable them to play, to utilize it and come back, is it working or not, and then go for it. That's important. On the other side, still I have to manage my financials, my competitive unit costs, et cetera. That's a given. So running your IT as a business with a business plan, understanding your financial unit costs and at the same time be on top of innovation and be out there and be a strong communicator. I think that's the question. I mean the whole experimental thing is a great message but the reality is, I mean that's good if you're like a public cloud and you're doing DevOps but if you're running a business and you guys are powering businesses, you can't just say, hey, let's just start playing with some of these buttons over here and roll it out. I mean, you got security issues. How do you handle that? And I think one important message also, you can have these analytics and mobile. If you don't have a clean system of records, if you don't have the engine, and Jim was absolutely right this morning saying, you see more garbage faster. Then before because this will, the new technology will allow that. So foundation, if we would not have the single centralized ERP system, CRM, HR, corporate business warehouse, I would have a chance today to put all the data in a consistent way out there. So that's something that you can be thinking about those kind of super innovation, but if the foundation is not there from the data, from the way how you handle your system of records, it will be very difficult. So it used to be, John, that CIO stood for the old joke, career is over. We're talking about the new role of the CIO, it's very dynamic position. Do you think, and I know it's not a yes or no question but I'm going to ask it as a yes or no question, do you think the CIO should report directly to the CEO? I think so, I think especially today with now the innovation coming back. And if you see that innovation can really change business models, how you operate, you know, you get more mobile, you can, with the big data, the capabilities, you can also be faster to make decision, predictive analysis, I think for CIO understand that. And that's important, understand the power of innovation and IT. And then I think reporting on to the CEO can be very, can be a win-win situation. Do you report to two guys, is that? I'm reporting to the CEO of SAP. And he runs also the whole SAP support organization, which is very helpful for me because he can help me also if there are any challenges to get activated, access to be very good expert to get it solved. I think that's the... By the way, I think it's the right model too, and I think most CIOs don't report to the CEO. And then I was reading recently that Sony, John, they didn't even have a CISO, right? And now, of course, they've got to, so that's another critical component. Yeah, I think the overall challenge I think is, and this is the reason why I said you have to be out there, you have to be in the driver's seat there. The worst case is that the position of the CEO is downgraded to a lower level. Not even reporting any more to the CEO, to the C-level more to a business head or, because if the, at the end, becoming only an execution function instead of a strategic function. So that's the risk that I see if... That's a big risk. There has to be a strategic, because IT is going to enable some powerful changes. You saw some of the analytics that you guys are providing. Real-time scenario planning, as Bill McDermott was pointing out on stage, that's a strategic function. You can't go to the well for that in six months and have an answer. That's your data warehouse model. I can tell you, you know, without that we start our infrastructure of the mobility topic in the beginning of last year and the experience that we gained, the credibility that we got in having these experiences helped also our business to understand. And that's something, at the end, it's a win-win situation. My final question, Dave, because we have to break and go do a remote and the floor is, obviously big data is a big part of the story. Bill McDermott actually said the word big data, but there's no real big data announcement. We don't hear about Hadoop or anything else. It seems that inherently, you guys are doing big data from before big data was big data. I mean, you're handling large amounts of customer data, moving it to the edge via the mobility and in memory with the side-based acquisition. So you got this big data. Mindset and platform. How has it changed the customer service side of the business or the services we call the services angle? Because now you have the ability to create IT infrastructure that can service the edge very rapidly. Has that changed any of the value chains and the business practices of SAP? And how do customers out there, your peers or CIOs out there, how should they think about those downstream edge points? Specifically customer service and these other services? Definitely. If I see that this kind of technology is available, and again, I want to stress it's a combination of what's going on the hardware side, the multi-course and the parallel processing and the rum and the pricing coming down like crazy, like we saw the last few months, and then also the software too, looking at compression at column store, database, et cetera, the combination, that's the power package. So let me explain what I believe is in the pipeline. If you see that from a customer service perspective, you can predict from a, if you consume a good company, if you see what will be a better forecast for the next few days and you see the potential consumption go up and you can simulate with all the data for entire region or country and activate the supply chain. That's compelling. It's very competitive. That's game-changing, I mean that's game-changing. That's game-changing. That's game-changing and you can do this on the fly or you run on the fly your profitability calculation that would maybe take days to run. That's a strategic, that's another good argument for the strategic nature of IT because what you're talking about is from a savings optimization standpoint is significant from a delivery new customer, dealing with either existing customers and or securing new customers. That's serving people in the trenches. That's like frontline guys delivering business. You've got to be nimble and you've got strategic function there. How could IT be in a silo? And again, I think the key successor will be the orchestration because you have the records of system, you have the ability to process big data and then make them available through mobility. And I think the only company that can really can do this is... Okay, I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE.tv, the worldwide leader in tech event coverage. We're inside theCUBE with Oliver Boosman, the CIO of SAP, sharing his knowledge. He's a smart node. He's a tech athlete, as we call it. Call it, welcome. I mean, thank you for coming to theCUBE. Appreciate it. Dave, I got to run.