 I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org, and we're here with Torsten Stefan, who is involved in the mobile applications business with SAP. Welcome. That's great. Thank you very much. Yeah, so talk about your role a little bit. I mean, mobile, we're hearing a lot about mobile. You guys are into mobile, I'm guessing. That's correct. That's the theme that I'm hearing very strongly. And it's coming through loud and clear, so you're in a good place. Not only from the market standpoint, but from SAP's perspective. So talk about your role and we'll get into it. Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, from an application perspective, SAP, we want to provide to all customers really best of class mobile applications, right? But from a design perspective, it's for us very important to be very user-centric. So that means it needs to be very designed to the user needs, it needs to fit to the different mobile capabilities or actually application need to be enriched with the device capabilities via location-based services, those kind of things that you can link in the applications into the devices. And you have the great user experience provided to the mobile user. And we talk about a glass of devices and I'm sure you have one of a few of those, I guess. Several, yeah. Dozens. Yeah, that's right. And smartphones compared to the early days of mobility where you had rather very specialized mobile devices. But the world has changed a lot. So we are well on track on that. We have a wonderful underlying mobile platform that supports all the different needs for us from an application perspective. So we can focus on the application development and have quite some application shipped already and we have happy customers using them and we of course are developing more and more. So how long have you been with SAP? With SAP, I would say almost now 15 years. Okay, so plenty to answer this question. So take us back to the point at which SAP realized that companies have this epiphany. We're going to go after X and you come up with this mantra, this vision, and the leader says there's the mountain go climate kind of thing. Take us back to the point at which you had the epiphany on mobile. Yeah, I mean for us it was very clear, I mean many years back with it that way we had dedicated mobile roles, right, where you had the sales reps going out of the service, technicians after sales services, but those were special environments where they were and but for us it was very important on where do the users go and what environment do users work and for us it was very clear a few years back when you have seen the impact of the iPhone and then on the iPad and the other smartphones appearing in the market you could really recognize the world, the consumption of data has changed a lot and that was for us very clear because we want to provide the front end and mobile application to the mobile user so we don't basically want to lose the mobile user, either the user in that sense, the mobile user and for us so it's just a natural next thing to do. So on the apps obviously mobile is hot, we all know that, app store is hot, but Schnappi talks about this business social network as the intelligence and great vision, we buy it and do it 100% by the way, we love it. But talk about the verticals now because in the enterprise certain verticals pop relative to adoption, what are you seeing for verticals now so we heard about the definition of oil and gas, are you seeing trends around certain verticals where the uptake of the mobile apps are off the charts? Yeah, I mean we have some classical verticals in the areas of utilities, oil and gas, manufacturing, so those are the areas where you can benefit a lot from those kind of mobile applications and what we obviously do is we have also our applications built in the way that they work across industries and have certain industry enhancements, also partners can pick up the mobile applications and enhance them to the dedicated industry needs, so we are very flexible, we are putting a lot of effort and view on the ecosystem, so we invite our partners to participate in the show, we offer them certification, we offer them visibility, and so you guys have done a good job, I will say on the ecosystem, you have a nice developing ecosystem around mobile, which is great, and those verticals are pretty obvious, utilities, etc, people are on the mobile, they are on the mobile, but if you want to get more of those Facebook developer-like guys out there building for the other products, what would you share with them with the hot verticals, give some insight into the developers out there, what they should be working on, what would you say to them? Yeah, on the one hand, since you mentioned, let's say developers that are not usually working in the classical SAP space, so on the one hand side, also need to mention that from a platform perspective, so we are opening up the industry standards, that means the development protocols are basically industry standard like open data protocol, so that you as a mobile developer can really understand the language, the kind of how to build mobile applications, we have blocked in addition partnerships on top of the platform, so that you can really easy build mobile applications on top of the SAP systems. For the what kind to focus on, so that is also very clear, wherever you can enrich kind of the natural processes that we do, you talked about social media, so wherever you are focusing on HR applications, wherever you have content you want to share with others, and that is obviously something in general I would tell developers, take something like that we do from a classical business process perspective and offer and try to enrich it with very mobile specific announcements and always bringing the picture like the personalization of the application with the support of the mobile device like where and when, like also the timing at the end, you end up then in the situation in which the mobile user is using the application, and if you can enrich with the skill set of a mobile developer, these kind of prepackage applications that we do, then this is just a classical area where you can bring a lot of value. So just to be clear on following up on John's question, so you are specific strategies to enable application developers to develop mobile apps on the SAP platform. And what kind of timeframe do you expect that adoption to occur? Is that a this year? Is that more of a five-year vision? Yeah, I mean we have this year just recently announced new partnerships like Accenture, PhoneGap, Accelerator, and all of those have already a certain developer in a community out there. So that means those tools are known on how to do mobile apps. Now we bring them in into our platform environment so that they can build a mobile apps on top of SAP. And with that, we see already an increase on the adoption of new developers, so to speak on that. But this is it is something we need to continue to push further. Where's the friction when you talk to customers in terms of their, what are they afraid of in terms of adopting mobile? What's the barrier? Well, the barrier, I mean, it's obviously also the freedom of choice, right? So on the one hand side, you have plenty of mobile devices that you actually need to, from a corporate perspective, you need to look into, are they secure enough? Are they fulfilling my needs? On the other side, the end users are pushing hard to IT already and say, I want to have this device, you know, bring your own device point of view. I want to use my private device in the corporate environment and want to have some business applications on that, not just mobile email, but more like also employee services, manager services, those kind of things. Yeah, exactly. You want to use it because you don't want to have a second device, right? So those are the kind of, let's say, the flexible areas where they're just asking for guidance. So is it sort of the fear of having to support so many opening Pandora's box, if you will? Or maybe not being able to clearly understand the business case? I would say on the one hand side, it's like, you know, you need to open up your security environment, right? That is always something very critical. You're hesitant doing that. And you are allowing someone from a personally equipped device to connect to your internet. That is always like a security question. And that is definitely something where we provide a great solution for, and they are asking for guidance. On the other side, obviously, also, we give them the chance for very obvious, let's say, rather simple mobile applications to start with, be like in the employee environment, on from a time entry perspective, from an absence management, those kind of things, or travel expense management, very natural things that the end users will also adopt. So I heard you guys had a lot of downloads this week, 800 downloads from the app store this week, around the software. What's your expectation for the application store in the app? Yeah, I think for us, it's important that, you know, we provide the end-to-end story to our customers. And therefore an application store has to be part of the story. And what we provide with our SAP store is also, A, the customer to have a single point to go to, to browse through all the offerings that we are doing, and also to the certified partners that we are offering. So for him, the customer is not getting lost, so to speak, on iTunes or somewhere trying to find, like, which applications would be running on the SAP system. And therefore, the SAP stores was an essential step to really complete the service basically we want to offer to them. Okay. All right, great. Now, final question before we end the segment is, share with the folks something in the future. Five years from now, what's going to be like? What's our world going to be like relative to mobile? I think we arrow forward and try to give a prediction. Yeah, I think it's, it's pretty simple. I would say, you know, you, you have just the mobile device is already your communication hub, but it's the only communication thing that you have, right? From that device, all the whatever kind of friends, business is all coming together. It's like consumer and business in one thing, and it will not take five years. Okay. Mobile everywhere, cloud everywhere, Dave. Torsten Stefan, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to meet you and good luck with everything. I think you guys are picking the right spot and we'll be watching. We've got more guests coming up. We're waiting on a couple of key highlights here. Reggie Jackson is coming, Schnaube is coming, CEO of SAP. Oliver is coming, CIO and a bunch of other guests, so, Oliver Boosman. So great lineup coming up in the afternoon and also the founder of SAP is coming on. So if you're an SAP fan, stay with us and we're going to have some great guests. And again, this independent CUBE would not be possible without the generous support of SAP and EMC. We'll be right back.