 Live from Midtown Manhattan, the Cube's live coverage of Big Data NYC, a Silicon Angle Wikibon production made possible by Hortonworks, we do Hadoop, and when this go, Hadoop made invincible. And now your co-hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back to Big Data NYC. This is the Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. In some cases have our own event, which we're having here, Big Data NYC, covering all the action in New York City around Big Data. Hadoop World, Stratocommerce, all going on behind us right here next to the Hilton. We are in New York City live. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle. I'm joined by Jeff Kelly of Wikibon. Jeff, welcome back. Our special guest here is David Parker, Vice President of SAP. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you. So SAP, getting a lot of buzz. You know, we were talking about open source communities. Obviously TechEd was last week. We did a crowd chat with you guys, or with EMC and SAP, talking about HANA in-memory storage, and all this great stuff happening around HANA, which basically is Big Data, dealing with very, very, very fast way. Some say it's a Ferrari, and the Big Data business may or may debate that, but it's fast. Here in the open source community, your presence really has signaled a lot of validation. Can you talk about the impact this week has had for you guys relative to this Hadoop ecosystem? Yeah, absolutely. Clearly, when we look at our business, we look at a number of different dimensions. First and foremost, we're an applications company. And by virtue of that, we have a wide range and variety of different customers. And their guidance and, in fact, requests and requirements has been around how do they store large, vast quantities of data in a kind of somewhat low-cost, distributed fashion, which naturally gravitates towards HANA Doop cluster. So from our perspective, we build our enterprise-class grade applications. So we have to consider that in the context of only the applications. But the technology that we provide in SAP HANA is the flagship product that we have to start driving some of our real-time applications. So we're kind of asked to look into this by virtue of how do we align SAP HANA into this world of Big Data, which is predominantly now kind of somewhat owned by the term of Hadoop. And for us, it's a case of combining instant results from HANA with infinite storage from Hadoop, which could include unstructured data. It could be emails. It could be web logs. It could be video data, image data. And merge that together with what we'd call enterprise data, which is your CRM, your general ledger, your books and records. Yeah. I mean, we cover you guys. We've been at every Sapphire, past four years with theCUBE. You're one of our early events we've gone through. Always love and press. SAP is business. I mean, when you go to those shows, you know, it's Suits. There's people doing business, a lot of big deals. So you're in the software business. So you're acknowledging by coming to the show here that you're not going to discriminate against data sources, where it comes from and where it's stored. It's the application and the customer's choice. Is that kind of what you're saying? Correct. So again, our ethos on how we go to market is all around customer choice. And it's all about focusing on use cases that make a difference across the verticals and industries that we tend to focus on. And we focus on over 25 different industries. So from that perspective, we are kind of database agnostic and kind of data source agnostic. So if our customers want to use Hadoop or they want to use some NoSQL equivalent of a Cassandra or a MongoDB, we're open to that at the said time. We're not going to be sitting there saying that all data must reside in SAP at some point because that's just not practical. So one of the continuing topics we've been covering over the last several years is the topic of big data applications. And frankly, we just haven't seen a lot of them. There's various reasons for that. In some cases, it's not a trivial thing to build applications on top of Hadoop, HBase, Hive, whatever capabilities you're using there. But obviously, as you mentioned, SAP is an application company. So for application focusing on BI and other types of applications. Talk a little bit about your approach to building big data applications. And how does it fit in both architecturally? Do they sit on top of something like HANA and not directly on top of Hadoop, for instance? So from that perspective and also from just a use case perspective, is it going to focus on verticals and specific business problems? How do you approach that? And that's an interesting topic because again, when we looked at the big data market, it wasn't always just about storage. I actually want to do something with that data. That would be a sensible thing to look at. But when we considered it, again, with our customers and looking at the market, it was a clear indication to us that we had to build out big data specific applications. So when we look at our big data portfolio, it has the technology which is driven by SAP HANA. On top of that, we actually make use of our data science organization. It has been within SAP for a number of years focusing on specific industries. And utilize the skill set and the knowledge that they've gleaned over the years to build out specific applications. And by virtue of us being an apps company, we kind of have the DNA to make that a success. So what you'd have seen probably in the past 24 hours or so, we actually did some press releases about launching two specific new applications in the big data space. The first of which is around fraud management, which goes cross vertical. That's not in the specific industry because fraud happens anywhere, right? And then the second one is around customer intelligence. And with that, you're actually taking buying profiles, sentiment analysis of the customer based upon how they interact in social media, based upon how they interact on your website. So you take web logs, you take Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds. All of that data is traditionally stored in something like a Hadoop. But made it difficult to build an application on top of it because it wasn't so user friendly unless I had a team of developers to help me. So we've embraced that side of the business in terms of allowing customers to store their data there and merge that with the customer relationship management data, the CRM data, the books and records data, the point of sale terminal data, infuse that data set together and allow retailers as an example to get a better insight in customer behavioural analysis and offer promotions, real time offer management to their consumers. So that's where we see the power of big data is putting all those components together as opposed to just the technology. So is the idea to bring that data together inside something like Hadoop and then move the valuable bits into HANA to then kind of productionise those applications? Yeah, well here's the sweet spot in terms of what we have with HANA. We launched as part of our SP7 release which was launched at our TechEd event last week. This concept of smart data access, so data federation, data querying. So a query can go directly into HANA. HANA looks at it by virtue of what we call virtual tables. It understands if data is being stored in any other third party data source including Hadoop, actually sends a query across to Hadoop so we can actually execute and produce jobs on Hadoop, get the result set and then federate that back into HANA. So I only have to worry about creating my application on top of HANA and let the brains and the power of HANA figure out where the other data assets are. So that's all under the cover. So as a user, I don't know. The user doesn't know. And the user, let's be honest, the user doesn't care where the data is coming from or where it's stored. They just want the answer, right? Correct, yeah. And then that's the value that we bring is that we have a transparent layer that sits above that which first and foremost is the application. We have a new release product called SAP Lumiere which is a self-service analytical tool for discovery. So the user now becomes more empowered to look at granular data and ask the what-if questions that they can ask previously. That being done on the raw transactional data and also being done on historical data that would come from Hadoop. But as you say, it's agnostic to the end user. They don't see it because we've actually hidden that layer from them. So I'm curious, what do you hear from customers when you go into customer accounts? Do they even use, you know, we're here in this, a bubble in a sense when you're, especially when you're at a conference like Strata at Hadoop World, everyone's very knowledgeable about the technology and Hive and Pig and Flume and all these different things. But when you go to a customer who's not in this world, do they use, do they call it big data? Do they think they have a big data problem? What's the perception of a, you know, a typical customer who's not really in this world necessarily? Well, first and foremost, they're not aware of big data exists in their world and there could be some of the largest companies in the world. There could be some of the smallest. Yeah, all they know is that they have a data challenge. It doesn't have to be around volume. It could actually just be around the variety of the data when they actually want to get more into, look at social media data and structured data, which is the variety. It could actually just be the velocity of the data that if I'm looking at trying to get into real time offer management to my customers, what does that mean for me? So they don't actually understand the concepts behind, well, what do I need to actually build out a big data platform? So part of our work is actually one of kind of educating them in terms of what is the market doing and what are other companies in your industry doing and get them up to speed on that. Then the question becomes, okay, I understand the use case. What technology drives that? Because some of them aren't well versed in the open source community either. A little technical issue there. Live TV, everybody. It was the panel of Hanna in action. Yeah, I think so. It was very exciting. Big data in New York City for you. You don't know what's going to happen in Big Apple. Exactly. So it can be a case of one of educating them first, let them understand what value they can derive from their data. Once they understand that, we take that data, turn it into information for them. Once they have that information, they then become knowledgeable about their business. Once they acquire that knowledge, they actually have some power about what they're going to do and become empowered on how to drive their business with further detailed insight about the business. So it's kind of those four tenets that we kind of walk them through, which is understand your data, understand what you can do with that data, become knowledgeable about it, then you become empowered to take action on your business and accelerate that entire process. And that's where the memory port of HANA comes into play. Excellent. So I want to ask you a little bit about kind of inside of SAP. What has been like as SAP is making a pretty big transition from, since the introduction of HANA really, when HANA has really become central to your strategy. Coming from the leading ERP company, coming from that world and kind of transitioning, it started, I guess you might say, with the business objects acquisition focused on analytics and BI. But I think it really accelerated with HANA kind of hitting the market. What's it been like inside SAP as you kind of make this transition? To be honest, it's been an exciting change for us. Refreshing changes some may add. And it has been that dichotomy that we've looked at the market. We've looked at what our customers have been asking us for. And more importantly, we have had one eye on what the vision should be of the company. So HANA was a part of that in terms of accelerating on the innovation side in terms of transactional processing and analytical processing in memory. But what we also saw was this move from on-premise solutions to cloud-based solutions. So the acquisition of success factors with the human capital management in the cloud, the acquisition of a riba for talent management in the cloud. We now have an HANA enterprise cloud environment where we actually have software-over-service. So the change internally is that that's what we use internally now. We use HANA to drive our own systems internally in the cloud. The other aspect is the mobility part because we're also being asked by our customers how can we actually enrich the user experience that may be out in the field? That if the CEO or the CFO wants to see what their P&L looks like, I wouldn't have to go back to a desktop machine to find that out. I can actually get information pushed to me now on a mobile device. When we look at the business, we look at it from the applications, which is the core. Internally, we knew that that was going to get us to new levels based upon what we were doing and customers were doing to drive it into the cloud. The analytics you touched on already, that was very key for us to get derived consistent analytics from the core applications and then actually make that available on-demand in the cloud and then on any device, any time with mobility. Yeah, we've got the complete picture there. I think the mobility aspect is very important. When you're talking about more operational type analytics, people out in the field, they need to have that information at their fingertips and that's where mobile really comes in. We've been following you guys for a while. We're definitely interested to see how this plays out. John, as you said, we've been at Sapphire for four years now, I think. Yeah, I mean, watch you guys do the mobile play perfectly. You guys are the first ones, to me, the first ones in the large software business to recognize the iPad as a game changer on the analytics side and even before HANA was launched, you guys had your eye on it. Although Hadoop kind of came later and HANA was kind of on track, but that's been phenomenal. The cloud thing, we've been somewhat critical to hear their success factors. What's the cloud strategy? That seems to be coming into focus this past year. Great stuff. We're big fans of what you guys are doing and like the fact that you're saying customers choose. I've always been a big believer. We cover Sapphire. We also cover Oracle Open World, so it's not the same. customers don't always choose with Oracle. But good business there. We love what you're doing here with Hadoop. Great validation. Congratulations on your deal with Hortonworks. This is the queue. We're at Big Data NYC. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Kelley. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.