 SAP's annual conference, this is SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage, theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm joined with my co-host, Jeff Kelly from wikibon.org, the number one big data analyst on the planet. Jeff, we've got a great segment here. Peter Graf, who's the chief sustainability officer of SAP, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, welcome everybody. We've had the sustainability group on every year, and it's been a mission as part of SAP. SAP has been one of those corporate cultures where they work hard, they play hard, and they also have a real citizenship aspect of life of the planet. And obviously with all the fast data mobility in HANA, the speed of business speeds things up, and speed is a competitive advantage, as Bill McDermott said. I've got to ask you the first question. How has that sped up your sustainability efforts? So first of all, sustainability is not so much about doing the right thing for society or the planet. It's about understanding where economic interests and environmental and social interests overlap. So it's about business at the end of the day, and we take a lot of pride in having not just had a sustainability strategy where we're trying to reduce carbon and we're trying to invest in society, but do that in a way that it drives economic benefit for SAP as well as our customers. And the customers. And there's a residual effect obviously to society and whatnot. But let's say he's more specific. I mean, there's tech involved, right? And you've got mobility, you've got people connected. So how is HANA and the mobility acceleration affected some of the things you're working on? So let me give you an example. A product we just launched about two weeks ago is called Tugo by SAP. And it's a solution that helps companies to organize carpools of employees getting to work. And that has a multitude of benefits. And it shows very nicely this interconnection between economic, environmental, and social benefits. Economically, SAP drove $5 million of value by using Tugo internally for two years. Now, also it helped us save in an enormous amount of carbon emissions. We avoided 400,000 miles being driven. But we also created 2,200-person days of people networking, getting together, driving to work together. So this is what we did within SAP using the solution. Now we have taken it to the customers. It's mobile. It's in the cloud. You go live with it in one minute. And it's apparently a business to business to consume a solution, just like the sports solutions that Bill McDermott talked about this morning. Interesting. So you mentioned, right before we went on, you mentioned something about an integrated reports, any report you guys are doing now. So you, as John mentioned, so SAP is really focused on this issue. Tell us about what you're doing in terms of the integrated report. I guess bringing together your financials with your sustainability and kind of showing where they intersect or how they support one another. Explain that a little bit. So an integrated report combines what used to be an annual report and what used to be a sustainability report into one document. And usually people think about integrated reporting as the outcome of a long process where people are discussing how they can drive sustainability into their strategy. We went a different approach. We used the creation of an integrated report as a catalyst, as an accelerator, to more deeply embedding sustainability into how we run our business. And the core of the report is the explanation of how our non-financial performance, like our employee engagement, our retention, our energy consumption, our carbon emissions, how that relates to the financial performance of the company. And that is hugely interesting, not for the sake of being better for the planet or better for society, but for the sake of being a better business. So for example, every percent of employee retention represents a 62 million euro value for SAP. So that's connecting the employee retention non-financial performance with the financial performance of the company. Or over the last five years, our energy efficiency increases have helped avoid costs in excess of 220 million euros. That's about 285 million dollars over five years. Creating those connections makes sustainability relevant for the business and it's a great proof point of the value we create so that customers can use our solutions to do the same. Yeah, absolutely, because we hear about green IT, right? And that was kind of the term a few years back was about being good for the environment. And that kind of fizzled, I think, because exactly what you said, it's not expecting companies to be more efficient and sustainable simply to help the environment clearly is not going to be the catalyst you need. So you're trying to tie together the financial metrics of a company with some of the things you're doing on sustainability to really build that business case and show the value of what you're doing, not just to the environment, but to your bottom line. But in essence, make sustainable thinking, which is essentially just the recognition that you need to be around in 10 or in five years, long-term success, make that a bigger part of how you steer the company on a day-to-day basis. And we're doing a lot of things that help companies do that, from analytics so that they can see the status quo to applications that can help them get more efficient and eventually transform behavior and processes within the organization. And we do that across a wide variety of industries. Peter, on the, there's some buzz on Twitter about Harley-Davidson increasing their performance and R&D and manufacturing and sustainability. Is that related to some of the things you're doing? Is that, do you have insights on that? What all these companies have in common is they're trying to take sustainability and make it part of the core of how they create value. So for a software company, for us that means create better software that can help other companies run more sustainably. For a company like Harley-Davidson is, look at your value chain, your suppliers, as well as what you do in the product for your customers and help your customers have a more sustainable experience. What does sustainable mean? I mean, is that like, is it more green? Is it just more efficiency? Because we heard from, with McDermott's press conference and obviously the CEO of Under Armour, he was talking about some of the inefficiencies with shipping and like they were going out 60% full and they had allocation problems of inventory as they're massively growing. Is that an example of sustainability that's just efficiency? I mean, how do you kind of like parse through that? Because it's a fuzzy gray area. You know. So sustainability as the way how I see it is really the interconnection where economic, environmental, and social interests overlap. And the point being that sustainable business means a business that is designed to function in the long run. It's not something that works for a very short period of time. And then, you know, you have you maneuvered yourself into a situation where you have a declining growth or where you're in a bad situation. So for example, it's about thinking five or 10 years ahead. And can you continue to be the number one or two in your industry in 10 or in 15 or in five years if you continue to operate as you do? So is the Under Armour example sustainability because if they can get containers packed and that's going to be efficient? I mean, it's kind of like a weird example. In a way, if you're a consumer, you pay attention. The companies who ignore sustainability and sustainable thinking and who don't treat society or the environment with respect, many of those, specifically those that are very close to consumers, they feel a backlash because consumers start to boycott their products. And we've seen this with exploding oil rigs. We've seen this with child labor in sneakers. We've seen this in many examples, the risk of not running in a sustainable way and being punished by the consumers is real. And that's why many companies that are close to the consumers are the ones who are the role models for sustainability because they're the furthest ahead. They need to do the most in order to avoid that they have this backlash from the consumers. So I have a question about kind of the intersection of sustainability and big data, actually. So not necessarily how big data can help companies be more sustainable, but how big data is impacting sustainability across industry. So of course there's, we see lots of reports and information in the media about the amount of data being created is just going through the roof and more with technologies like Hadoop and other things you can store more of that data. But that all creates a much larger footprint in the data center. So as more companies start to invest in technology to store all this data, they're really getting, I mean even companies that were not considered technology savvy are starting to get into this business. So as the amount of data grows, the amount of data being stored grows, data centers are going to grow, how does that impact sustainability and how is SAP going to try to help their customers, particularly the ones that are really data storage and data intensive, actually do that kind of big data analytics and big data storage in a sustainable way without creating just a whole nother problem. So two thoughts on this. First of all, we do a lot with systems that help companies run more sustainably. So and yes, these systems, they require resources, they require electricity and cooling and so forth. However, for all of these systems, what we have seen is that the value they create in the real world outside of data center is much larger than what they consume. In other words, McKinsey did a great study a couple of years back, they analyzed that the IT and communications industry has between two and 3% of the worldwide's carbon emissions that they cause. However, they can help avoid 16% of the carbon emissions through technology. So we have a huge lever, a factor of six or eight, with which we can actually help improve the situation, not worsen the situation, so that's number one. The second is that you've heard that SAP is making a big push into the HANA cloud and about taking some of that load off our customer's shoulders. And that includes the electricity. Already today, 60% of our global electricity is sourced from renewable sources. We're very proud of that, it's a significant investment and it actually helps showcase to our customers that we're serious about this and that we are driving to deliver those solutions to them with the lowest possible footprint. Interesting, so and as you, obviously SAP plays across vertical markets, you've got customers and we saw some today in the sports industry but they're in manufacturing, they're in high tech, they're in sorts of verticals. Is there a strategy that is necessary for each vertical or even each company? How do you deal with sustainability across such a broad set of customers? Many of those strategies, as you call it, they cross industries and that's when they become transformational. And for example, we are researching right now our move into the connected car and the car not just as something that has a web browser but something that actually can conduct business. So that from the convenience of your own dashboard you can authorize the payment of a parking garage or your fuel and stuff like that. And that is transcending industries, it's transcending the parking garage operators and the oil and gas industry and the automotive industry and it creates new scenarios that deliver completely new levels of efficiency because you can inform drivers more proactively, you can reward them, you can send them to do specific things, you can have gamification elements to it. And simple things like looking for parking which actually causes 30% of the traffic in big cities, that can actually be transformed in a different experience. So yes, you're right on the money, we see the biggest opportunity to transformation when we overcome the boundaries between industries and HANA is a fabulous platform because it can cope with the amount of data that's required to do that. Peter, just to kind of wrap up the segment here, I wanted you to elaborate on the future of sustainability, kind of also the big message with HANA and cloud is speed to value. And so how are we getting faster to value on the sustainability side? And what's changing? What do you see as key challenges that are being managed and being looked at by the brightest minds at SAP and around the world? So we really see three constituents pushing the sustainability agenda. First of all, the governments and they have very different speeds around the world and we deliver solutions to customers that help them cope with those regulations in the most painless way possible. The second constituents are the consumers. They are demanding more transparency. We've just had this horrible accident in Bangladesh with the clothes manufacturer. So people start asking questions about clothes and where do they come from and what do the people make who are making these shirts and stuff like that? So consumers are playing an increasingly important role. And the most important role I believe comes to those who have enormous power in their supply chains, the huge retailers, the big consumer companies, they can actually take entire value chains with them and force them to behave in specific ways because of their buying power. And we see that as a huge accelerator at the moment because these big companies, they want their consumers to feel safe, to feel like they're making a reasonable and responsible choice with the products they buy. That's what I see as the biggest driver. Okay, Peter, Dr. Peter Graf, here inside theCUBE, Chief Sustainability Officer at SAP, thanks for joining us. This is exclusive SiliconANGLE.com's coverage with Wikibon.org here at Sapphire now, our fourth consecutive event here. Great message. SAP has stayed the course on sustainability, mobile analytics. And the new stuff that's kind of forcing change is HANA and the cloud, but that's in a good way. We got it all here covered, more breaking analysis, more coverage wall-to-wall through Thursday live. Stay tuned, we've got more interviews coming up and possibly a fly-by by Bill McDermott, the co-CEO of SAP. We hope to have him on shortly. I know he's got a short window, so stay tuned, keep watching, we'll be right back.