 Okay, we're back here live, this is SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage of SAP Sapphire Now, live from Orlando, Florida, this is SiliconANGLE's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. What a great morning. We had Bill McDermott's great keynote and fabulous new format on stage called theCUBE. I mean, their anchor desk of tech athletes. We called it theCUBE because it emulated our success here in the press conference four years ago when we started theCUBE. We called it the ESPN of tech. SAP had up on stage their own version of ESPN of tech with Bill McDermott, JB, James Brown from CBS, went into Harvard, played basketball, Bill McDermott, big athlete himself, and they had the NBA, the 49ers, and Armeral. And continuing that tradition, we have more tech athletes and SAP has made some big moves and we have inside the cube here Chris Hayden, who's the vice president of private management for Ariba Networks. Now part of SAP, SAP made a huge move last year, they're not afraid to make bold moves. They did it with SideBase, they're doing it with Hanna, they did it with Ariba, plopped down over $4 billion for Ariba. Chris, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks very much. It's great to be here. So obviously you heard the monologue intro there, obviously SAP's not afraid to make big moves. Okay. So tell us about Ariba's course and kind of this new area. And you know, collaboration has been a theme that's been kicked around kind of a punchline really. B2B, B2C, all converging. Ariba's had great success in business networks. And now that you're part of SAP, which is mobile analytics and databases, all the stuff that Hanna's enabling, how does Ariba fit into the overall SAP family? Yeah, thanks. Well, we're truly excited to be part of the SAP family. We think that the Ariba Network's cloud source to settle suite, coupled with our business network, really offers an exciting opportunity. In terms of like the opportunity, the SAP ecosystem, you know, today, if we look at the Ariba Network, we're routing more than $460 billion to spend through the network every year in over 190 countries. But when you take a look at what the opportunity is with SAP, SAP touches 60% of all the transactions of the global 2000. The addressable send for the global 2000 is a truly staggering figure, $12 trillion. So we just think of the latent opportunity, if you like, in our ecosystem to really add value to every single intra-business collaboration via the network. So we heard from the press conference here at the global press conference, Jed York from the 49ers talking about the fan experience and how SAP is helping. And essentially, we're going to use business intelligence and analytics to eliminate the hassles of buying. That's a consumer experience in a stadium. People can relate to not wanting to get up and miss the game or go wait in line for the bathroom. I guess you can't bring the bathroom down to the seat. But these kinds of experiences is a consumer experience. On the business side, there are those same opportunities. Can you share with the audience what are some of those things that are new opportunities for transactions that didn't exist before? Absolutely. Thanks. And we totally believe that the buying experience for the end user within a business needs to be exactly the same as the buying experience as a consumer. Right? And we also believe that the nature of the community effect, just like you have on Facebook for your social community or your social graph, needs to be the same capability on the business side as well. So specifically in how we're looking to address that, we've got some really interesting ways in which we're just not going to leverage the technology. But we also want to leverage the power of the network or the community. You know, the first is thinking about better buying. And when we talk about better buying, there's an interesting fact as well from Hackett, almost 40% of spend is ad hoc in large corporates. And so Ariba, we announced just recently what we call Ariba spot buy. And this really enables buyers to publish their spot ad hoc requirements to the network for suppliers they know, but suppliers they don't know about. And when you think about today, we have a million suppliers on the network today, and with the power and the SAP ecosystem moving forward, we really think this can be a great differentiator and it helps buyers get better pricing. But it also helps suppliers really get more opportunities for business. You know, real win-win. So that's one of the exciting areas that we think with the spot buy. Secondarily as well, along the spot buy capabilities is really using the profile of sellers on the network to be able to, if you'd like, somewhat be prompted to buyers automatically. So when a buyer wants to go on for an event, we can automatically match their profile in the same way as you think about Facebook, someone you met in high school, how about the opportunity to supply materials? And we have a number of use cases of suppliers who've done some great matching and growing, you know, really interesting businesses from the ability to have recommendations from the Ariba network. Why did SAP buy Ariba back in the day? They pumped in a lot of cash. What was the one reason that they bought Ariba for? One reason. Just like the main core of the core reason. I think the core reason is the proven scalability and the vision around intra-business collaboration for the power of the Ariba network. I think SAP saw that Ariba had the number one cloud source to settle procurement suite, which very complements their own existing offering. And number two, just the potential of unlocking collaboration, not just in procurement, but in finance and supply chain, in human resources, sustainability across a business network is truly the next generation in the network economy. And I think that's a big part of the acquisition reason. And now see their focus on mobile has been huge, right, in analytics. Yes. I mean, we were at Sapphire just, you know, 2011, a couple of years ago. And, you know, it's pretty clear that mobility and analytics, we call that fast data back at the time. Yeah. They coined that term here in the queue. But, you know, now it's exploded. You've got SSDs. You have server-side SSDs. You have SSDs in the devices. So, you know, the ability to get stuff to the edge of the network pretty fast, it kind of changes your game a little bit. Absolutely. You guys are a connected network. Correct. So how does that mobility play? What has it done to your business? And what are some of the things that you can point to saying, hey, here's some things that is a kickbutt for us? Well, what it does is I think it's opened up a whole new community of users. I mean, and it also really opens the world up more. What we're seeing, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere, is the laptop is being bypassed, right? The PC is being bypassed. It's going to smart devices and to tablets. And so just that whole ecosystem of users there just presents a whole, you know, great opportunity for us in some of the greatest, fastest-growing markets in the world. So I think that that mobility angle is number one. Number two is, quite honestly, we can just piggyback over the fantastic mobile platform that SAP has. When we are, if you like, an independent company, we would have to build some of that or partner with some of that. Now at SAP, we really think we can just accelerate that mobility and the beautiful user experience to everyone. You know, SAP's made some bold moves. And if you look at some of the moves it made, Arib has been around for a while, Silicon Valley's success story. And but it was built back when B2B networks were, you know, build your own T1s, build your own data centers. And another company, Sybase, which was having, you know, actually pioneered the database, had some, and then you guys, they transformed themselves. But now in the new equation, in memory and network-based commerce on the B2B side is a real strategic asset. We, that's, we're just so excited. You're talking about mobility. When we think about the network, think about the network as it's being open. We want to connect to every system. We think it needs to be comprehensive. We need to have as much collaboration. But just as importantly, once you have a lot of collaboration and a lot of trading partners, it needs to be intelligent. It needs to be able to take the transactional data, it needs to be able to marry up the relationship data, the commerce graph, so to speak, and add intelligence to it. And we just don't think there's any other better capability or technology out there to really transform the latent information and knowledge in the network than HANA. Yeah, and I think the cloud story is interesting, too. I mean, what's happening here is that, and we were talking earlier on the, on theCUBE, but, you know, cloud is changing. So HANA has been kind of a, obviously, a force that's driving some of the strategy change in cloud. Does SAP be a cloud provider? Do they use their own cloud? What's going to go on? I mean, HANA is an element for cloud providers. She said, should they compete directly with Amazon? So there's some disruption at the ecosystem level. So what have you heard? Positive and potentially challenges for SAP in the ecosystem and the business model? Well, I don't see them as challenges. I actually see them as opportunities. I mean, I remember either Jim or Bill mentioned at one of the keynotes, a big part is giving our customers choice, choice of deployment mode, whether that be cloud or on-premise. What we still see is the network intersects the two, whether it's cloud or on-premise. Customers can really now focus on outcome rather than deployment methodology. And so we see really exciting opportunities are massive there for us. I mean, bringing together our cloud. I mean, SAP is a massive cloud player now. I don't think that message has really got out to the real world. SAP is significant, second to none probably in terms of business to business cloud. Yeah, and we saw earlier, Jeff Kelly on from Wikibon quoted the New York Times when Vishal was quoted that SAP is running some customers' biggest clouds that actually are bigger than salesforce.com's entire cloud. I'm not sure who he's referring to there. Do you deserve a name there? I have no scoop there. I don't know that one. I'm not in that loop. Did you watch the press conference from the sports panel? That was really exciting. It was good fun, wasn't it? What'd you think about those guys up there? Jed, you're a pretty impressive young guy, isn't he? He is. I mean, he makes some of us look, it just turned 40 and he's running the 49. Isn't that pretty amazing? Yeah, I think it just shows the innovation and how they're really trying to link. They're taking a different view. That's what I love. They're looking at their customers all the way through that value chain and how they're linking together is really, truly amazing. I mean, they've transformed and the 49 is interesting and this is something we could talk about. I tried to get the question in there but they kind of didn't go there. But one of the things I wanted to talk about was, and it kind of just a little bit was transformation. I mean, the 49 is look at that transformation of that organization. They went from scandal to complete modernized young management team, Kitty and you, ex-Facebook CFOs over there heading up the charge, Harbaugh's legend from Palo Alto and Stanford. So that's cool. That back office got a new stadium going on. So his view is very clear, user experience. And what I found interesting is that that's the challenges that IT guys face. They're looking to be the 49ers of IT. They're looking for how do I transform and turn into a younger, hipper, faster, more agile infrastructure. And so the only way to do that is to have speed, have networks. I mean, this kind of mirrors a faster version of the old days, the extra nets connected. Right. What's your take on all of that? Well, I think it just totally complements this business network story. You know, you connect once and you have access to the whole ecosystem, but not just for one type. This is what we really want to get excited and get people to understand. You can do it to discover new business. You can do it to deliver new business. And you can also do it to get paid for your business. And one of the recent things we're also looking to take this next level innovation, there's a huge amount of, you know, upturn and disruption as well in the financial payments markets, you know, with the squares and the PayPal's changing. I mean, just last week, we also announced our own B2B payment solution called the Reba Pay, where we've partnered with Discover Financial Services to bring the power of their global network and infrastructure with the Reba Network to add a really differentiated offering into payments. Just a whole new, if you like, from a paper-based check-based process to an electronic in your account, pay faster with better reconciliation. Totally transformational again across the whole supply chain, whether you're big or small. So final question on this interview here with theCUBE, Chris, is, you know, obviously startups kind of predict the future. You were a part of one and you joined Reba through an acquisition, you mentioned that before we got on the camera, but you see square out there with the payments, you see the social media, you see the gamification, you know, these are network effects. And, you know, the virality of the new markets, the connected system, is distributed, this is not new to people at Reba who get this. So obviously startups kind of let the whales kind of figure out what to do and then they integrate it in, we're seeing it here. What is next for Reba? As you guys talked to savvy executives, collaboration is there, but collaboration has just been overused as a punchline. I mean, it's like, yeah, collaboration, yeah, we need to collaborate more. That's like saying, yeah, I need better judgment. You know, it's like, come on, who doesn't need more collaboration? So break it down, what's real about the collaboration right now going forward? What's really real is we're uniquely poised here and why is it? Because as you point out, it's not just a collaboration, we just don't want to get bad collaboration faster. We need to add value. It's all about putting intelligence in the network, about behaviors of what you've done, what you're doing, and overlaying predictive reporting, predictive analytics, to really give people visibility on what's going on. And we think we were supplier info net, which can take over 150 sources, automated. If you haven't forbid, there's another tsunami somewhere in the world, you never want that, but that happens. Automatic alerting and notification of some key trading partners that may be affected somewhere in your supply chain. And oh, by the way, here's half a dozen more that can help you. That type of information, that type of analytics, that type of predictive, that's the next power of the network. You can't get that on a single connection to a small part of your community. So more connections, more data, more intelligence. Yes. That's what you're saying. Okay, great. Big bold move, $4 billion plus acquisition. We saw it with Sybase. We see it with how many of these big pieces of engines plugged into the new SAP powering business. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. This is exclusive coverage from Sapphire now. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE, we'll be right back after this short break.