 With Andreas Berg, CIO of Wolfcron, who is an SAP customer, Andreas, welcome. Welcome, thank you. Good to see you. So we're here at Sapphire in Orlando, hearing very big messaging from SAP around two big things really, HANA, the in-memory solution, and of course, mobile. And so I always try to measure the effectiveness of a company's marketing by talking to customers. And so do those. And how do those things resonate with you? Are you actually doing anything with, for instance, mobile today in your environment? But we want to talk about that. But first, start us off by telling us a little bit about your organization. Yes. My name is Andreas Berg. I am CIO of Wolfcron AG, European Crane Manufacturer, with his head office in Switzerland, Turing, and production facilities all over Germany. We are a mid-size company, 550 employees. Our main markets are in Europe and Middle East. And we have a rental fleet of tower cranes of about 600 pieces. OK. And so you've been an SAP customer for a long time, obviously. And you've seen the transformation of that company in many ways. And we're now seeing another one. What do you make of all this talk about mobile, for instance? Is that something that you're pursuing? Yes, I have to make one correction. We are SAP customers since 2006. So we just have finalized the international rollout throughout over Europe in the beginning of this year. Now we have one SAP system with one client and many companies in this SAP system. And it works fine. But we have had one problem that was the process for our service technicians. A service technician at Wolfgang has to assemble, disassemble, and to repair cranes all over the world. And this work was not supported by IT so far. So the problem that we had was, whenever there was a service order coming in, we did not know who is the right person, where is the person, is it free? After, finally, we have found the person and we had to direct him to the right place all over the world. And all what we did in this process was paperwork. So we had to send him paper. He had to send us paper. And it took weeks and months from the beginning of the order that we were able to send an invoice to the customer. Very expensive, inefficient. Inefficient, yeah. So you must imagine the form for the service technician had six carbon copies. So one for the customer, one for the technician, and four for the organization. With 2,000 to 3,000 orders per month and four carbon copies in the organization, all the data I had to be keyed into the HR payroll system or the quality assurance system or the SAP system for invoicing. So many people were working on this issue and this was really not productive for us. So we had to find a mobile solution and finally we found it. It is very simple. It is an iPhone. An iPhone for the technicians. They are very proud to have one because it's for them as status symbols. They are treating it very well. It's cool. Yeah. And we have a so-called SAP connector. It's a piece of software added to our SAP system which organizes the communication between the iPhone and the SAP system. Dave, one of the things we've been hearing today and love to get your perspective as a CIO and kind of out doing business on SAP is with this HANA product, that innovation from SAP, a lot of the folks that follow our content and who are watching on the web, they're consumers. They're using consumer products, games, the web, mobile devices, Apple's obviously driven that. Now Android was seeing surpassing on a market share basis on Apple, although not as fully developed as Apple in our opinion. The experience in the consumer lifestyle, right, and that's good. It feels good. That's coming to the enterprise where people are working doing business. So what the SAP is really saying here is that that experience is coming to the enterprise. A once dictated environment where you have to do certain things, certain policies, things are slower, certain processes so that consumerization is happening. How has the mobile aspect changed your business and how is it changing your business and what's your outlook and how you see this world going forward? Okay, with this service solution, we are now much faster. It is sophisticated. We can streamline the processes and so on, but this is not the end of this story, of course. What I want to do is in the next coming months to make our CRM, Customer Relationship Management, also mobile. So we will giving iPads and iPhones to all our sales reps all over the world and they will communicate as in Chrome with the SAP system. So they can load down their key performance indicators, the information about the customers, how the business is going, the business intelligent information. So this is a huge step forward now that we have. And for me, it's very important. I'm the IT responsibility. I do not need hardware. I do not need middleware. So everything is happening in the cloud. I still have my SAP system. To support my SAP users in the back office and the iPhones and the iPads with their apps are working more or less without any. You have that whole edge concept where I remember when networking was advancing, you had the notion of branch offices. You had the central operations and then let's have branch offices and you have to have network access and have a dynamic provisioning. That's now at the device level. I mean, it seems more complex. How are you handling all that? What's the technology that eliminates that complexity? Is it core cloud technologies? Is it the software at the edge? How do you get that effectiveness? Well, the access of the branch offices and different companies in different countries is still via the wide area networks. That is, stay the same. But all the mobile solutions, that is cloud computing in the future. So, cloud computing, in my opinion, is safe. So you have big providers like Amazon behind the cloud, let's say it's this way. And I feel very secure with the solution. But what I said, you have to travel a lot. All our top managers, our service technicians, our sales manager have to travel. And we were not able really to give them the right information when they needed it. So the mobile is a new wide area network? That's the new, the mobile networks are what you're using in the cloud power sector? Yes, it's correct. GSMNet and so on is almost always available. So, and the good new is I do not need direct and online access to the SAP system. These devices are working as in Chrome. So you can download the data, you can upload the data to the SAP system whenever you have access to the net. Dave, this is interesting comment about the hardware and middleware. I mean, we're hearing that. I don't need hardware, I don't need middleware. And that's what vendors do, they throw hardware at people. Hey, you need more gear, gear up. And it's like, that's more management. It's got more cost, more management. Exactly. It doesn't make you faster. And Andres, you say the cloud is safe. You feel comfortable with the cloud. You know, studies show that CIOs, what keeps them up at night is the security in the cloud. But why do you feel it's safe? You feel it because it's better than what you had before or the processes are starting to mature? What's your opinion on that? Well, as I said, behind the clouds, there are big providers like the telecom companies or Amazon, and they have much more money than I have for security. I cannot really provide security for my company. I think they can it with their. So also you see the cloud is more secure than anything you could provide. Exactly, that's just my opinion. We're getting some comments from some of the people on here. It's like describing how fast everything's gotten and I'm the other guy, I think he's talking about me trying to wrap it around Hannah. I necessarily want to wrap it around Hannah. I think Hannah is an advancement. It's SAP's version they're trying to put out there as fast memory. And that's consistent with the trends of like Fusion IO and caching. But it's not so much about Hannah. The cloud is a synchronous, there's no paperwork as he's saying in his comment. The speed is the key and it's not so much about Hannah. It's about the fact that you can do it, right? You're right. And so what do you make of Hannah? I mean, is that another part of your strategy? Yes, to be honest, it's the first time that I hear Hannah as a development of SAP. But I have no idea. So knowledge management in our company. So cranes are complicated devices here and there are many news all over the world about cranes. And to provide all these news to our engineers and technicians, I could use a database loaded into the main memory, of course. And all the possibilities to search information. So this is the first idea that I had when I heard from Hassell what he's doing with Hannah. But it's interesting to you. Yeah, of course, knowledge management is an issue. And also business intelligence, of course, has worked much better with Hannah. Andres, we want to respect your time. I know you were running late, but we could keep you here all day and have a good discussion. My last question is, how's the role of the CIO changing? You know, it used to be CIO, in America we used to joke, CIO stands for career is over. I don't know if they joke like that in Europe. But the role is changing, isn't it, with all this notion of mobility and changes in infrastructure and the cloud? And how do you see that changing your role? I feel, as in CIO, more and more responsible for the decision makers, let's say it's this way. It's no longer the processes. In the past, I had to look how it's invoicing doing, how can I improve purchasing, department, and so on. I think these things are over now. So we have implemented SAP and everything works fine. So in the future, I have to bring added value to our top management, to our sales rep. And therefore, I need new devices, new databases, new communication possibilities, and so on. Excellent. OK, we're here live at Sapphire now with Andreas Berg, who's the CIO of Wolfkran, a large crane manufacturer in Europe, across Europe and across the Middle East as well. And I'm Dave Vellante. I'm John Furrier. SiliconANGLE.com, SiliconANGLE.tv, the leading source of tech news, and this is theCUBE, our flagship telecast. We're on the ground covering SAP Day 3 in-depth coverage. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. Thank you.