 message you're basically, hey, really, let's focus on the customer. Let's, let's, we'll, we'll develop this unifying layer. We want to make this, let me ask you a question about this panel. So Lars is the CEO of SuccessFactors, bought by SAP for $3.4 billion on the job of three months here. Um, is it culture shock? I mean, I was in the CEO interviews and you asked that question and I was actually sitting next to him. So when I looked to the right, I heard how it's Williams. I asked, so you asked the question. You didn't see this. I'm sharing this for the first time publicly, he rolled his eyes and he kind of squirreled, he was staring at Bill and Jim, because what's happening in my takeaway from that is he's just a monster firm. He's been running Mach 100 and start up less than a billion dollars in billings. Yeah, exactly. Clean and mean, right? Yeah. It's interesting to see the TV right next to one that was being asked because, you know, he has a lot of bravado, but he isn't a very much of a large, large organization because now we're getting, how do you treat the channel with SuccessFactors? I asked him, I said, oh, yeah, yeah. Purpose is provider. It's an education process. I think he's good for the company, but he's, he's definitely going to take his knocks over the next. So basically, he's got to get acclimated to the environment. Yeah, probably get slapped around. And by the way, on your question, which is so good, you weaved in, what about cloud foundry? Again, that was a different smirk. So he looked at the CEOs, you can almost see in real time. I see if you talk about real time management and analytics. What I heard McDermott say, Bill McDermott was he actually answered for him. Yeah, I think he wanted to give him the right answer. Yeah, I think so. Before you say something stupid or get it wrong, SAP's the brand. OK, so this is evolving in real time in front of our eyes. We're capturing it. What else are you seeing with this? I mean, do you agree with that that it's evolving? Totally. What nuances are you learning? Totally evolving. I think some of the nuances that I'm learning is that everything is up for grabs. We really don't know what's going to happen to business by design. We're told that some components might, you know, it might be broken up and that we will then be then pushed into kind of this loosely coupled platform. We're also hearing that, you know, I think it's pretty very verified that Streamworks, the technology they've been developing over the past several years, really activity stream technology will become integrated with the success factors jam technology. So we're starting to see kind of where these technologies will fit where they don't fit. The interesting thing is, and I think it really is important to focus on is what is SAP's overall strategy as how this compares to mobile. And that's where I think we'll start to really see some real definition. They are getting better with the developer communities. They still need to do a lot of work. They admit that. But I think that's going to be where we're going to start to see really where these intersections really matter with what Lars is talking about with SuccessFactors. I want to stay on SuccessFactors if we can for a moment. And we talked about this a little bit yesterday, but I've talked to some other customers here today. And I'm of the opinion that there's a little bit of smoke and mirrors going on here. So I mean, the SuccessFactors is obviously a great story. I've said before it's really focused on the talent side. We saw Lars bring out essentially what I consider a screenshot of Employee Central. Right. That's what it was. It didn't look as nearly as mature. I mean, it's hard to tell from a graphic. But in talking to other people, other customers who have experience with SuccessFactors, that's the new kid in the block, the Employee Central. So essentially, you've got the core SAP HR, which is, I think, staying right there. Employee Central is the way in which they're going to compete more broadly with, for example, Workday, which is a much more built out core HR, and as well has the talent management. I think that that's going to be a real challenge for them. At the same time, SuccessFactors and Lars, in particular, give them a cloud strategy, a cloud play. I think it's a good move that they invested 3.4 billion. I think it's better than an R&D investment sometimes. And so that gets them in. I think they're going to sell a lot of it to their existing customers. The big question is, can they broaden that out? And will a company like Workday, when it does its IPO, become the next new hot company and create problems for SuccessFactors? That's going to be really interesting to watch. I think SAP has the advantage of the mobile emphasis, but I think that the clean sheet of paper built from the ground up for the cloud has some advantages as well. Yeah, I totally agree with the competitive landscape. Workday is a charging horse. They're going for an IPO. They're very good at mobile app development. They're going after the core of SAP. SAP, on the other hand, with SuccessFactors, is really trying to delineate SuccessFactors, understanding the difference between it and their apps, their core and edge apps, which were developed on platform environments. So you have all those line of business apps that you see that were developed off the Java pass and the ABAP pass. And then you also have then SuccessFactors. We talked a little bit about this yesterday. You can align those, but the people who are the SAP mentors who I talk to say that there's an issue with retention issue with extensions and how you actually develop applications off of that if those architectures are so different. So I think they have some architectural challenges at base, but I think it's still to be determined what that is about. Well, I talked to another customer today, and I won't name them, because they asked me not to. But they said, yeah, you know what? We de-installed SuccessFactors. We brought in Workday. It's way simpler. Now, that struck me as, oh, SuccessFactors. Maybe there's a commonality in the approach. I think it's big and functional. We study eminence a lot. We study integration, especially VMC. The great companies actually do a poor job of integrating those issues. I think it was going to be fun to watch that I think Alex maybe don't feel it this way, is that the integration doesn't go smooth with SuccessFactors. You can watch that position. Now, S&P told us today that they were all their assets in cloud, in S&P, in SuccessFactors. S&P is stepping up. They're going to make this work. So they're walking it up. Yeah, I think that's true. But SuccessFactors is a start-up. OK, that's cool. They're mostly under elaborate model around cloud. And S&P is a 40-year-old company with a founder back in the house. Let's talk about that for a second. So the companies that do really well with acquisitions, obviously IBM and Oracle, and you mentioned EMC. I think VMware, it's kind of a mixed track record, Zimbrane, but some others that might work pretty well. But clearly EMC is good today. How would you grade S&P in terms of its ability to integrate its acquisitions? Oh, I think that they're getting there. I think that SuccessFactors' acquisition was a smart one. I think if you look at it from a technology perspective, they've been developing basically their own clouds or resources on a job environment. And SuccessFactors is also a job environment. And so they have a like platform there. I don't think it would be overly complex to kind of to bring this together. I think there would be more complex in terms of business challenges interface. I think one thing Lars came here for the company is he could help them relaunch essentially what he calls where like just terrible products and terrible launches in themselves when they were first put out. Because really, well, he talked a lot about explaining what the product is. What are its benefits? Like why do customers use this? And he said because what you saw in business by design was like actually some of these are a lot of customers out there who actually do use it. So I think it's a little early to say whether this is a boss' acquisition or not. I don't know. So that's not my point. My point is if you look back at some of the acquisition, how have they done some business objects? Business objects? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's totally. I think the side base is tomorrow now. The side base is only just starting to come. So the side base should probably be a good deal. I think they did well. It's great to start. It's been taking them a while to get this thing. But side base, the piece that they bought side base for was really mobile. Right. And so they've got to sort of do the pivot to mobile. How about tomorrow now? I mean that was basically a disaster. I don't know. You can sort of blame that one on Appatec, I guess, right? Wasn't that legal? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Business objects? I mean, how would you grade business objects? I think that's another question I think for the like, it really comes from another age, really, of the on-premise world. This management team has to show, they've impressed me with their vision and their ability to act on that vision and message that vision. I think they've got to demonstrate that they can do well with acquisitions. I think John's point about side base being a good move, I would agree with you. It did take a long time, but I still think it's, you know, gotten them into mobile in a big way. And I think the success factors, it gets them into cloud and that's a strategic imperative for these guys. I think it is, yeah. So, as you know, Jerry's still out, but they've got a lot to prove about. Al, what are you hearing on the trenches? Okay, you're out there, you're in the meetings. What are you hearing from the other bloggers, other analysts, the mentors? Do you have a lot of social media going on out there? I think he's got their own internal and social media. What are you hearing? What's the general buzz? One of the most interesting conversations I had last night, of course, at the bar, was about Bluefin solution with one of the chief technical architect for Bluefin solutions. And Bluefin solutions is a service provider based out of the UK. And they're one of the leading kind of integrators for SAP innovative technology. And this guy really knows SAP HANA back and forth. And this was backed up by what kind of another conversation I had with some Fujitsu executives. And essentially what we're looking at here is SAP HANA really kind of focuses on the kind of the legacy business intelligence data warehouse technology out there. And that you can bring HANA in. Now it's still, you know, we're still seeing it in smaller clusters of two, four, 16 nodes as the guy was explaining to us last night. But they are starting to see where SAP is starting to test out in-memory platforms with a hundred terabytes of data. Now that is a tremendous amount right there. The question though becomes can this HANA technology really scale across the marketplace because there's a factor of virtualization? Well, the technical architect from Bluefin basically told us we can virtualize the data warehouse technology and then push the data into HANA. So those are two different, so those are some interesting kind of dynamics there. So I think HANA really, you know, represents the future now that we're concerned that I think some people have that I've talked to is there's this kind of, again, this division between how HANA apps are developed in the cloud versus how the SAP's been developing apps in the cloud. And yeah, success factors over here. HANA will have to be that underlying layer but we'll have to look at how those apps are configured within HANA. So it really seems like the customers are really excited about what HANA can do. What do you think about Jim's comments? He's like, it's really HANA's real. He's made multiple comments to speed up and it's one-on-one with us. Am I going to burst my life? Do you think it's a real thing now? Or he just said it was gestures around it's real. They're bringing out all their customers who've been a great thing for this event. Yeah. So obviously, a little bit is secure but the second thing is trust me, it's real. I get the vibe there. One, do you agree that it was a good take on that? And the second question is one, our developers mentioned this thing and I don't want to won't tell them if they want to get a million new developments out of the SAP platform. So those are two questions that I want you to talk about. What you've been seeing out there today. First off, about is it real? It is HANA real. Yeah, it is definitely real. And again, the people who I am talking to has been in this field before and it really is a direct right to Oracle. And look at it from this perspective in terms of licensing issue, right? SAP is IBM's biggest customer. I mean, Oracle's biggest customer. So when you traditionally have developed a data warehouse or put in some enterprise SAP technology, you'd pair it with the Oracle database. Well, the opportunity here is to replace, is to put that SAP HANA database next to the Oracle environment and if you can replace it, then you don't have to pay that 12% tax anymore. Okay, so that's a real critical factor there is actually the cost and the performance itself. They need to do some, they do need to work on, I have talked to you and they know that they have to work on some things. For instance, they have to need to work more on the data visualization because you need to be able to look at this data in a whole different way. You've got to make that data available on tablets. Again, the mobile question becomes an issue. Those factors are there and present, but overall, there is adoption for the technology and there is merit to what SAP says when they say that they can be the number two database cleanser. I think it's a possibility. What do you think about the comments around the performance of SAP? Bill McDermott mentioned, when you tried to address the four corners, you get three quarters of an outstanding double-digit growth. Okay, got that. The video is depending on the stuff. So performance. Do you think SAP is capable of their own business to step up for the future? I mean, I was going to bring this up and then there's different questions that you came up with here with SAP. Look what deep jobs did in Apple. He blew up a very successful iPod business to introduce a phone, right, and that changed the world. Essentially, it will, and literally, let's just blow up a franchise that people love. Right, music. Right. I mean, music is a quality. Right, right. The rest is history, right? So let's do that. Right. I think you, in a way, is in a similar situation where they're, you haven't really, I'm quickly said it, that we have to blow up, but I think they've got to blow up something because they have to make you open to it. So, you know, in my way of the business school, the old joke was, cannibalize your role before someone else does. Right. So I get the sense that's going on here. Yeah. I had a high altitude. I can't, he said that there was some considerable telecom. It's actually kind of a real problem versus the regional range and the industry range. And the regional range started to wiggle and that is also kind of like this song. While they say that, you know, he said that if you hear such, that it's a corrective thing, that it's going to pass, you know, it's going to come back to, it's a lot to do with this music. And it was, you know, I came to a staff bar now two years ago and it was a lot of attention point, you know, where it's like, you know, the cloud is big, you know, it's cool. We have big data, we really all talk about that too. But, you know, we've got a lot of talk about this and it's still so really important next year it was left down. But if you want to ensure that it's going to lead to intimate, powerful, last fall, there was like this, you know, there was still an expression inside SAP. And hey, they do not want to give up their power. So, yeah. So they do have to, they almost have to come and go, you know, and blow it up. But I think here at this event, we're seeing that basically the market has accepted the fact that the cloud is IT, right? I mean, there's no question about it anymore. Come on. So now SAP. Yeah. So now SAP can go out and say, yeah, we're all about the cloud. Woo. But now, give me back to this developer question, right? Because I think this all ties in pretty directly, because now if you do have all the cloud and you have the ability to run your IT on a mobile device, then what do you do? You know, well, you need developers for that. And so I think that's really, it is the next big challenge for SAP. They're going to have to learn how to almost, again, blow up their kind of engineering community internally. And I think that's a role that Lars can play. He can say, we've got to blow this up. We've got to like take this to a whole new level, okay? And so, He's got that mojo. He's got the swagger. Yeah. And you almost see like Schnabe and McDermott being his older brother. You know, like, okay, calm down. Yeah. You know, ready to get unleashed. So, interesting tension in the company. Yeah, really interesting. But I don't see it dysfunctional yet. No, no, I don't see it dysfunctional. I actually think it's very innovative what they're doing. And I think that they're kind of like, they're treading on ground that I don't see really IBM treading on. I don't see HP treading on this ground. I don't, you know. You're moving fast and making change against SAP. You're about to hit some speed bumps. Like Sybase, same kind of tension. They're making bold moves. Okay. And I think the M&A will continue for SAP. They have to. Because I think they're on a growth path right now that might be unprecedented in their history. If HANA continues to track what the traction it has, and I'm still yet to hear the massive number of nodes on the deployment, but from our research that we've been doing and kind of unscientific polling, this general traction, the in-memory is the serious sleeper. Because HANA is HASO's little project, step one through four of this big revitalization, transformation of SAP, but the in-memory is a secret weapon. I mean, everything that we've been covering on the Cuban so if an angle has been around Fusion IO, violin, EMC, making stores, low latency, this in-memory component is a critical winch pin in the architecture. Yes. And no one's talking about that. So it's a hidden little secret sleeper. I mean, they don't have a story for it. It's real time, but I don't see them dealing with that. So... Tell this product better. We got to get out there. We can't just talk about how the nuances of its architecture, we need to sell it. We need to market it. And so I think, you know, and so that says a lot, what you say is like, you know, is in-memory kind of like this hidden gem. Yeah, it is hidden, but it can't be hidden. You got to take that thing out and show it to the world. SAP executives, I'm getting a like SAP more and more as we sit down with them here inside the Cube because they have an air of cockiness, but competitiveness, but they're fun-spiriting. They are. But one thing that's clear, they are performance-driven. They are all about winning. You see that from clearly. He made references to basketball and sports. And you got Schnabe, the intellect, who's a product guy who's got an incredible vision. And he appeals to me, okay? Because he talks about things that I care about, talking about the intelligence network around business. And Dave, this is stuff that we talk about internally at Wikibon and SiliconANGLE Labs is things like predictive analytics. That I think they are tracking right on the right path for a company as big as SAP. They are right on the fault line of innovation. And they continue to play on that fault line when these seismic shifts happen, they're going to be capitalized on it. So again, positive science all around from me on this show so far. And what's even more impressive is their focus of innovation around investment. So the start-up money that's going to be flowing in from SAP Ventures and also the SAP kind of incubator in Palo Alto, I'm going to go check that place out. First of all, we should have a Cube gig up. We should have a Cube spot up there. But that's all in the story. So that's one thing. So the things that I'm disappointed with from on this show, Dave and Alex, is the lack of traction on the App Store, the apps. Now, the ecosystem, I've seen some great examples of Alex, you know, we're in San Francisco for the, we saw, what were those companies? We saw Adobe, right? We saw our phone gap, phone gap, accelerator. Yeah, those are, this is bright spots in here. So there's movement there, but I don't think the world has crossed over to the concept that there's an enterprise App Store in business. It's just now emerging. So I'm not seeing the uptake on that. It's kind of an ecosystem funding that's required. I just don't see it. It's not impressive yet. There's not that capability to just kind of like roll apps off the factory floor, which I really think you need to do with, if you're going to have a mobile strategy, you need to just roll them off. They need to almost be realistic, so they're just like going, like just like keep on throwing them out there, like, oh, a conveyor line, pick it up, put it in the market, pick it up for the market, like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. We don't have that yet. But I think it's part of the problem though, is with the, is with the mobile platforms themselves. And then, you know, we have, they're so aligned in iOS right now, because Android platform is so entirely fragmented and it really is troublesome to develop on. And Windows 8 is really still kind of, you know, is out there. We don't really know what it is. But what I'm hearing, for instance, from people, Philippe Winthrop of the Enterprise Mobility Foundation, he says that he's starting to see some more pickup around Windows 8. It's more interesting. And I think that'll be kind of, I think there's going to be some inflection points. I think one of those inflection points maybe is to see how rapidly Windows 8 does get accepted into the market. The other thing I heard but didn't hear a lot about in terms of success points or some proof points was the personalization. So analytics, real time, they're banging that thing home. Not a lot of proof points on the personalization. So to me, they're still in proof of concept mode. Obviously, this Sapphire, they're rolling out more customers. Any feedback on that if you've heard in the trenches around it? A lot of customers are talking. What customers are saying? You know, just generally the vibe. I mean, it's great with the operating customers because it's validation. Are you hearing the same thing? Yeah, I do. And I think they actually did a very good job of how they handled their customer sessions yesterday, especially with Bill McDermott in the talk show format that they did. They were actually able to kind of clearly articulate what they are trying to do. And I think then Schnabe did a good job of kind of bringing it back home today. When he was starting to talk about, you know, he went through this whole kind of evolution of today. It's like, you know, we went from like, you know, the punch card, you know, to this point in time where like, we have more, you know, mobile devices than people on the planet. And to another point where actually it's the data that people are generating that's going to make the biggest difference of all because for the first time people are generating unbelievable amounts of data. I mean, kids, right? I mean, how many updates has my daughter made to her text message to Twitter, to Facebook? Todd Pappiano, a founder of continuity coined the term social exhaust as data. The social exhaust meaning stuff we're exhausting out of our interactions. Loose data, kind of floating around out there, being harnessed for big data. So I think, you know, this is a big data show. I mean, these guys, to me, Alex, are a big data company, but not a lot of big data. This is like, not a lot of big data washing, as we say. So, they're showing big data. So I think the connection is with what Shinabe said today and what Shinabe said today, he said the amount of data that we're generating is turning supply chains upside down because we don't, because now people are generating so much more information that it's kind of putting everything into kind of a whole different kind of realm where it's not, you know, as they said yesterday, English was the language you needed to really succeed in this world when you were, you know, growing up and, you know, of our generation and our parents' generation, but now that the generation, we're entering a generation where social is the language of commerce, really, essentially. And that will then really, and that's really what I think was most interesting about the customers that they had yesterday because what they said was you can turn that chaos into optimization. You can optimize that chaos and you can make it even, you can make your actually business far more efficient. And we know that. You know, we know that in following all these, all this stuff. There's incredible efficiencies with the automation. Okay, I want to reset and let people know you're watching silicon angle.com's footage and coverage of SAP Sapphire now in Orlando, Florida. I'm John Furrier. I'm here with Alex Williams and Dave Vellante. And we are bringing you action from the tech event here as the tech world and the enterprise. And this week, Facebook's going to go public. A lot of stuff happening in tech. Huge shifts. If you're under the age of 30, you don't know what we've seen. And that is, is that we're seeing a once in a lifetime opportunity around an inflection point in technology where technology is now part of our culture on the consumer side and continuing to grow rapidly, but changing business. I mean, it's not too long ago when I was in college and graduated from college, we didn't have cell phones. I mean, can you imagine the day where there was no mobile phones at all? Imagine the day where there was no internet. Yeah. This is what's happening to business. The businesses that are out there today are still architected on those days of big computers in the back office, no phones. That's changing. People are modernizing their business. It's going to change how we work, how we play. And I think that's the key point that SAP is aligning with. You're watching SiliconANGLE.TV. SiliconANGLE.com is the tech reference point for innovation. If you want to know what it means, follow siliconANGLE.com with people on .org. We'll tell you what it means. We'll tell you what to follow. We use predictive analytics to figure out what's trending and write about it. So if you want to be informed, you want to be ahead of the curve, follow siliconANGLE.com. So where are we going to be over the next few weeks? This is the beginning of the summer tour. We have, next week, we're going to be at EMC World in Las Vegas. Right. We're also going to have H-based conference services. They want to cut us off on passive, but we're going to be all there and forced. But H-based is an interesting conference because it's a one-day event. It's kind of like the inner circle of the open-source community, and it's probably one of the most explosive scenes right now in tech. We're not familiar with H-based out there, guys. Go register for that conference or actually can't, but watch it online, watch the cube. It's completely sold out. Again, anything Cloudera's doing is just phenomenal. After that, we have IBM Edge. Right. We have HP Discover. Right. What else do we have there? What else do we have there? We have HP Discover. We have a busy schedule. We have Google I-O, a bunch of events. Imagine Edge. IBM Edge. Dell Storage Forum. Dell Storage Forum. Google I-O. We're going to try to do a little gate crash there. We'll be at VMware. VMware World. In August. In August. VMware World. Right. Back in the Moscone, which I'm very excited about. Yeah. Even though a couple hours further in the plane, I'd much prefer to be trying to find out what's your final parting thoughts for today? Well, I think that we heard McDermott set it up yesterday and give the high-level messaging. He was saying, you know, maybe looks a little tired, but I think that both the CEOs are very credible. They're confident and that's coming across despite some of the bumps on the road, you know, the financial results and so forth. I think they're steering the ship in the right direction and that direction as well. They're injecting social. They're talking analytics. They don't talk a lot about big data, but you know what? They're talking about analytics and I think that's a great big day to play. I think the big challenge is, you know, their past is like a boat anchor. It's slowing them down. Yeah. And that's going to be their challenge, you know, and they're fighting a multi-front war. But what a successor, I think, in terms of an example of a large organization that really has said, and we're going to take that innovation. And I love that. I love the fact that they are making some bold decisions. I think they are trying, John, not to cannibalize their young too fast, but it's inevitable. The faster they rip off that bandaid, the sooner they're going to be on that growth trajectory, even though they grow pretty well, but a lot of that comes from, you know, their traditional maintenance business just kicking along. But I think they're really good at this. The side base move was, I think, big. The success factors move was big. They're filling in with some major acquisitions. And now, really, they got the pieces in place. They really do just got to, you know, pull it off and compete in the marketplace. I think they'll do well and here's why. This customer base is starved for innovation. They're starved for cool technology. Good point. And I think they'll lead it up. I think they will. And I think they're reaching the look at Oracle and Exilogic and say, wait a second, they've just piece together, you know, they've piece together technology over the past 10 years. There's nothing really truly innovative out of this. But SAP HANA, different story, different story built from the ground up, really core technology. I'm really interested.