 Dave Vellante, how you doing? Good to see you, this is my colleague John Furrier. Hey, John. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. And no problem. I'm a bit late. No problem, John. No worries, we were... Jonathan Vekker is the EVP of marketing at SAP. Thanks for joining us inside theCUBE. Some had say that you're transforming the brand. We were just talking about, last we get the EMC world, Jeremy Burton, the new CMO over at EMC. He's kind of cleaned up that tech image, bringing it more of a mainstream simplified messaging. Apparently you've been doing the same here at SAP. So tell us first what's happening with the SAP brand, and obviously the marketing side, you guys are killing it with all the media. Great mentions on Twitter, social media doing strong, mainstream media looking good. What's the current state of the union for SAP? So first of all, thanks for the nice mention. I'm glad you've seen us in the social media, et cetera. I don't know if you had a chance to wander around the event, but this is a phenomenal event, almost a million square feet of floor space, 233 partners, et cetera. But kind of one of the evolution of what's happening at SAP is, we're a great corporate brand. When people hear SAP, they know it's a trusted advisor, and they know it's a big partner, they know that we're the global 2000, we get the corporations. What we don't yet have is the more consumer field. And what you're starting to get out of SAP is almost the softer side of SAP, talking directly to consumers, what does it mean for me? I know what it means for the big company, what does it mean to me? And that's the evolution of storytelling. And obviously the customer experience at previous Sapphires comes through loud and clear. The ASUG is really very strong, but now you got this blogger lounge going, you have theCUBE here. It seems like there's a conscious effort to be more collaborative with consumers and influencers. Is that true? You got it exactly right. Not only is it a conscious effort, it follows the overall SAP strategy. You think about what we're doing compared to the other guys is we're the open ecosystem guys. We're the come on in, the water's fine, let's partner on things together. Doesn't matter who you are, you might compete on this thing and partner on that other thing, everybody's in. So think of the show floor. You're here in the middle of everything. The broadcast center is right behind us. The keynote is no separate back room the way you're normally treated. Let's do this open. We're live streaming on the internet. Everyone's involved. That's the way we incrementally reach hundreds of thousands of people and not just 15,000 people. All these new channels out there, it's pretty exciting. Dave and I were just talking before you came on, Jonathan, about the consumer brand. Obviously it's the hot thing. Everyone's got iPhones and tablets, iPads. It creates that sex appeal. The edge of a little Kindle here with our show notes on it. Kind of having fun, doing a little media hacking, as we say. But ultimately there's still a brand opportunity, still a jump ball really in the marketplace for that brand that will become the consumerization of IT brand for the enterprise. Meaning, I can't really put my finger on that one brand. I think it's an open game at this point in terms of which venues. Hey, we trust these guys. We run their business with them and they help our employees be better consumers. How do you approach that marketplace in terms of trying to capture that hill? Well, so first of all, I don't know if it's an open market. Maybe, because it's hockey season, we can say the puck's already dropped in there. People are fighting on it and my beloved sharks are doing quite well right now. But I think the question is, do you want to come at it from a consumer point of view where privacy is dicey, there are no enterprise scalability issues or do you want to come at it from an enterprise point of view? And we think we actually have to leg up on this because we already have 170,000 customers around the world that trust us to run their core operations. And so when you talk about things about personal information, et cetera, we need to do that. We're also now at the acquisition of CyBase, the number one mobility platform there as well. So it's not replacing the people that are manufacturing the devices, but a lot of the networks are relying on us as well. It's interesting you mentioned privacy. You know, a lot of executives, CIOs in particular, talk about security. Jonathan, but you're keying on privacy. Talk about how that's different maybe from security. Well, so security is a, who do you give access to and when? Privacy is what information do you want to intentionally talk about or not talk about? So I'll use myself as an example, right? I have several different blogs. I'm active on Twitter, et cetera. But I don't- What's your Twitter handle? At jbecker, J-B-E-C-H-E-R. Feel free to follow me if you want. I probably should be live checking now my Blackberry to see if I get any tweets or not. Tweet him right now. We're following your CIO now, right? Well, I'd like to say on the CIO, C-M-O. We're following your CIO. Oh, there you go. We had Oliver, if you're listening. We got them now, yep. So okay. He gave us his and so we're fanboys. So the general idea is think of information, there is information you want broadcast everywhere and there's information you want narrowcast. And that's kind of what privacy is, which is what information do I put through what channels? And think about it, same with financial information. Certain financial information you want to disclose, other financial information you can't disclose. I think all information is going to have privacy tagged to it as well. This, in fact, even many bloggers, maybe you guys, in the emails they send around, they say, this is bloggable, this is private, this is non-bloggable. That's controlling not accessed information, but the channel you want to go to, that's the next generation of privacy. And McDermott up on his keynote mentioned social media, specifically talking about the classic, one unhappy customer tells 10, well, social media that's amplified into everybody knows. And that changes the game a bit, right? So this transparency model is great. So unlike other companies like, say, HP, they tell their people very strict, don't talk to anybody. They get fired for just talking on a podcast. You guys are open. So is that culture staying that way? How do you guys handle that? Cause you got an organic base growing, but you got some top-down messaging. How do you balance the two? So if we err, we err on the side in the openness. Cause frankly, with 50,000, 53,000 employees, they're all brand ambassadors. Part of what I say is how do I get the message of what SAP is out to all of our employees? Cause they talk at cocktail parties, they're on Twitter, they meet everybody. And frankly, right now, if you ask somebody about SAP, they'll probably say, aren't they the ERP vendor? Or weren't they started in Germany? And the more we as people have conversations about who the new reality is, the fact that we have simple applications, the fact that they're easy to use, the fact that we're in mobility, it's you guys, frankly. Well, you guys are bigger than Disney. I mean, you think about brand comparison, you got Disney and you got SAP. You guys are neck and neck, I think like 70 something billion per minute, market capitalization. I mean, you're not a small brand, you guys do a lot of things. We just don't have the mouse. Yeah. Or a sports center. Well, you got two CEOs, so you know, that's good theater right there and the CTO and you got a lot of high powered executives at the helm there. But the brand, you guys are doing a lot of, I see a lot of golf stuff and a lot of promotion. You know, we've doubled the brand value in the last 10 years. So it's the investment in the brand's paying off. And the way we've done that is not just by doing top down advertising, which works fantastic, by the way. I think we're better than any tech company at doing that. Have you guys seen our run better ads? Do you get the kind of chills when that comes on in the baseball game, et cetera? Chicken skin. Chickens. Chicken skin. Oh, I'm being led down garden path there, I don't know. But the other hand, again, it's all, it's going back to people. One of the things I often say is the old idea of B2B and B2C being too separate, that's dead. B2, business and business people or B2C are the same thing. So how do you get people to tell stories? My big shtick is storytelling and the art of storytelling is a thing that impacts the brand and eventually helps sales as well. Of course, but you guys, when you're done, you're going to tell the story about SAP and you're going to talk about things different. That's what I want. I mean, I'm really impressed with how you guys do the media thing. I've been following you guys for years on the social media side. And there's a montage of crowdsourcing content development out there. And people are creating what they can get their hands on. So you guys are not shy about pumping content into the system. I mean, you got the big studio here, you got bloggers, you got the blogger lounge, you got the tech ed programs, you got the mentors, you got your executive blogging up and down. And if you haven't, you should check out SCN, which is the SAP community network. There are more, I think about 2.5 million members on that network as well. So not just us pumping out content, it's us getting other people to organize content as well. We're talking to Sam Juno, who does the TV stuff, very impressed with the direction you're taking that. And I can almost see maybe some documentaries coming out of SAP, maybe some sponsoring sports center, theCUBE. Well, it's kind of the new model, isn't it? I mean, in a way, you want to try to write and contribute to the narrative in an open way. You know, not necessarily, here's why SAP is great. You're going to do that anyway. But if you can add some incremental value, you become a source of more value to the CIO and now the lines of business as well. And maybe we become the aggregation point where we start some conversations, participate in other conversations, channel a few more, but it's gone into the days where media and marketing was about, we control the message. That phrase, control the message, we all know is dead. Well, I think control in the conversation, you can, if you do it in a way that's compatible with the market, like we're big on this whole lifestyle of tech. And there's a lifestyle, because people, when they leave their jobs, go home and they do the same things everyone else does. They watch movies and they do normal stuff. They watch sports, and they're all connected. So I think integrating into that is super smart and we're totally behind it, obviously. theCUBE is a, as we say, ESPN 1979 for tech. And with the audience is a huge demand for this kind of content. And that doesn't mean that this is better than CNBC. It just means that it's just a different audience. Exactly the point. So segment audiences, some people want the heavily produced, high-end, it's going to be. Some people want the more informal access behind the scenes. But I think you made another point, which I don't want to get lost, which is the difference between your personal life and your work life, that's somewhat disappearing. It's a blast for our privacy concerns as well. And we try to figure out how the future of software and marketing is going to look like by looking at consumer trends. If you haven't had a chance, walk about 100 feet behind us. There's a Microsoft Xbox Connect, literally connected to our in-memory HANA data accelerator, looking at sports data, baseball data, and you use the hand-style user interface to actually explore data. So is that a consumer ad? Is that an enterprise app? The distinction doesn't matter. I totally agree. I mean, the data is unstructured now. It's coming in for all different vectors. You got, with mobility, it really changes the game because it's truly physical. And I think the other thing that I like about your messaging right now that I'm impressed with is this real, real time. I think when you talk about real time, it's just so beneficial to users. We're in Florida. You can't get any more real time than that, right? So the benefits around me have to be tailored to my needs. If I've got a mobile device and I can get content to it, that's the holy grail. And the key to that is obviously in-memory, low latency, and fast data. So, completely agree, but it's not just getting the content to the mobile device. It's helping the person looking at that content and make an instantaneous decision of what they want to do. If you didn't get to see yesterday morning's keynote with Gabriel Byrne, one of the things he said about is, as you walk past a store in a mall, what if they gave you an ad, which is 10% off the closer in there? You've got to make an instantaneous decision. If you walk five more feet, they may say, sorry, now it's only 5% off. So how do you actually do the phrase, and Bill's keynote was business in the moment. I think real time is changing its character, which is don't wait for decisions, don't wait for six months for a mortgage, don't wait for three months for an answer, just instantaneously do decisions. Cool deal, I mean, I got to think you got some serious goals on your hands this year. I mean, honestly, how do you top this? I mean, record-breaking attendance? Yep. What's your plans for next year? What big things do you get your eyes on? Oh well, so just for the record, I haven't given up on this year yet. So this is from Orlando in May, but we actually have two sister events. This is like a half time. So what's your plan for the second half of the game? Well, in the second half, we're going to actually do a dual court press. We actually have another one of these events happening in Madrid, an event happening in Beijing. And for the first time ever, we're going to do a crazy, but wonderful experiment. In Beijing, 80% of the content's going to be done in Mandarin. You guys talk Mandarin? No. All right, so we're going to have to get some local reports going. My kids go to Mandarin immersion in Palo Alto, so. There you go, maybe we'll get them to come. So think about it. Most day for us, you know. We are a truly global company. One of the few, maybe the only really global company. So if we want to reach around the world, we're going there as well. We're broadcasting around the world, but in those other two events, we're going to be broadcasting from them to other places in the world as well. When are those events? So they're in November, one in early November, one in mid-November. The first one is Madrid. I can't remember the exact dates, but if you go to sapphirenow.com, they're on that webpage. And the other one's in Beijing a couple weeks later. Rainer Zinna, who does the business by design, was on theCUBE early on the first yesterday, and he was talking about how stringent and how global SAP is. He says, in Germany, the privacy issues are so hardcore. Makes the United States look like, you know, taking candy from your baby, not an issue. So by the way, I do not advocate taking candy from a baby. He says this is so easy to deal with. I do, by the way. Baby should not eat candy. He says it's so easy to deal with. It's not a big issue because in Germany, there's so hardcore that SAP's processes have built into that privacy. And so that's obviously a big concern with the mobility thing with, you know, today reporting, we're reporting that night, the top story, I don't think, is that Android phones are leaking personal data. So this is a concern. And you guys, SAP's been kind of criticized for slowing the software releases down, but your brand is about getting it right. That's exactly right. And I think people miss that. People always complain, ah, that one's the latest release. You have the latest release, you want vulnerabilities. So I think that's what Schnabe was saying. You got exactly right. So if I think about the brand promise, the brand promise is about dependability. My business depends on it. It's not okay that if I do payroll, it's a few dollars off. It's not okay if I file my finance reports. They didn't really sum up in all the different, that's not okay. It's okay if some of the social networks are down a few hours a day. So dependability, bedrock is the heart of the brand. Well, it's hard because, I mean, in a lot of cases in the technology industry, taking your time can be disastrous, but this is a situation, this enterprise space where that might not be the case. Well, it also depends on what's definition of taking your time. You probably heard Jim say, we've gone from 12 to 16 month release cycles to now in many cases, six to nine month. Six to nine months isn't two weeks, which is sort of the toy app development model, but it's still much faster than anybody in enterprise software. So two major releases a year. Maybe business objects, what was the cycle? You know, I mean, you've been in this business for a while. Yeah, about every six months, it's about that. In some cases for really bigger things, it'd be once a year. But if you're downloading an app for a mobile phone, that may be every couple of weeks, but then you throw away the old app and nobody really throws away their financial systems. That's true, yeah. Absolutely, I'm going to throw it away. It's my funnel building. So, you know, another thing I liked about there was the messaging of a Schnabe mentioned Apple of the enterprise. And he used Apple as a reference point as an innovation. Actually, he made a mistake. He meant to say that Apple is going to be the SAP of the consumer market. Okay, all right, so, okay, correction. But he's on the innovation wave. And you know, innovation, not consolidation. Obviously, you know, the shortening life cycles and he was pointing to Apple. How does SAP become cool like Apple? How do they become the products like Apple? Is there a specific strategy you guys think you're there? If you had to grade yourself, fun to scale one to 10, where are you on the coolness and then the product superiority? So, first of all, I should just say I'm a tough grader. Second of all is, I think it's kind of disingenuous to declare yourself cool. It feels a little bit like putting on a leather jacket, combing back your hair and saying, I bought a big motorcycle, so I'm cool. So, I won't do that. Like me on Facebook, please. Yeah, exactly. So, you don't really, a strategy to become cool doesn't feel authentic. Instead, what you do is you remain true to your customers. There are some customers that want bedrock, slower innovation, keeping people, there are other customers that need faster. If you do what the customer needs from you and if you do that at the pace they're willing to go, some things should be slow moving. Other things should be mobile, should be a faster development cycle. Financials, don't mess with it too much. You become cool by doing what you say you're going to do. Exactly right. Say you took my lawn, that's where I was going. Because then it becomes not just dependable, but in the, my business depends on it, gets also switched to and my future is based on it. And so that's the dichotomy of the brand. Those are the two things, is future and present. Yeah, and the ecosystem's a big part of that. You know, we get that vibe. We do all the events. We do all of them? We do, well, all the cool events. Okay. All the events we can get to. We did EMC World last week. We're here. We're going to be Synergy. We did VM World. We did Oracle Open World. We did HP Discover. Dramatically different vibes, you know. One of the things that we track is. So what's our vibe? Sorry to interrupt you. So the vibe is open. There's no doubt about it. We're looking for, we're talking to the ecosystem. We're talking to the partners, trying to get a sense as to how serious is SAP? It's serious, the vibe is making money. The vibe is business and making money. And we look at it for every dollar spent on an SAP license, you know, how much is going to be spent on the ecosystem? And what's the ecosystem feel about that? I don't know if you guys have ever quantified that, but to us it's pretty substantial. It's a, maybe it's an order of magnitude more. I don't know if you guys look at that, that way. There are lots of different numbers and I don't think we've ever gotten a hard number that everyone can look at and say, because there's money spent on services and there's money spent on other applications. It's obviously very big. But here's the thing. A lot of people when they say ecosystem, it's lip service. Sorry about that. Because they always think of themselves as the sun in the middle of the galaxy and everybody revolves around them. And when we say ecosystem, we really mean in some cases we lead, in other cases we come and help, et cetera. It's, we're all networked together. So think of a network model more than a sun in the middle and the planets revolving around it. And, well said. And if you have that psychology when you're building an ecosystem, it's much more successful. And well, you guys are also, I mean, the ecosystem's also about making money for people too. And what we're seeing here is that there's been a relationship and a track record of trust of money making. Yeah, there's been, hey, I want things a little bit differently, there's some transformation going on. But the most part you can just tell the vibe is it's like people are doing deals. Sales are being bugged. I mean, people have to run their business. There's some tech going on and business at the same time. So I think that's my option. We watch the floor, people are excited, right, John? I mean, they're happy, they're smiling. It's not like some of the events are like, oh, I got to be here. People want to be here. So maybe I'll turn the table on you guys for a second. So since you've walked the floor, have you seen anything that you didn't expect to see? What's the coolest thing you've seen to use your word? So to me, the service providers are buzzing, right? That whole transformation that's going through their business. Now, we talk a lot about SAP and the complexity of legacy software and how customers can maybe manage through that. We talk about that a lot in the Wikibon community. That oftentimes, complexity is sometimes a euphemism for printing money to a services company. But the services guys that we're talking to are embracing the simplicity message. They see that as a real opportunity for them to transform their customers' businesses and they see it as an enrichment opportunity. That to me is the coolest thing that I've seen. Yeah, I mean, for me, I mean, my asset test is I kind of had the sizzle and the steak formula. Like, with a sizzle, there should be some steak. Which one of you has a sizzle? Which one's steak? Well, we both have some sizzle and steak. And we both bring some meat on the bone. So to speak. The sizzle's obviously the fast, the in-memory with the mobile. Very sizzling of the iPads, like the tech jewelry. I mean, you see guys walking around filming the show, holding an iPad up. I mean, I find that personally hilarious and great. The steak is really the meat on the bone. That is that there's a services angle here that is kind of client services circa 1990 buzz. Where it's like, there's some real transformation where there's some dollars to be made, business to be done, the commerce side of the business. I find that kind of, not the sexy story, but that kind of fuels it. So that's kind of the thing that I see. And in terms of the coolest thing, I do like the wall. The wall is phenomenal. It's a great demo. That's probably the coolest thing. And also the cube is in the vlogger's lounge. We love the cube. It's the cube, we're here, so. What do you think of the cube? The cube is phenomenal. It's another example of open, letting anybody get access, et cetera. The snobby who said, this is a huge concept. He loved it. Because he was comfortable. He didn't get wired up with CNBC. Yeah, exactly. No makeup. No makeup. Oh yeah, no makeup. He was looking, well, he had a nice suit on. But it's a great show. I mean, I'm really excited to see you guys kind of branch into that consumer brand and the IT. Because I think you have a good story there. Great loyalty amongst the people we talk to. Yeah, you get your complainers. I want the latest core. You know, just do that camp, but they're loyal. They're not really kind of throwing you into the bus. So maybe a couple things here. One is, love that you brought up the service partners. One of the innovations we've done over the last year, frankly announced Q3, most of which is rapid deployment solutions, which include package services. What does that mean? That means if you want to deploy a part of the business suite, you don't have to deploy the whole thing. You can deploy something small, like something within the CRM area. And you can actually get up and running in six to 12 weeks rather than, frankly, six to 12 months. So you might say, well, why would a service partner care about package services? That's because instead of just doing implementation, they can shift to some of the higher value things of, well, what are you going to do? What actions are you going to take? The other thing is, is I need you guys are going to be hard on my army, right? One of the things I said is we're transforming the brand. So you got to have stories to tell. We're all storytellers. So what percent of the world's beer is based on SAP systems? 70%. You want to try to make it real? We're going to change your tagline from eating your own dog food to drinking your own beer. Since you make most of the beer in the world. Or if you prefer chocolate, you could say 80% of the world's chocolate. There you go. You can run sweeter. Yeah. I'm telling you, you guys, to me, the next brand, we were joking about, we call ourselves the ESPN of tech. You guys could be our Budweiser, you know, like every, you know, maybe Budweiser. You know, it's like, you know, SAP. Come up with a tagline, you know. Brought to you by WebGems. I mean, we could actually make a WebGem show, Dave, you know. Well, congratulations on a great show. You're doing a great job. Good luck in the second half of the year at the big events. Anything around the corner that you're playing with, marketing-wise, that's different, that's new, taking advantage of the big data and mobile that you can share with us that you're teasing out there? I think the short answer is, you saw SAP's strategy today. It is in memory. It's cloud and mobility. So think about how those are going to transform how marketing would be. Traditional marketing has been very analog. The next generation of stuff is going to be digital. It's all going to be available everywhere. And it's going to be sent to you on your mobile device. So if I'm wandering around asking you for your mobile number, you might know why. Yeah. Jonathan, great story. Pushing the envelope. Thanks for coming to theCUBE. Great to have you. Thanks so much. Appreciate the Cube. Watch us on sapphirenow.com if you can't come live. Sapphire Now, they've got all the footage, amazing amount of video being pumped out. These guys are doing a good job with social media, up and down the stack, high-end messaging, down to the trenches. He's leading the charge. He's like Jeremy Burton, Dave.