 You're the SVP of the core SAP platform, is that correct? That's more or less correct. So we're talking NetWeaver here, right? That's NetWeaver, exactly. You're the serious tech geek, right? To some extent, I would say, yeah. Even though it might not look like it, maybe I should take that off. It's secure. I took mine off. Based on the audience feedback and the focus groups out there, I took off my tie going with the whole collar thing here, being the blogger they am. Did you basically manage the guys, the Brainiacs inside of SAP, making all this innovation happen? We usually tend to introduce ourselves to the guys who are closest to the operating system. It comes to what SAP is delivering, in terms of application stack, technology infrastructure, NetWeaver underneath, and that's the main area we're responsible for. So it's everything from the application servers, our up-up stack, our Java stack, what we're doing in terms of security, internationalization technology. It's the whole topic of lifecycle management these pieces because we believe you need some, let's say, consistent and coherent way of putting these pieces together. Things like Project Gateway that we're pushing a lot. So it's about all these topics, basically. SAP, Bjorn, has been known for, we're just talking with other guests all through the day here, of going back in the history of SAP, has always been pushing the envelope with software and trying to push the cost of the infrastructure down. Even going back into the days of the mini computer and client server, PC Revolution LAN, and now we're at essentially cloud. It's kind of a redo of client server, but even lower cost. How are you guys taking that core platform down and cost and what strategies and what things have you done and are doing with cloud and mobile and a concept that we coined called fast data? How do you make all that work at the same time servicing all these customers? How many of you have 170,000 customers? I heard 70% of all the beer made in the world is powered by SAP. And it's not just beer, right? There's no chance of meeting your own dog food too. You're drinking your own beer. And being a German company, you've got to franchise on the beer market. Okay, you own that market. But I mean, seriously. I think the basic approach that we're trying to take is really to combine the evolutionary part with the innovation. That's what we've always been doing. I mean, if we look at what our customers are doing with our solutions, it's huge investments that they're doing. So they're very often, of course, hesitant to risk what they have there. They seek to optimize what they have in that space. And there's a lot of things going on with cloud as additional deployment models to increase the speed, how you can adopt new solutions, how you can scale out if you need the performance and the computing power. But it's also always a big demand from customers to see how they can get new innovations that are coming in. I mean, we're every year at the Sapphire presenting great new and hot stuff. And the question is, how do you get that out to customers? And what we've been believing is really that there's not this contradiction of just keeping things stable to allow customers to optimize their business, but they need the innovation to be competitive going forward. And we've heard that this morning in the keynote as well. So that's a big task for SAP and we take it very serious to make that happen. And what we leave is basically that we need a technology platform underneath that enables all these kind of scenarios, being compatible and stable on the one side, a stable core and having innovation there. What does Bill McDermott mean when Bill McDermott, you're cozy? What does he mean when he says innovation or Schnabe? I think Schnabe said this, not McDermott. Consistent core. What does that mean? Is that like an SAP buzzword when he says the consistent core? Does that mean like one core base? Well, if you look at what our current customers have installed from SAP, the solutions that they have, this is definitely the core processes that they are running there. It's mission critical to their business and we go down, they might go down pretty quickly with their business. So that's something we want to avoid to touch at all costs. At the same time, they ask for new innovations to compete with their competitors in a better way, to serve their customers in a much better way. So what they are looking at is how can they extend the edge around this core and how can we bring innovation in there. And that's exactly what we're delivering with our NetWeaver technology platform. And that's how we're going forward. And we basically see three large areas and you've heard that several times now. It's obviously the cloud stuff. It's in memory with HANA, what's happening there. And it's definitely mobility and everything that goes around. Mobile devices, smartphones, be it the iPads, Android or whatever you name. And as you can see from our solutions portfolio and how we're moving forward, we're bringing all these aspects together and they span the on-device, the on-demand, and the on-premise deployment scenarios. And we're trying to do that obviously to the existing stuff, bring that in as non-disruptively as possible, like taking a HANA in memory solution and put that underneath an existing kind of business warehouse installation that customers have with huge investments. And at the same time, there's enormous potential for completely new applications and the trick will be to bring these two aspects close together. So that's what we're for. John was asking about the platform in terms of the cost and taking cost out of the platform. I have a similar question around complexity. I mean, there's a lot of complexity in that platform and yet there's such a drive for simplicity. You talked about the architecture. How is the architecture changing to accommodate that drive towards simplicity? Yeah, I think that's... I mean, first of all, data has been spread around within companies in many databases and many systems. And especially in memory, we now have the opportunity to bring much more of this data together, be it structured or unstructured or event-driven data. Bring that together and run many of the scenarios on top of that data in a consistent way. So that's one way of simplifying things. Then if you look at how applications have classically been built to take load out of the database into scaling application server architectures like a classical client server architecture, a lot of the complexity and handling has been about data consistency doing aggregations to get speed out of a classical database approach to be able to run things like ATP checks available to promise checks and things like that. Obviously, if you now have the computing power with the database, you can dramatically simplify how your data models look like, how your processes look on top of that, how your applications look on top of that. So that's part of the simplification that you can drive forward with that new technology. Speaking our language there and I think the question that I have to ask you is, what is big data? Because we were commenting earlier that SAP has been in the big data business for some time and you're in the data business. You protect data. But the speed is much more of a message here. So what's your opinion of this big data market? The Hadoop open source unstructured data out there and obviously some security risks we're reporting on siliconangle.com today that 99% of Android phones are leaking personal information. So you had an edge that's unsecured in mobility. Now all this new data is unleashed onto the world. It's got to integrate in. Talk about big data and then talk about the mobility. I mean first thing I would do is we separate clearly between having the data in one place and having it available for amazingly fast analysis for simulation and planning on top of the data and potential security risks that you might open up with by going mobile and exposing all the data to the outside world. I think that's things that need to be taken very seriously and we're very serious about especially security in that whole space. But in general it's two different orthogonal problems I would say. If it comes to big data and I don't want to say the sizzle of some of the demos that we're also going to see at the keynote tomorrow with Hasso and Vishal it's obviously the combination of unstructured data that you have in whatever let's say especially in service cases for example where you have a lot of text descriptions around data and you have structured data with the products behind and if you can bring that together with the performance of in-memory that's opening up these new scenarios that we get very, very positive feedback from customers. So that's really kind of the combination where you can now bring unstructured data out of the web or even Twitter analysis on what are the hot topics? What do customers say about my product is whatever my soda getting better kind of feedbacks on Twitter than the completing product? To business intelligence, to business intelligence. You get that stuff into that database and you can run blazingly fast analysis on top of that. You have tons of data out of say meters for example if you go into the utility business where you're creating millions of data points every day and you have to whatever 120 billion data points to analyze figure out what's the data consumption models of my customers as a utility company how can I go out to specific customer this is new stuff this is new scenarios that you're enabling with the fast data in memory exactly and the cloud exactly but not the cloud, just fast data I want to make sure I understand the scenario so basically traditionally you have this big data temple if you will you put everything in there have a relational database management system and now you're sort of describing the scenario you have a lot of unstructured data on Twitter and the web and Google and wherever else but you're painting a scenario where you essentially bring that in to that data temple if you will but only the pieces that you need you can't bring it all in, it's too much and so again architecturally things have to change to accommodate that the database is one piece in this whole puzzle you need some infrastructure on top there's things like complex event processing to basically also define correlations between events, trigger events that you want to get out of it you move up into the space of analytical applications and in the end it's not just about this one you have a data pop basically where all that stuff is in and you're amazing at last but fast on top but it's about getting the applications around it and moving that into the part make this part of the core processes that our customers are running on our existing infrastructure so this is an inflection point of specifically that scenario of getting the infrastructure down to a lowest cost where you have this abundance of compute now with cloud now you're taking the software pushing it into this memory processor if you will for speed so this is again is this an inflection I guess the question is is this a major inflection point in your mind of this new architecture? it is absolutely it's for us it's like the move from mainframe to client server now within memory coming up it's changing dramatically how we think about applications and how we structure applications how you structure data and it's an inflection point for our customers as well quite obviously for them scenarios are possible that weren't be thinkable before it says as Bill McDermott would say that's a game changer and what about in that vein I want to ask you about the notion of actually having persistent storage closer to the memory is that something that is also potentially a game changer I mean you see all this flash and or is it just big memories that are super fast and super expensive as an application developer do you see that as yet another contributor to this inflection point? I think it's I mean data sizes are growing every day and so it's definitely a point that will play a role that will play into that and what we currently see is that with what we have with our memory database we're talking to our biggest customers we're talking to the biggest data sets they are currently handling and it's amazing how much we can get in there like we talked to one of our CGP companies one of our customers biggest ones like it's 460 billion data records that we were analyzing within milliseconds right do aggregations on top of that stuff so that's really scenarios that weren't possible before and you get that at a price point which is quite amazing you heard about that more than an inflection point it's a massive change it's really changing things as well so the question that has come up on theCUBE here this yesterday theme was people are a lot of people that we talked to and people that have come to CUBE are really here this week to monitor the application mobility component how is the core changing or changed for the application mobility can you one share with the folks what the hell does that mean I mean what classically I mean we've been very centric about the desktop being the access to the applications that's how processes were built like the type of users that were actually using those systems and I mean with mobile devices being ubiquitous and whatever 1.2 billion smartphones I mean it's obvious that this is going to be the device how people interact with the systems at the same time it's completely new as the device knows who you are where you are you have video and photo capabilities so it's really changing and adding virtual reality basically to what's happening there now the interesting question is how do you get these kind of devices into your existing landscapes and there's a lot of not just SAP there's also a lot of other legacy systems that contain parts of your data parts of the information you want to get to in a very fast manner and what you definitely need is kind of a link between these new type of devices and the assumption models with the iPad, iPhone all these kind of things back to your old system what we're providing here is something we call Project Gateway which is exactly this piece that maps basically from a REST based OData based open broadly supported model on the outside to consume specifically for certain types of devices data and bring people into the position that they can access data that is coming out of various backend systems be it now your 4.3 4.6c system or the latest business suite released with the latest enhancement pick so that's the kind of link that you need and that again goes back to the point of how do we bring this kind of innovation that's currently happening at an enormous speed into without disruption into an existing customer installation so Project Gateway allows customers to get access to those so called legacy applications and data that's locked in those applications without a rip and replace exactly, from a strongly consumer side driven perspective so what's the data that you need how can I get this in exactly those chunks in my device that I can easily consume and it also allows you to somehow separate who's actually building these kind of things so if you think about a scenario where you want a new mobile app you don't want your IT department to spend months to think about it and then a year later have it developed so you'd rather go into the way how do people how can they describe what they expect from the application and that's what we support with this kind of model and link that then back to somebody who provides the service with all the security and controlling governance out of IT out of the back end systems we were talking to your EVP and marketing about the brand of SAP and you're on the tech side the platform side share with the folks going back go back dial the clock back five or six years SAP was really one of the early adopters of SOA APIs and Michelle we talked with him in the past and then the recession hit and the world started to change what have you guys learned coming out of that technology C change you were innovating there from a tech standpoint so to take us through kind of what's the core competency there and then today you're kind of being everything to everyone around apps tell the folks out there what does SAP technology mean I mean is it what is there a couple of three things you can point to saying SAP is amazing at these three things because the messaging is kind of all over the place with apps and apps to everything so what is SAP technology I mean is it just pure software I mean you got analytics message is there a root technology what we're I mean if we talk about SAP technology it's not a purpose in itself it's not there are some instances right I mean what makes SAP strong is really the vision to run the world better and in the end what we're delivering to customers is solutions it's not about a specific application or product it's about solutions right now what we need to make all this happen and to also do that in a way that customers can actually manage these kind of landscapes and they are running complex processes I mean that's really the tough and difficult things that they are doing out there we need solutions that fit together we need the pieces that basically work together and not just some bunch and pieces here and there that are kind of plugged together without really fitting together and that's what makes SAP and underneath we need this technology platform and that's what we're building the technology for so it's getting all the pieces together and it covers there's some technology it's about applications infrastructure you need application servers to run your mission critical applications it's about for example eight operating systems it's about seven databases that are out there it's a heterogeneous environment heterogeneous environment and I got the in-memory stuff that's tech from SAP there's tech in the in-memory stuff there's gateway stuff we go into this mobility space as you can see here also we're showing a lot of solutions in that space now the technology is enabling so diverse tech base so it's diverse tech it's not one thing it's not an algorithm it's not we don't have just one app server Google says we have page rank it's a full bunch of stuff we go into the extensibility stuff like we have a process infrastructure eight application to application solutions for business to business there's things in the enterprise portal stuff for end user usability how to bring together basically all the various users within your company and allow them access to a ton of systems that they have in the background in a consistent way and have one access point to all these applications I mean this is what SAP is about bringing your end users and bringing your customers customers even into your IT landscape with your business that sets up my next question which is if you're fast data in-memory cloud and mobile that's kind of crystals up to that all that tech rolls up to the top that's cool that's the first half of the game we're at half time now you got the second half of your journey of tech what's your game plan what's coming next for you guys so if we're in the locker room at half time what's next for you guys what's your strategy I mean first of all we have talked a lot at last sapphire about the direction we're going you can see a lot of proof here at sapphire this year that we're actually delivering the next steps I don't want to announce the products that are going to be announced tomorrow come on tell us about the beans show a little we're live tell the world there's not much things in the timeline you will hear in the pipeline you will hear about that tomorrow we have one thing out that I can definitely share which is to us and especially my area very important because I'm responsible for that we have our net beaver release 7.3 which goes general available on May 13th this year we had a phenomenal ramp up this comes out end of this month so you had another release in the fall last year that was going out into ramp up we have as you know the ramp up process where we basically very much control what are the customer projects we provide a lot of support to those customers to get some early learnings is the game plan I'm looking for maybe is it like more categorical is it security I mean you know obviously the second half we're in the locker room is it more security more speed more performance what's the focus I mean the whole topic we talked about these three things what we're currently doing is we're doing individual applications of course on HANA there's BW on HANA that's something we're seeing as the next big step and we get a lot of good customer feedback and we're extending HANA to go and support business suite applications we're putting that into our business by design solution so that's obviously the next step here from a mobility perspective we have mobile enablement for business by design we have the mobility solution with Sybase on my platform next release coming out which will also support connecting into business suite I talked about project gateway which will see a go to market so there's a number of things in the pipeline I will not give you the exact date we have official announcement you look excited how do you feel good I'm absolutely excited this is great times at SAP there's a lot of innovation topics happening and we talked about some of them and we see I can see taking things shape I mean that's what currently happening we have been talking about it a year ago and now it's really you see that we have made a lot of progress there's a lot of demand pieces really come together the marketplace is growing we're on an upswing there's demand and you guys got it mobile adoption is exploding we've been talking a lot about the metaphor of the App Store and we've heard a lot of your customers talking about that as well and in the App Store you have the platform and also the application you're both so you've got to service both of those constituencies how do you see that developing that is a very exciting the very nice thing also about SAP going into this on demand space is really that we had a lot of learnings what does it actually mean to operate it's a different thing whether you deliver software to somebody or whether you deliver service to somebody and we had over the past month with the with by design and we go to market with by design we had many many learnings out of what does it mean to operate such an environment how do you get TCO down for such a solution how do you can you provide a quick development cycles also which is a very important thing because you want to innovate and keep innovating and pushing that out to a customer faster than you can do with large on-premise shipments and we're taking these learnings back into our on-premise software and that's a very interesting thing and that's how we're moving forward in that space and we're trying to really bridge the gap between this on-demand and on-premise world that's one of the next or the forward going themes and topics as well we strongly believe I mean a lot of the processes will always remain on-premise no customers currently thinking about moving some of their most mission critical yeah it's not going anywhere but the more and more they think about like edge applications things that are not that much critical to their core business to move that for cost reasons for speed reasons into the cloud now how do you connect this and this is one of the big topics that we also believe we can best solve with one technology platform underneath with the orchestration capabilities that span across both and then you can all of a sudden also add kind of our whole support offering around the solution that spans from on-premise into cloud into the on-demand space and then you have something like enterprise support and max attention and all the things our customers love because we can support them in keeping their business up and running you can basically provide all these kind of things in the full space across all these departments how has the pressure from the CEOs come down on you with the Jim Schnabe's mandate life cycles from 12 months to 6 I mean is that how do you feel about that I mean you got but he talked about like you got best practices you got a lot of prefabricated tech you can bolt into that yes it's pressure actually but it's also very rewarding and we've completely rebuilt our internal development processes to run long agile and lean methodology so we're delivering working software every four weeks now there's our Tuck site internally my organization which is a 2000 developer organization worldwide we're completely running in this lean software development methodology huge shift that we've done over the last two years and you see the engine running and we're delivering by design feature packs 3.0 or 2.5 3.0 3.5 you were criticized by the you've been you've been criticized on the delivery of by design in the past I was looking at some of the coverage but it turned out to be a good move because if you look at all the recent you know cloud crashes yes you know Schnabe's like hey you know we made a good call we tested it we delivered it things are crashing out it took us a while to get there there's nothing to hide it away 2.0 by design 2.0 now 2.5 I think we got it right that's also what we see now with customer adoption where we are from an internal operations perspective the way how we can develop and kind of ship in six to nine month cycles new versions of this by design increase it from an industry and country perspective now with a partner development kit on top we can also get partners on board to build actually and all the pieces somehow fall into place and it makes a lot of how do you get the real-time information from the customers because you know we heard on stage customer centric you know you're getting more from the customers I mean you askly with McDermott running sales and marketing and Schnabe running the product engineering is it awkward there I mean you how real-time are you on the how real-time are you on customer feedback I mean honestly with by design you guys said you sat down with customers is it focus groups is it reference accounts reference architectures we're really a lot to get more and more direct customer interaction and the on-demand model is definitely one model that supports that a lot it doesn't help you if you develop a product that takes whatever years to develop and years for customers to adopt and get feedback about it when you always move forward the whole thing is very much that's not a good model it's very rewarding that you have to ship something and deliver something to the customers and use it within six months right and you get feedback immediately that's one thing the second thing is that the models and customer engagement initiatives were even our development teams like our scrum teams for example have direct interaction and we have customers participate in our scrum planning and scrum review cycles so we're doing that big time to make sure that we do the things right from the start from the design perspective and not as an afterthought kind of getting support messages and trying to fix it afterwards so the whole model how we work internally that was pressure yes to go to that cycle but actually it's also very rewarding for people much more feedback whether you built the right stuff or whether you're completely off and you get that pretty early so it avoids you to whatever do waste a year of development with somebody that nobody likes so that has changed dramatically okay we're here inside the Cube I'm John Furrier the founder of SiliconANGLE.com and Dave Vellante my co-host SiliconANGLE.tv the leading provider of tech coverage at events this is the Cube our flagship telecast where we go at events and talk to the smartest nodes out there Yoren thank you for coming in with our smart content machine you're awesome thanks coming into the Cube anytime it's great rewarding thanks for coming on thanks for coming on appreciate it great job thank you