 All right, great. Thank you, John. So we heard Jim Hagam and Shinabe this morning talking to a very large audience. And Jeff, why don't you join me? And he talked about medical devices being input to the analytic databases. He talked about everything being mobile and cloud. Everything. Now, it's interesting to me. We heard a little bit about this last year. We certainly heard a lot about mobile last year. Jeff, but we didn't hear a ton about the cloud. And I think that's really what the success factors acquisition was about. Absolutely. Alex Williams, why don't you join us as well? That'd be fantastic. Hey, Alex. Hey, Jim. Hey, Jim. Hey, Alex, thanks for coming on. So let me just reset here. We're here live in Orlando at SAP Sapphire Now. SAP's big user conference. A lot of suits, very formal kind of crowd, very C-level executives everywhere in the audience. We heard some Chris Messaging this morning from Jim Hageman Snabe, the co-CEO. Bill McDermott yesterday, also Chris Messaging. Bill McDermott's really a former sales guy. Snabe is really the product guy. And I thought, Alex, that Snabe's commentary was consistent with the messaging we heard yesterday, simplicity, personalization, the vision of the future. But somehow I thought it resonated better with the audience. What do you think? I think it did. I think that he really got more into the heart of the technology by really looking at it from that business perspective, but really helping outline what HANA means to the company and what cloud means to the company. And by doing that, you can really kind of demonstrate that cloud really is the future. It is part of IT now. And it has to be. And mobile really is the node for IT. IT will now increasingly not be in one place. It'll be everywhere. And I think that's really the message that I got out of what Snabe said. He talked about the intelligence business web and the lines blurring between different types of businesses. Jeff, is he talking about essentially consolidating supply chains and virtualizing supply chains? What did you make of that? I think that's certainly one aspect. But he made a comment something along the lines of companies can now offer business services, even if they're banking services, if you're not a bank. So the idea being you can integrate your partner's services into your offerings in a seamless way so that you don't have to actually build or supply all the components of a given service, but the web allows you, this kind of intelligent business web allows you to integrate all those pieces from your partners to offer a comprehensive offering. It's also a lot of talk about productivity and the impact that things like HANA are going to have on productivity. It's an interesting perspective, I think. We think about productivity from the PC era. Everybody got PCs in their hands. It was a huge, massive productivity boom. And prior to that, you really never saw a relationship, statistical relationship between productivity and information technology investment. Snobby put forth a vision today of really extending the productivity through analytics, through, you didn't really save big data a lot, but through analytics and really dramatically changing the way in which customers are able to respond, his customers and companies are able to respond, driving massive increases in revenue. And that's really what I think he's talking about in terms of productivity increases. I saw, I was wondering where he was going with the population boom and the mobile boom. And then I think he helped crystallize it when he talked about how much data people generate. And by the generation of that data, it's turning supply chains upside down. And in the process, though, there's the technology because memory is so much greater in the technology, in memory technology. It's so much more advanced now. And you can get so much more data in there that the supply chains are becoming disrupted. But you can also optimize the supply chains and bring much deeper efficiencies. And so I thought he did a good job in explaining that and then bringing it back home to what we heard yesterday from the Berbery's CEO, the ACE CEO, and the Coinstar CEO, who talked a lot about those things. So, Jeff, this is kind of like David Flair's scenario, where you're taking transactional data and operational data, you're bringing it in, commingling it, essentially, certainly not all of it. You're going to have your Hadoop batch processes. You want to sort of keep the data where it is. But you're going to pull nuggets into the operational systems. And that kind of is what HANA enables, I guess. Talk about that a little bit. Right, well, HANA, we heard McDermott yesterday kind of mentioned a couple times as HANA as a big data solution. But it's not exactly, it's certainly not akin to Hadoop. And the relationship there is Hadoop is where you're going to do your big batch processing, crunch a lot of historical data. You're going to take segments of that or some of the insights, the nuggets, as you say. That's where you kind of load those into HANA in memory situation, where you can now act on those in your operational systems and actually turn those insights into action. So when a customer exhibits a certain behavior, makes a certain purchase, it kicks off another activity, either an upsell, a cross-off, or doing whatever it might be, based on the insights that you perhaps derived from a totally another system. But now it's living in HANA. And in real time, you can take action. Yeah, and another David Flawiarism, he defines real time. Alex says, fast enough so that you don't lose the customer. That's really a good definition, right? You think? I mean, because people split hairs over really, what is real time? Yeah, I think people are starting to split hairs over, what is big data? And I think when you can put 100 terabytes of data in memory, which looks like SAP is gunning to do, that's significant. And the amount of, it's not just what you can do with one thing. It's what you can do with multiple things with HANA when you're starting to use it in an optimized way. For instance, in financial services, I saw an example yesterday where IBM has developed some methods for how to track workflow capital better for the CFO. And they can now track multiple KPIs, much better than they ever could before. They can get results in 15 seconds that used to take hours. They can get results now in just 15 hours that would take a few months. And so that just turns everything upside down. So maybe it's not like so much more data that they can access. I mean, it's not like petabytes of data. But this is where I think where you start to see the capabilities that integrates you to real-time data with things like the data, right? So you can push that data back into the loop. You can start using like, you know, Flash was more effective way to really optimize the real-time data and start creating kind of this cycle between those two different companies. He also took a little stab, very minor, but it was subtle. SAP really doesn't trash the competition. They're like the exact opposite of Oracle. Yeah, how so, Mike, tomorrow? Hope he does, because that'll make a good review for us. But he said something to the effect of imagine where all data is in memory and you don't need any traditional disk-based database. That's obviously a slight hint at Oracle, but also others. I mean, EMC, NetApp, we're going to have that on theCUBE. Today, I want to ask those guys, you know? What do you think that means to you guys? Now, I don't think all data is going to be in memory. I think all active data will eventually be in some type of memory or Flash, and then the bit bucket will still be the spinning disk, because it's clearly going to be less expensive. But, you know, I think that's really what he meant. And that really speaks to some major changes in the architecture, the IO architecture of the system. And again, I keep bringing up David Foyer, but he's written some great stuff on Wikibon. If you Google, or actually go to Wikibon and search IO-centric design. What's really been getting down to this more than anyone else? Well, Fusion IO, for sure. And I think that, so for the past 15 years, we've seen functions sort of migrate out of the server, you know, outside the other side of the channel. Do disk arrays and, you know, things like snapshots and replication and other data-sharing techniques and data movement. That function, maybe not that function per se, but a lot of function is now moving back because flash is persistent. You're certainly seeing it in laptops. I hope I never have another laptop with a hard disk in it. I don't think I ever will. Why don't the economics permeate into the enterprise? They clearly are going to, you know. And so to me, this is what Snabe was talking about when he talked about the productivity increases. Massive increases in productivity. Well, what's productivity in the simplest form is revenue per employee. That's a great measure of productivity. So how do you increase revenue per employee if you can allow people to see things in near real time and act on them and impact the outcome, that's going to increase productivity. And I think that's what he was talking about. Massive, massive changes coming. I mean, just to simplify it even more, just think of what in memory allows you to do in terms of touch the customer that many more times in a given day in an hour, whatever it might be, whereas an employee in any given particle market might take an hour to interact with a customer or work on a customer problem because the system required that much time can now do it in maybe five minutes. If that's the case, well, you can do the math and you can see how many more customers in customer problems and situations you can deal with in a given period. And that's going to certainly increase productivity. That's pretty much the definition of it. Now, let's talk about success factors. You had mentioned, I'd never seen Lars speak before, Delgarde, who's the founder and CEO of Success Factors and now a member of the executive board of SAP. I'd never seen him speak before. You said he's a fantastic speaker. He does a lot of hand waving, a lot of rah-rah, but very credible, I thought, and really motivating and quite impressive. So tell me what you thought of his discussion and we'll get into it a little bit. Well, I think he represents that future that we've just been talking about where the cloud really is IT now and how does SAP adapt to that? And what I got out of it after talking to some analysts afterwards is that we're starting to hear a lot more about this kind of loosely coupled infrastructure. And SAP will increasingly talk about that loosely coupled infrastructure and they'll develop a unified UI. And I think that's what Lars wanted to show during the keynote. And I believe he did was showing how social fits into human capital management, for instance. And what I'm hearing also how collaborative analytics are being used inside stream work. The question I have is how will these, how will they start dividing the territories here? What will they do? And so we're hearing about financial on demand. We can travel on demand. We also have career on demand. What those, I think, represent are what Lars really is going to focus on. And I think in large part with people like Samir Patel, who I'm so excited to see a blogger, someone who really is part of our community, becoming like a senior ranking guy at SAP. And I think people like him will be instrumental to SAP as they embark on this future. I really believe it's a loosely coupled world that they're really going to focus on. Well, you know, loosely coupled but highly integrated, I think. He said loosely coupled, and I'm sorry, loosely coupled but end-to-end integration. So loosely coupled meaning you can have your choice as to what, I guess, modules. I'm using that term module. He didn't use it because it's such an on-premise term. But what software function you can choose, whether it's talent management or he gave a number of examples, talent management, procurement, social learning, learning, recruitment, and there's probably a half dozen others. So you can choose those independently or together. And he drew many, many permutations, I don't know, 10 factorial permutations of combinations that you could choose all in the cloud. The other thing that struck me is his title. He's up there, he's talking about Lars Dahlgaard, beautiful, the SAP graphics are just fantastic, aren't they? But the whole vibe here is just really, really professional. I think the best of any event, as good as IBM, maybe even better than that. And IBM is very good, you know. Yeah, IBM's done a great job with their smarter planet, but kind of the sophistication here and the elegance. Elegance is a good word for it. And then so, I digress, but so his title is Founder and CEO of Success Factors and member of the SAP Executive Board. So they've empowered, that to me is very, it says a lot about what they're trying to achieve culturally. They're saying, we want you to bring your mojo to SAP. Now, you're in charge of 5,000 people, presumably a lot of developers, make it happen. And this guy can really, is a real visionary. Yeah, he is, and he's really fast. And apparently what I'm hearing is that they have really been saying to people, they've been weeding out people, you know, because they say, we just need to work faster. We need to be able to be more aggressive. And there's people in SAP that have historically been developing systems for years and years and years who don't fit as well with this cloud-up model. And what's interesting about what you say about his title, it's a similar title to Vishal, you know, who was in the executive board, who's really a hasas like, you know, right-hand man, right? And so that to me says a lot about, you know, about Lars's significance in the company. Yeah, so, Susu. No, I was just gonna say, I think that acquisition was about a lot more than just the technology. That was about bringing on, as you said, a visionary, somebody who can actually spearhead the entire cloud approach. And we heard Snobby talking a lot about cloud and his keynote this morning. I mean, that's a key part of their go-to strategy within a couple of years, decades, perhaps. So I think it was much more about kind of bringing in the IQ, the visionary, than necessarily just the technology. Well, there's a lot of ways to skin an acquisition. You know, sometimes you just jam it right in, right? And do tight integration. Other times you just leave it alone. This is not a leave it alone deal. I mean, I had trouble sort of discerning the lines between success factors and SAP. Now, the acquisition is pretty recent. So the lines, I'm sure, are still pretty stark. But so, let's go through it. So he mentioned he has a 5,000 person team. I presume that's a lot more than just success factors, right? He said, at the same time, he said success factors has been in business 10 years. They've got 100% on the cloud. He said 15.6 million unique users. Now, I believe Snobby used that number as well in his talk, that we have 15.6 million users in the cloud. Now, that would suggest that SAP, I don't know if they're commingling SAP cloud users or let's say SAP didn't have any, which essentially is the case. That's why they made this acquisition of success factors is to get them into the cloud. And they were late. They had no question about it. Almost 500 million in bookings in 2012. I didn't say run rate. He didn't use those words. He said, we're nearing 500 million in 2012 bookings. I incurred that to me in year to date. I don't know what you guys thought about that. That would suggest they're at a billion dollar plus run rate. I was wondering about myself. Yeah, bookings, not necessarily the same as revenue and... No, he said billings. Right, so the question is exactly right. But I think if it was, if they were on a billion dollar run rate. So billings would be revenue. Right. So we need to bring back the concerns and just carry them into the field as we need them. Yeah, that's a good question. What's the point that you think I'm really good at? I think it's an actual question. We've got a break, and so we're here live. This is Dave Vellante, wikibon.org. I'm with Alex Williams of Silicon Angle and Jeff Kelly of Wikibon. This is day two of SAP Fire Now. And we are gonna bring you wall-to-wall coverage all week, and we'll be right back after this word from our sponsors.