 Shandani, welcome, repeat guest, get nice and close to the microphone last year. We had Vinny on talking about his new book, The New Polymath, which essentially a polymath is an individual with a wide variety of expertise, right? I think I called you a renaissance man. You were very humble and said, no, Dave, I'm not a renaissance man, but you knew a lot of people that were renaissance men of technology and you profiled them in your book. And we're here to talk about a new book. It's called the IT Switch Hitter. Is that right? The Technology Switch Hitter. The Technology Switch Hitter. Right? Better than the IT. Better title. So I'm not good at titles. So tell us about the Technology Switch Hitter. It sounds like part two of The New Polymath. First of all, how'd The New Polymath go? Maybe you could summarize the premise of the book and then we can talk about the Technology Switch Hitter. Well, thank you for having me again. You're welcome. Good to see you at another event. Good to see your show continue to grow. So thank you. Dave, The New Polymath, as you summarized, what's about this new world where we are seeing companies learn to take a little bit of information technology, a little bit of biotech, a little bit of nano tech, a little bit of clean tech, a little bit of help tech, come up with just amazing new products, not just because they wanted to show off and say, hey, we've got all these disciplines, but because they're trying to solve some really what I call grand challenges, we face as mankind. So there's ecological issues, there's health issues, there are information technology issues that this combination of technologies is allowing us to solve. So Polymath Renaissance Man meant to describe these companies that are learning to embed so many different disciplines. How has the book done? It's done well, but more importantly, I've had a chance to go present probably 50 different events around the world and talk about this new world of compound innovation. So it's probably exposed the idea to another 15, 20, 25,000 people as part of the events. So in that sense, it's been very gratifying. What are some of the events that you've done? One event in London, Capgemini in Amsterdam, a Lexmark event in Lexington, Kentucky, all over the ice cool and Toronto. Book signings and all of them? Yes, but more importantly, just a very wide range of, I was at Arizona State in Tempe, bunch of students and alum and professors, very different setting from some of the more corporate oriented events that I presented. Just great to see so many different audiences interested in innovation and so on. So we're talking about solving some of the problems. I wonder if you could go in and we talked about this a little bit last year, but for those folks in the audience who aren't familiar with the book, maybe give us some examples of some of the problems that you're talking about, that the new Polymath, the technology Renaissance individual is helping to solve. So one example from the book was something called the GE net zero project. In their view, none of us should have to pay utility bills. So they have an initiative. In their world, they're looking at each one of us, in fact, being able to sell back to the electricity grid, a bunch of power. Now, how do you do that? To be able to do that? Our vision is we would have next generation solar panels. We would have scaled down wind turbines at our home. We would have next generation LED lighting appliances that are smart. So we can have the spin cycle at six o'clock and the watch cycle at nine o'clock. We would have interfaces to the smart grids that utilities are building. We would have all kinds of home energy managers. So when you step back, you look at it and you go, what is this initiative? Is it an information technology initiative? Yes, it is because it's got software and sensors and so on. Is it a clean tech initiative? Of course it is. Is it a nano tech initiative going forward? Because some of the technologies involve next generation composites and so on. Of course it is. So a combination of a whole bunch of sciences coming together in one initiative. That's incredibly visionary. I mean you think about humans becoming a power generation node, selling energy back to the energy companies who then would presumably offset a lot of the billions in capital expense that they have to go through and still profit from being able to resell that energy. Some of the utilities call it their next power plant because it means they don't have to invest that much capex in a new power plant. So they're willing to come up with variable pricing if you consume less or can sell back to them the power that we may be generating. So all this has to be worked through over the next few years. But in Germany it's amazing to see how much of this is already happening. A lot of German farms and houses are selling back to the grid. So the technology switch hitter sounds like a very thematic picking up on the new polymath and you know it's interesting Vinny. We were just here a short year ago talking about it and it's amazing how much has changed since I mean you know the role of the data scientist for example we were just talking about all over to Oliver Busman about the changing role of the CIO how infrastructure applications and devices are completely flipping that role on its head the importance of security and the CISO etc. So you wouldn't have thought that in a year so much had changed that it would be fodder for a new development new book. But talk about what's new and the technology switch hitter and you know why the book why now. So it's actually a slightly different theme than what you just talked about. Okay it talks about two converging trends that I see. One is that traditional technology buyers are learning to embed technology in their products and become technology vendors. So that's one side of the switch hitter equation. What do I mean. So Nike shoes have sensors. Cars have all kinds of sensors and software and satellite support. Grills have Bluetooth. Moen has remote controls for showers. I cannot find a single industry. You know when I started to do my research I thought maybe 8 or 10 industry and medical devices auto etc were leading the charge. But I'm now up to 30 industries that are coming up with smart products smart services right. So I'm talking to townships that are coming up with the next generation parking garage that have sensors and parking you know to tell us which parking spaces are empty next generation charging stations for electrical vehicles. I cannot find an industry that is not thinking about technology embedded product. So in that sense these companies are learning to become technology vendors because now they have to think about spare parts. Now they're learning about my God Moore's law. Software testing yeah exactly you just got to retrain their channel got to retrain their sales force. They're learning about Moore's law right. Think about GPS when it first came out in cars. It was three four five thousand dollars. Well the sales person still expects to charge that. You can pull out your iPhone and say why would I pay you five hundred dollars for that. You know so so they're learning all these new nuances of becoming technology vendors. Okay so that's one vector one one. On the other hand the more I look at particularly the consumer tech industry if you peel the onion behind an apple or an Amazon or a Google or a Facebook the well run ones it is amazing the industrial best practices these companies have deployed. Okay so you go into the Apple retail store the average retailer who's been in business a hundred years drools about Apple's retail metrics. You know the sales per square foot the consumer satisfaction etc etc. If you look at Facebook's data centers this is stuff that IBM and Accenture should have been designing. I mean it is quantum better than what the corporate data center is today. If you look at Amazon supply chain innovations right. Postal injections and so on. This is stuff that Walmart and FedEx used to do twenty years ago. Okay these vendors are becoming the new buyers in the sense that they are propagating new industrial best practices that now the P&G's and the Kimberley Clarks are saying my God why aren't we doing that right. So you see the other vector these technology vendors are becoming more like buyers they're becoming the new best practice leaders on the other hand buyers are becoming more like technology vendors. So the thesis of the book is anymore we can't pretend to be just a buyer or a vendor right. We can't just say I'm a consumer of technology or I'm a producer of technology. We've got to become at both sides you know and that has some dramatic impact on IT right. Because IT has traditionally been a consumer and deployer of technology now they've been forced into becoming producers of technology. On the other hand you know we can't afford to have software vendors who say I deserve 90% gross margins because these customers understand how to produce technology how to deploy it. They understand the economics of technology much better than they did 10 years ago. So there's some profound impact that the industry is going to go through. Interesting premise Vinny so essentially you're by implication saying that the way in which traditional buyers are actually applying technology is becoming maybe more important than the traditional way in which we as an industry have looked at the sellers of technology. For example Microsoft software having such an impact on me because of an operating system that compared to the examples you just gave it just seems outdated right that an operating system would have all that value the value really is in the way in which whether it's automobile companies you mentioned medical device companies manufacturers are applying technology to create new business capabilities. Absolutely and quite often what's interesting is if you go to Daimler for example right doesn't make Mercedes. They have a thousand software engineers who have nothing to do with the CIO. It reports to the R&D and product engineering group. So over and over again I'm seeing examples of companies buyers of technology who are because they're deploying technology and product are very worried about the brand, they're very worried about the product are learning to become deploy a new version of technology consumption and technology manufacturing. It's dramatic actually. Many of them are avoiding IT in their product areas. Yeah but they're certainly not avoiding technology. Oh no, no, no. That's all about technology. The new form factors, you know, the phenomenon that I heard at an event a couple of months ago is what I call the Monday morning quarterback, okay. The dramatic difference between all of us the technologies we have Sunday night, right. The HDTVs and the iPads and the iPods at home, the home entertainment at home and then we go on Monday morning to the UI and the old laptops and the old technology is so dramatic that many CIOs are finally saying bring your own technology. There's a term called BYOT. Bring your home technologies. Let's work with that, right. Now many of the CEOs are going to the CIOs and saying where's my iPad? But the smarter the CEOs are saying there is a consumer out there that is used to the iPad and Google and Facebook. What can I sell to them? Why does my product have to be 10 years old? Why can't it be a new form factor which embeds technology, which embeds industrial design principles that an Apple has shown that the consumer is ready for, right. So there's a revolution going on. Yeah, Apple sort of paved the way for mobile adoption and now we're here at Sapphire. We're talking to Vinnie Mershandani who's the author of The New Polymath. He's got a new book coming out called The Technology Switch Hitter. We're talking about the premise of that book. And Vinnie, it's really, you know, you're a former analyst, you've gone deep, done a lot of good work. To me, this is a new take, a deeper take on the whole consumerization of IT. And people have been talking about that and sort of scratching the surface. You're really getting deep into how those technologies are becoming embedded. You know, IBM talks about the smarter planet. There's undertones of that smarter planet. It's a great vision. But you're really coming up with some examples and then sort of combining that with this notion of the consumer tech drive and how companies like Amazon and Facebook are completely changing industry. And not just changing the technology industry, but how they're inspiring the sick codes that have nothing to do with technology to also become technology vendors. I mean, that is the big awakening in a number of companies where they say, if a consumer is used to a Kindle, they're used to, they will likely try a medical device. That looks like this. They'll likely try a lawnmower, which is much more technologically savvy than it was five years ago. They're much more likely to try a new service that is technologically savvy than they were a few years ago, okay? I mean, if you look at Mary Meeker's numbers, right? We have so many devices, so many, you know, so many web services in our daily life. Why wouldn't we try a new form factor in any product, right? We're used to books becoming Kindles. Why wouldn't we try that with how we refill the Walgreen prescriptions or how we look at shoes or how we look at, you just saw a commercial for, you know, under armor here, you know, the shirt they had with the sensor. Smart shirt. It's a smart shirt, right? Smart products are everywhere. I mean, what does this mean for data, right? Because we're talking about devices. You're talking about big data. Billions of devices, and every one of these devices, these embedded devices has microprocessors, they've got tons of lines of code, and it's generating data. It's a sensor on the internet. There are those who believe that as open source software increasingly commoditizes traditional software, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, et cetera, that data becomes the next source of competitive advantage. Do you share that vision in regards to the work that you've done and the research that you've done, do you see that fitting into your scenarios here? I mean, it's almost to the point where our current definition of big data is going to be outdated in a couple of years. It's going to be a tiny data looking back, really. Correct. Now, you know, there are some exciting opportunities from the analysis of that data. There's also a whole bunch of new ethical considerations as we now share even more personal data through our devices. Privacy issues. Oh, God, I mean, you know, we haven't even, you know, now we'll have smart medical devices that'll be transmitting other data. We'll be transmitting all kinds of location data. We'll be transmitting all kinds of, you know, food data as our appliances, you know, collect information on what we're cooking and when we're cooking and all that. We haven't even touched the surface in terms of privacy issues that are coming up. You know, let's talk about that a little bit because there's such talk about security in our industry and not a lot of talk. It's certainly at the CIO level, the traditional enterprise CIO level, about privacy. And based on what you just said, it's going to become increasingly important. It's not the same as security. There's relationships there, but there's also business practices and ethics and maybe new laws that have to come down that really adjudicate privacy in a much different way than security. In some ways, security is intellectually more clean cut. I want to be secure. Privacy, it's like, well, where do you draw the line? David, the funny thing is, let me go back to the new polymath, right? In the 40 or 50 presentations that I've done. Every time I go to a campus setting, the chapter on ethics gets a lot of attention. When I go into a business setting, I don't even raise the topic because it's a very uncomfortable discussion in a business setting. Unfortunately, you know, most companies would rather just avoid the topic. They know it's coming, but they'd rather avoid the topic. And it's not just privacy. You know, I had a chapter on ethics in the book which went into a whole bunch of new, other ethical considerations that are coming up, it's clean technologies and so on. It's not a very comfortable discussion. In fact, one of the guys I quoted in the book made a great point which was, we don't have a 10 commandments for our industry, you know, which is anytime we unleash a new technology, we kind of just throw it out there and wait for society to react, right? We don't have a framework for saying, hey, you talk about data, right? People collect data knowing fully well it's at risk of losing it, right? Isn't it much better not to collect that data? But we just assume, we just kind of accept that it's okay to collect more and more data. So like I said, I don't think we'll resolve the issue in the next couple of minutes, but it's not a very comfortable discussion in the industry. But it'd be worthwhile framing the issue because I've been thinking about this a lot actually and with theCUBE and SiliconANGLE and Wikibon, we've been covering a lot of the whole big data issues. It's hot, right? You know, the game and we want to be where the action is. We did the Strata conference and we talked to Tim O'Reilly about this issue of privacy versus security. I thought he had a good angle on it. He basically said, look, this is an opportunity for companies, so I see the same thing. Companies don't want to talk about it. It's almost like, yeah, we'll figure that out some other day or it's security. We'll solve security, we'll take care of privacy too. Tim's take on it was different. He sees this as an opportunity, as an opt-in opportunity, if you will. Like when we're on our mobile devices and we want to find a place, and Google asks us, can we use your location? We say, sure, because we're trying, we're getting value out of that interaction. And his premise was that data becomes more valuable as organizations package that data, it becomes an opportunity. And as a consumer, I'm going to want to opt-in. Your example about cooking devices, conveying information about what's being cooked and when and there's potentially a way to turn that into a rich data source of information for a consumer that I might like to have access to. Whether it's recipes or other ideas, I don't really know, I can't really envision that. But do you see that as, as you look out, you take your telescope out as the potential bit flip here in this industry on privacy where consumers are saying, all right, I want to opt-in because I see a greater good both for me and my colleagues, my peers. Well, quite often we don't give them the choice. And if you give them the choice, most consumers would probably opt-in, but they wouldn't want that shared in every single scenario that they can't think about, right? So I mean, the thorny issue is, is if you ask the consumers, that's one decision point, which freezes many of them. The second thing is, if you ask them where it can be used. It's too confusing. It's too confusing, right? So that's what I'm saying. We don't have an industry framework. And so everybody kind of goes along and says, well, I'm sure some lawyer somewhere will figure this out. Somebody else's issue, we don't take responsibility for, you know, having a framework as an industry. What, I wonder if we could talk a little bit about Sapphire. So we always have such interesting conversations in Sapphire. We don't even talk about SAP, but so, you know, SAP is a company where last year we heard the co-CEO discussion. Hey, we've got co-CEOs, Kumbaya. It seems to be working pretty well. And so hats off to those guys. We've had them both on theCUBE. We had Jim Hangeman-Shinabe yesterday and we've had Bill McDermott on earlier and they seem to be doing a good job there. The side-base acquisition was fresh. Like, okay, we were kind of scratching our heads, all right, mobile really? And like, yeah, really. So that's good. So we're seeing this transformation. We've seen a lot of the analogy of the app store. Just heard their CIO talking about that, running their business on iPads and so forth. But the fact of the matter is that SAP, the predominance of SAP's business, like many of the enterprise companies is maintenance. They're making money by extracting rent from their customers. Oracle does that, Symantec does that, that's the name of the game. I get the sense that SAP is really trying to innovate, they're pouring money into R&D and they are trying to turn this steamship, but that's going to take a long time, isn't it? I mean, the marketing seems to be way ahead of the actual dollars. Is that a fair perception on my part or on my message? Oh, no, I mean, I think it's one. First of all, Jim and Bill, very compatible. We had dinner with Jim on Sunday, hell of a nice guy. I mean, these are nice, fun executives to be around. Okay, so, SAP is- And in the case of McDermott, he's cool. Well, frankly, I find Schnabe very, very personable. Oh, absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think a great sense of humor, humble in a lot of ways. So, this is a good company to do business. They're making these- People like doing business with SAP, right? Right, right. The, I, this year, even more than last year, I'm convinced that this is a legacy vendor, right? Which keeps doing nice things, nice extensions to the legacy code, but they kind of feel compelled to talk about mobile this, social this, cloud this, because it's fashionable for them to talk about it. The core of the company, the customers keep writing them checks, not just because it's a good, good rental model, is because they've run the backbone of many of the biggest companies in the world, okay? And I think the one thing I'd like SAP to just acknowledge is we may not be the most innovative, we're not an apple, okay? We are a back office, a back logistics backbone provider. I wish they would start focusing more on efficiency, right? Because they always like to say, oh, we do so much innovation for 20 billion, and I like to turn around and say, but you cost your customers 80 billion a year. Compared to that, the innovation quotient is very low. So, how about reducing that 80 billion down to 60 billion? Now, how do you come up with those numbers, just in terms of the investment around? The ecosystem around SAP, you know, the data centers, the offshore application management. She said spend a dollar on SAP license, you're going to spend four on all the other stuff around it. Every single year, right? So, I wish they would become a lot more aggressive about managing that ecosystem. You know, like Apple does, I mean, they go through a certification project, they control that ecosystem pretty tight. SAP has very little control over its ecosystem, right? So, it's, again, I've mentioned this every year for the last several years. I wish they would become more aggressive in managing the ecosystem around it. So, you're more of an application guy, I'm more of an infrastructure person, so I can see how they can attack that infrastructure with things like virtualization. We had a partner on before SAP systems integrator. He was talking about EMC's V block, which is a logical block of infrastructure, compute storage and networking. I can see how they simplify that infrastructure layer. You're proposing a similar type of approach at the application layer. Absolutely, I mean, you look at, talk about infrastructure, right? I know for a fact, some of the SAP customers are paying $2.5, $3 a gigabyte a month to their outsourcers. If Amazon can do it for 15 cents, right? I mean, there is a benchmark out there. You're not just dreaming this stuff out there. They could be putting some pressure there. If you look at application management, salesforce.com supports 75,000 customers. Not, it's not the same footprint as SAP has, but 75,000 customers with a handful of people. Every SAP customer has got an offshore provider doing hundreds of bodies, right? There is something dramatically off that you can bring multi-tenant concepts from the application world and kind of expect your partners to start doing some of that, right? I wonder if I could get your perspective on, I mean, again, I'm more familiar with, let's say, for instance, PC software and the whole concept of bloatware, the vast majority of functionality in Microsoft Office we never need, we never use, and there's a whole suite of applications coming. I mean, I think of companies like 37 Signals that does project management. I think, I mean, this is a simple, dead simple CRM, right? Fantastic. Does that same model project into the enterprise world? I mean, or is that not the case? Because these big companies are using all this function. Is there similar kind of bloatware in the enterprise, or is it just too valuable to pull the plug on those functions? It is probably even more in the enterprise world. Yes, it is. Well, that's encouraging, then, because that says a company like SAP could really truly innovate by simplifying. The opportunities to innovate may not be the right term, they make more efficient. Yeah, yeah, you're right. It's not innovation, it's attack efficiency. Countless opportunities, right? And this is where the research from the consumer tech world that I'm seeing is even more dramatic. When you look at the efficiencies that the way the Facebook runs its data center or Amazon runs its supply chain, you go, why can't it happen in the enterprise? Yeah, and why wouldn't new emerging enterprise software vendors take that Zynga model and develop enterprise applications that are secure, that are functional? I mean, they're going to do that, right? This is inevitable. Or IT, when I say IT broadly defined, not just the CIO, but all the ecosystem of vendors that makes up the IT spend are going to gradually become more and more trivial. So I think SAP actually has a good chance of figuring this out, because if they're developing all these applications for iPad, I mean, iPad users aren't going to accept anything, but dead simple. You buy that? This is rejected. New form factor, yeah, in every aspect of life. All right, Vinnie, Vinnie, Mershandani, I'm standing guest as usual. Really enjoy having you on. Appreciate you taking a little bit of time out of your busy schedule. The new Polymath is his book last year, the Tech Switch Hitter this year. Later in the year. When is it coming out? Well, I'm not even finished with the research. So you're in the research phase, so it'll be fall? Yeah, publishing world is a little old fashioned. It takes a while to get. Good stocking stuffer, folks out there, looking for something for your significant other, your child in business school, or your friend, or just yourself. So treat yourself to the Tech Switch Hitter. Vinnie, Mershandani, look for that later this year. Vinnie, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Always a pleasure. Great to see you.