Jim Hagemann Snabe is the co-CEO of one of the world's largest enterprise software companies, SAP AG (NYSE:SAP), headquartered in Germany.
During a recent visit to SAP Labs Vancouver, he chatted with Business in Vancouver about the company's recent startup forum and Vancouver's place in the high-tech world.
Q&A
Q; What brings you to town?
A: Vancouver is very strong on anything that has to do with analytics innovation. [SAP Labs Vancouver] is – from a time zone point of view – a very important lab because it's close to the Silicon Valley. And it coincided very well with the startup forum, which is the second part of our innovation strategy – that we don't want to innovate everything ourselves. We think our partners can be very helpful in bringing innovation to the market.
Q: This is the first startup forum you have held in Canada. What is the goal?
A: We have a very focused effort to accelerate companies that innovate, in particular on top of our HANA platform. In order for us to be more successful with HANA, we now offer HANA as a platform, not just for SAP, but for any company, including startups. Small companies can now build solutions that were previously impossible to do or too expensive or too slow to do.
Q: What does the HANA system do differently than traditional databases?
A: The idea was very simple – get rid of the disk in the database because the disk is very slow. And we found a way to store the data in main memory and compress it so you can have billions of records and read it in sub-seconds. One example was a company that's doing 3D star maps. You need a lot of data analysis, and HANA turned out to be the best platform.
Q: Why Vancouver for your first Canadian startup forum?
A: We have a strong presence here. The closeness to the west coast in the U.S. is, I think, a huge asset for Vancouver. I believe Canada could take a leading role in being close to the Silicon Valley and create something similar here.
Q: SAP Labs Vancouver was created through a series of acquisitions. Are you also looking to acquire new companies here?
A: That is absolutely also an opportunity. We don't want to buy all companies in this world. What we can bring to the small ones is global market access. We have an enormous customer base – more than 230,000 customers. Imagine the access to that customer base if you work with SAP.
Q: What are the big trends and opportunities in enterprise software?
A: In our industry there's a lot of focus on next generation marketing, on consumer interaction opportunities, on mobile devices. There's a lot of focus on big data, analytics and ways of visualizing data. There's a lot of focus on security. There's a lot of focus also on unstructured data and how to make sense of unstructured data.
Q: What is the global picture for high-tech investment like?
A: I think the phenomenon is global but picking up earlier and faster in North America. I've been travelling a lot the last three weeks. I've been in Asia, various countries in Europe, including Russia. Most countries right now are looking beyond the financial instability and saying eventually we need to grow again, and growth comes from innovation. I think [transformation] will be led by North America, but you'll see Asia, China coming soon thereafter.
