Welcome, Larry. Take a seat. Great to see you again How are you?

“Third quarter earnings, doctor.”

“Aah. How did it go?”

Okay, let me start. Two things, all these geniuses mention HANA and they  mention the cloud. But I told them I’m going to just talk about SAP in general! We made the decision to rewrite our ERP and CRM suite for the cloud. We made that decision 6 years ago. We called it Fusion. SAP called it Confusion. If you’re looking for a complete suite in the cloud, you can get that from Oracle. You can’t get that from SAP.

“I see, Larry.  This sounds like your transcript from your earnings call. Now, why are you so focused on HANA?

It is part of the transcript. Thank Seeking Alpha for what I say here! So let’s go into HANA. So SAP decided not to focus on applications but instead, they said, “Hey, let’s go compete with Oracle in the database business and let’s build this HANA in-memory system.” Now the last time SAP decided to compete with us in technology, core technology, they had this thing called NetWeaver and I’m reading all the same questions about NetWeaver that I’m now getting about HANA.

But HANA seems to be getting a lot of attention. I was reading Curt Monash who says you are probably right. HANA may never compete with Oracle databases. But what about online transaction processing? Those will go to RAM someday. Is it really smart to discount in-memory as much as you do?

Oh, come on doc! Now when SAP, and specifically Hasso Plattner, said they’re going to build this in-memory database system and compete with Oracle. I said, duh, get me the name of that pharmacist, they must be on drugs!  Really, doc, I thought that. And that was interpreted by Hasso as saying Larry Ellison doesn’t believe in in-memory database.

Larry – How do you feel about your old nemesis Dave Duffield? He is building something pretty exciting at Workday. As Monash also said, their applications run entirely in-memory in object oriented structures. Their interface is like nothing we see from Oracle. It’s the Web.

Really? Here’s a company that made two fundamental mistakes. They developed in Flash and now they have to rethink that and build something new for it. And they built their own database!  They’re basically, this small company, is basically going to have to build all of their own database technology. I mean they need recovery. They need to create processing.  But Workday, they’re going to rely on themselves. It’s a small company, making 2 architectural mistakes right out of the box.

Larry –  this concludes our meeting. We’ll see you next quarter.