Interview SAP Data Space in Berlin

As known that Berlin as “the most important city in the blockchain cosmos”, world’s largest corporations such SAP for sure won’t be left behind in terms of Blockchain technology. Last week, our Chief Operations Officer Dr. Kyung-Hun HA had an interview with Chief Innovation Officer Dr. Jürgen Müller from SAP about their professional insights and business perspectives for Blockchain at SAP Data Space.

Video 1 :

Kyung: Can you tell about a little bit about this place, why do you choose this location?

Jürgen: Here it’s a public space,it’s the SAP Data space and SAP outreaches into the developing community she created like a great space here, where SAP but also like others can have events and so Lition for example today you can can have an event here and we can shoot this video.

Kyung: The community is obviously interested in getting to know you so tell us a little bit more about your role as a Chief Innovation Officer at SAP?

Jürgen: My Boss, CEO at SAP, Mr.Bill McDermott, made it very simple, so I only have one task: to making sure that SAP does not fall behind any kind of innovation waves that are coming, but on the other side we lead the way for our customers.

Because they expect guidance from us when it comes to innovation topics around enterprise application.

Kyung: That sounds very interesting.

Jürgen: And today days are very very different so from a lot of customer interactions, of course a lot of internal interactions with our teams. And then we have of course a lot going on on all the technology trends but also talking to partners to customers.

We created an internal innovation “Round-table” so I asked our board members actually to nominating innovation ambassadors, so therefore we now have a very very strong innovation community with SAP and we have the same externally so we have an external innovation” Round-table “ where we meet with futurists with professors and forward thinkers in the industry already beyond to discussing innovation topics.

Kyung: so externally you got a feedback from from your partners from research etc. But how we make sure that you that you really get all the information, and that you make sure that you kind of like to prioritize the information , and use it for your day day to day business?

Jürgen: That is the work of when we talk about technologies of the Innovation Center networks.

So you can imagine that there’s like a huge fund information coming in and potential ideas coming in, and then you have to like select, and we have a process in place of how to do it so. first there’s like exploration, you invest like a small amount of time then you were like ideas, and try to create product ideas, then you validate those with customers and then finally gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Then once your pivot a lot and iterate a lot and you find your sweet spot, then it is like very very interesting and then you can scale massively and have great great success.

Kyung: what do you think particularly are the challenges for startups especially in this in this innovation field?

Jürgen: To finding the right product market fit, so I think this is the largest challenge mm-hm because if you if you don’t have it and you push to a heart you don’t know where you are going right if you if you have it then it’s it’s an execution risk so then you need experienced leaders and experienced people in the company who know their domain and then it is a likelihood of success is very very high.

Kyung: So SAP is basically assisting them as well, right? on the on these decision-making processes.

Jürgen: Yes , so we we do bring startups into our ecosystem right and for example when we work with the SAP.IO and therefore we we help them bring them together with our experts so we appreciate that a lot.

Kyung: We basically talked already about innovation but what’s the meaning of innovation for you?

Jürgen: hmm very important is its invention. so coming up with something new plus adoption.

So very often innovation start stops at invention and then people are happy and already satisfied that might be good enough in research so because you might discover might have discovered something new right and probably later on someone else can use it. But if you want to drive commercial innovation it is invention plus adoption

thank you so much.

Video 2

Kyung: SAP is focusing on different technological streams you mentioned already, what other advantages of notching technology ?

Jürgen: so SAP, to start with that is a leader in central ledger technology, so this is like many many customers more than 350,000 customers run on SAP systems and that’s their central ledger.

And now first blockchain brings the opportunity of having distributed ledger so potentially all use cases or business scenarios where you have multiple parties involved and middlemen involved and like a lot of negotiation is happening and reconciliation is happening today, the potential is there that these use cases get disrupted, with like having a shared data ownership more efficiency, more transparency, so that’s why of course that is a very very interesting topic, whereas of course not all challenges are solved and that’s why also like technique deep life and the technique expertise has to be there in order to make Blockchain use cases happen.

Kyung: what industries are in which industries do you think the most tangible benefits can be can be achieved with respect to the blockchain technology ?

Jürgen: I do see that in industries like let’s pick, track and trace so where do you need that, you needed in the farm to fork use case all, you want to verify where is food coming from? has it been contaminated? maybe if you add other sensors, just like have temperature boundaries being exceeded where any anomalies there. Or similarly in the farmer supply chain, is the product if pharmaceuticals are their genuine? or are they counterfeit?

So to have these kinds of proofs and what I do see is that many consoles here are being formed,where I complete value chains for example with regard to transportation or with energy production come together in a permissioned blockchain to actually share data, and leverage this potential efficiencies.

Kyung:so as you know there are many blockchain projects out there, and what I mean from your perspective what are the downsides of current blockchain technologies ?

Jürgen: we do see scalability challenges in the public blockchain, you do see like energy consumption challenges, do you see like transaction cost. Also of course you want to have even immutability, you want to have all abilities and this all should stay.

But you want to have like some of these restrictions you don’t want to see, so therefore we we actually in the moment see that most of the use cases are in permissioned blockchains. So people come together and actually it’s also then not only about technology, but you you do bring together value chain, you do bring together partners and they also change like how they work together. And maybe even complete business models if like intermediaries to do not exist anymore, so they did do some work today, valuable or not you can argue, but if that work has not been done any more, it somehow has to be done by someone else, or you have to come together as organizations. so this is I think even the larger challenge then the pure technical challenge.

Kyung: you already mentioned permission and permissionless blockchain technologies, so what do you think are the benefits of public/private deletable blockchain infrastructure?

Jürgen: Yeah, so in some cases it will be sufficient to have like private blockchain. So if you have for example a clear owner of an asset and then you don’t have all the benefits of blockchain, certainly. Then if you want to like to do that through a blockchain use case in a bit broader user community, what we actually as I said to see is permission block chains, but then how do you verify this in like, in the public domain? you cannot.

And this is also where in the moment we we don’t see any use cases that are currently applied beyond, like the cryptocurrencies. but if you want to have use cases for example in the energy market, for example, in another mass-market, consumer products or even pharmaceuticals,you need to have this. So therefore you need to be able, maybe even live in a continuum of some things I want to have private then I bring it to a permissioned blockchain ,and then I can verify this in a public Blockchain. And this is very very interesting to like pushing blockchain and like consensus protocols into this direction.

Kyung: so you mentioned that SAP is working as an incubator as well and has a lot of partnerships. so what kind of partnership is SAP basically looking for and how do you think SAP can really benefit from those corporations and partnerships?

Jürgen: Yeah, so SAP is like the market-leader enterprise space. And the vision is to help making the world run better and improve people’s lives so therefore I’m very much looking forward to the partnership that SAP and Lition have set up.

Kyung: Thank you so much of your time.

There will be more to come, please stay tuned.