Okay, are we on here? Yes. Okay, in the interest of time, we'll get started just while the last few seats are filled. Christian, thank you for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. Nice to see you. We heard a lot from you two weeks ago in Orlando at Sapphire. A lot of innovation, which we're going to get into. Maybe let's start just on the present, the current operating environment. I think, you know, investors, financial markets see and read the headlines. Why don't you start us off just by telling us a little bit? What are you seeing on the ground? What are customers telling you? How are they coming to SAP in this sort of time of uncertainty? How is it impacting their decision-making? Yeah, actually, the type of C-level conversations I have these days, I mean, obviously when all the trade conflicts came up, a lot of companies immediately needed to reshuffle their supply chains. We had earnings, others had earnings, and then what should we tell you in times of uncertainty about the financial outlook for the year? That, on the one hand side, created a lot of good conversations with clients on, you know, how to get more transparency, Business Data Cloud, how to steer a company of uncertainty, and not only steer it financially or steer my supply chain here or steer my workforce here. How, SAP, can you bring this all together? I mean, I and this mobile here need to see not only, you know, my financial data to understand how my quarter will end. I need the risk in the pipeline based off trade conflicts. I need to see the upside, but I also then need to see, you know, how a Sapphire or other events are, you know, driving demand. The second piece is, of course, reshuffling of supply chain inventory data, supply chain planning, sourcing. I mean, that is, you know, a big plus of what SAP can deliver, not in the transactional monolithic ERP systems of the past, but in the highly modern AI-powered suite in the cloud. That is good. Now, of course, are you also running into C-level, say, Christian, it's good that we meet, but I just wrote such a letter to the U.S. government about, hey, I'm producing here in the United States. Now I pay a hell out of tariffs just to getting all the spare parts in, and then I pay tariffs again to export the stuff I produced in the U.S. You are asking me to spend some more money on, you know, on solutions, on software. I mean, you see this as well, but overall, I would say the sentiment is still positive. AI helps a lot. BDC helps a lot. The suite helps a lot. We remain positive still. The uncertainty in the market is there, and we need to watch what will happen now in the next weeks. Understood. At Sapphire, it felt to me like there was an emphasis on SAP becoming a data and an AI company, kind of fueled by your application footprint. How would you describe what SAP is striving for here? Perhaps for the benefits and the people in the room, you know, can you explain and expand on why that is so significant today, looking forward? I would say what we have done is very significant. Just, you know, you have to imagine, yeah, there was SAP now exists since over 50 years. And for many years, our data module was the best kept secret in SAP. And one of our founders, I talked long nights with him and said, you know, Hasso, I'm not sure if HANA will be the gravitas for every data lake in the world. I don't believe so when it comes to real time and what kind of data you need real time. The second piece is, as much as we want, yeah, not all companies will run only on SAP software. Looking at when I was running SAP as a CIO, Chief Operating Officer, and looking at many customers, they all have one big problem. They spend a ton of money on SAP, BigQuery, Data Factory, Databricks, and then they technically create a data lake. Now, does your consumer data now make more sense just because you have technically your data in one place? Absolutely not at all. The biggest challenge what they all have, they need to make mean of the data, semantics. And no data integration tool does that. No data lake does that. We said, some people retired from SAP. I said, let's use the opportunity and in a controlled environment share our data module. What we are now doing is there are these virtual data layer of data products. We are saying you have your customer master in SAP, not in Salesforce, because a pipeline ID is not a master data object. You need to form your customers with 60 around the first binding object. That is the business partner of a customer sitting in SAP at the time when you send an order out, the material master, the employee master, the supplier master, it's all SAP. Now we share that. Now think about that. Instead of then bringing a cohort of data engineers in to somehow match data and spend a whole lot of money of IT budget, you know, just to, you know, on software to make mean out of the data, you are now building once the semantics for your company. Then you have a highly automated semantic layer for all of your data in the company. Second, then what can you do with it? Not only that you understand your consumer, your employees much better, the AI agents now who can, who need this data to do that job in cash collection, in sourcing, in quoting, in pricing, in supply chain management, they now suddenly have access not only semantically to high valuable SAP data, but also to non-SAP data. I hope this explains why I have never seen in the history of SAP so much excitement after the launch of a solution, which we did back in February. It is just a different architecture. It is a mega step from SAP in the way how we share data, how we build data, how we build the semantics for our customer. Given this is relatively new to SAP, but also to the financial markets, how do you think about sizing that data and AI opportunity? You know, I think we're quite familiar with what the application migration to the cloud framework, that multiplier effect looked like, but this data and AI opportunity is much newer. How are you thinking about that in terms of size of opportunity if you look out five, ten years from now? Yeah, so the transformation of an SAP customer so far before BDC was heavily said, hey, Christian, we love the modular suite. We love automation of business processes. We love the AI piece. And the BW piece was somehow left aside. You know, we have our data strategy. Is SAP now a major player on that? So we made a decision on Databricks, on Snowflake, and so on. Now all the wise conversations are, okay, we need to anyway tackle the data layer when we migrate our data. What is the role of Databricks? BW, let's move it to the cloud, build the partner connect to a Databricks. By the way, we get a lot of pressure now, where is Snowflake in the game? Where is BigQuery? Where are all the others? Always a good sign when you get these questions and you know you're up for something. You know, we monetize, you know, first the shift, the BW private, then we modernize, we build a partner connect, and then of course what comes with a premium is the data products, the semantics. This is the high value. All of our product owners have now two priorities next to features and functions. It's about AI and building data products and the intelligent apps. Because as a success factor, we told our salespeople, don't lead against work, lead against features and functions, lead with AI, but also lead with, hey, when you really want to understand your total workforce, go with SAP SuccessFactors because there is the data product, there is BDC who gives you out of the box all of your skills, all of your people data, like also attrition data, like market data on inflation, like payroll data. We delivered all of these analytics for you so you understand your workforce out of the box much better. That is then the monetization of BDC moving up to the app layer where we now have the intelligent apps, you know, coming up for each line of business. I heard your Chief Product Officer, Muhammad Alam, the other week say that SAP is competing in a class of one, which is quite a statement. Can you explain just why you believe that to be the case? You know, you also talked about you're taking the fight to those point solution cloud vendors more today than you ever have done. You know, I think you called out regaining market share in those markets. Can you just expand on that and just, you know, articulate why that is that class of one analogy? I mean, I have to say, I mean, Muhammad is of course right. The hard work and the immense work we put into cleaning up our stack, the Frankenstein Stack, where I would say five years back some of the others said, oh, look, SAP can only acquire the way to the cloud. I would say we have now the most modern modular tech stack with a cohesive platform underneath and some others, I don't know. Now the point is having this stack now enables us to say the category of one, when you land in the private cloud on the wise journey with finance, I mean, you do financial planning, you do cash collection, you bring in Taulia, you bring all of these things. The next step is then, okay, let's go sourcing. If you do sourcing, by the way, and you do supply chain planning, sourcing and supply chain planning needs to be one. It's pretty simple to explain this ahead of supply chain. When you actually do demand and supply chain planning, you need manufacturing execution because you can plan a lot. If your, you know, manufacturing execution is decoupled from that, you miss a very important point and it will hit your productivity, but it will also hit the experience of your consumers. Now I can spin this further and further and further, but this is what the category of one. And then second, I mean, when I was running SAP, and I know this for many CIOs, four, five years back, there was no reason to go with SAP versus Best of Breed. Now you can always say, oh, this feature here, this feature there. You know, at the end, when you have one data platform, one semantic layer, when there are AI agents now coming on top, not like you build a million of AI agents who don't talk to each other. Now they understand the business context of business processes. They are connected to the rules. They are connected to the authorization because not every agent can share whatever piece of data they like with every end user in the company. So the business context is important. Now you also see how this category of one plays out. It is more like it's interesting to see now at Sapphire, we have a discussion around not about features and functions, about what can this AI agent now do. The feature and function discussion is about now what can these AI agents do for me? The broader they can orchestrate work across end-to-end processes, of course, the higher is the value. That is the category of one. That's why after the initial landing phase, now of course also comes with many customers already depart how to cross-sell and make them a strong believer in the category of one in the modular best of suite while having, you know, a hodgepodge of solutions and no one understands, you know, how to, you know, make the processes work, how to make the data silos work, et cetera. You touched on it there, but I think it's worth digging in a little more around Joule, your co-pilot. It feels like this is quite quickly moving from looking inwards at the SAP ecosystem to connecting with external agents, connecting with external applications, and, you know, touching on the Perplexity AI and Palantir partnerships and even the agent-to-agent protocols. How do you see that ecosystem playing out? What gives SAP sort of the right to win there in this kind of deeply integrated ecosystem looking forward? I mean, I'm first of all very happy that Philipp, our CTO, had a conviction to say, Christian, let's not acquire and jump on the hype of LLMs. And SAP needs to have an own LLM. They are becoming now heavily commoditized. We invested into our own AI foundation. Now these AI agents, it's not like that, you know, we develop an agent and suddenly they do magic. I mean, in our AI foundation, not sure how others are doing it, there's heavy work. I mean, there's a knowledge graph who makes understand that Joule can orchestrate all of these AI agents. When you are touching, you know, a sourcing decision, an RFP in sourcing, you need millions of connections to other data points in order to make an informed decision on which supplier is the best. Can the supplier deliver? Has the supplier always had the right quality? Is actually, you know, the supplier closest to factory XY? You know, in our AI foundation, we make business data work. We have a lot of business data, but you need things like a knowledge graph and others to really make sense of this business data. That is why now Joule, when you think about, you know, ask me, you know, you answer me everything or you everywhere, you know, a lot is of course orchestrated via our AI foundation. Why we are so excited about it? I mean, I am as a heavy end user of BW and analytics and, you know, all kinds of HR and sourcing systems of SAP in the past. In the future, you know, me as an end user, I would never deep dive any more so deep into a transactional ERP system. I tell my best friend Joule to say, give me an analysis when Christian wants to understand with Dominik Asam, how are we going to end up the quarter? Give me an analysis, give me the risk profile and how has Sapphire now impacted my financial prediction for the year? By the way, tell me on the hyperscaler side, when there are some customers going crazy now about U.S. tech, what is the kind of risk actually you see for SAP in this? That is, you know, the future of how you will work with SAP software. All the others building a layer on top and say, you know, SAP is this transactional system. I mean, Joule, walk me. I mean, this is like the digital adoption platform where we guide end users across SAP and non-SAP apps to make sure they are adopting our software great on its own case. Now we have this Joule diamond icon everywhere. You say in ServiceNow, oh, there is this ticket. Let's read through this ticket. This is about a customer XY. Let's relate it back with the knowledge graph and our AI foundation to the customer information in the SAP system. Let's, you know, solve this supplier risk, yeah, within the SAP system starting with the ticket in the ServiceNow solution. I mean, I have to say that that works. Since I think the announcement was made either at the beginning of last week and since we have yourself, Mistral and Capgemini here this week, you know, that partnership agreement that was announced, what can you expand on there as far as, you know, how those partnerships come about, the positioning of SAP as being, you know, independent from any given LLM provider, any given infrastructure? Just how does that play into geopolitics around data sovereignty? I mean, obviously that announcement was done with the intent to show we have sovereignty also in Europe. Because, I mean, sitting here a year ago, probably the two of us would not have thought that we are talking about, you know, these kind of geopolitical conflicts we are having now. Now, of course, more and more customers also coming to SAP and say, hey, across the technical stack, it's not anymore only about where do you store my data or who is touching my data, what kind of AI large language models you are using. It's good to have Mistral on our side to say, you know what, we can also plug in Mistral and to run our AI use cases. That way we have complete sovereignty from the top to the bottom. Now, the only thing what I caution a little bit here in Europe is the competitiveness of European car industry or chemical industry will not be by building now 20 different data centers here in France and try to compete against the U.S. hyperscalers. It's completely crazy. That is sovereignty completely done in the wrong way. We need the best here in Europe to apply AI, to apply, you know, intelligent software to be the best, to produce much better, you know, much faster, better cars, or, you know, be way more efficient on how to run our supply chains here when we have anyway, you know, huge pressure on energy prices, et cetera. We need to be here in Europe. That's why I also share, I'm heavily involved these days with governments also here and say, hey, think through it. Yeah, sovereignty is needed. We do not need a lock-in, but building data centers, I am not sure if this is really now the solution. We really need to think that for us at SAP, no matter if a customer is in China, here in Europe or in the U.S., we actually can give them different levels, you know, of data security, of data sovereignty. That is for us very important. That is why we are super agnostic on the infrastructure layer. We are agnostic on the way how we embed LLMs in our stack as well. At Sapphire, you collectively spoke about the longer-term growth algorithm for SAP. You referred to the markets that you're playing in growing, you know, mid to high teens. I think for much of the community, you know, the prospect of SAP sort of referring to that level of growth for, you know, a durable length of time is new and therefore interesting. You also touched on that maintenance multiplier going from two to three X to even five X now. Could you just expand on that and your thinking of how you're thinking about that longer-term sort of sustainable growth rate of SAP and the comfort level within that? Yeah, I mean, inside SAP, to make this multiplier not two to three X, but five X, maybe even no more of what kind of innovation we're going to ship now in the next years. This is not like, you know, of course the potential is there. Now the execution is what matters. That's sometimes harder. What we are doing already now is, okay, 40%-50% of the customers now initially landed with RISE in the private cloud. Second, our salespeople, I tell them, your best friend, the CIO is great. We need the CIOs. I want to now see how often are you meeting with the head of supply chain, the head of HR, et cetera, because the cross-sell then will only happen with a business transformation and we need the buying of the lines of businesses. That's why with the category of one now, we are also changing already now gears where we landed. Now SAP wants to be loved not only by the CIO, but also by the other lines of businesses. You see also in the way how we spend our marketing dollars, it's not anymore we are doing 20 events for our CIO. I mean, you see a lot of focus also on the lines of businesses and make them a believer of the suite. The second piece is then when you look at the overall growth potential, I mean, with BDC and AI coming on top, that is of course, you know, for us huge also with regard to monetization potential. It also makes our apps more attractive. It's not for us, it's rather less about standalone. Of course, it's nice, but of course making our apps, you know, more winning, higher win rates in our core solution portfolio is of course what matters the most to us. That is good. Now, of course, you know, short term this year, it's about, you know, the uncertainty, but the resiliency now when you look also at the revenue mix, you know, you have this cloud revenue growing, you know, really well. You have, of course, you know, what brings the total revenue growth down is the support revenue, but the mix will just go more into the right direction. When we are talking about double-digit growth on total revenue, I mean, absolutely, I would say this is a safe bet just looking at the revenue mix. Then about the cloud revenue growth, can we sustain that kind of growth? Really depends on now on the success of BDC, of AI and how we can monetize that. Of course, being able to cross-sell. Because the question about do we move now to the cloud, yes or no, that question was asked four years ago. That question is not asked anymore. The two to three X multiplier, I would take my dad. Now it's about how to expand. Yeah, and something you should never forget, an ECC on-premise customer, I mean, just we put the monolith into that data center does not mean that they used all lines, you know, the software which was built into this monolith. Some people, ECC customers only used finance, some others used finance, HR and manufacturing. There is a lot of cross-sell potential then also later on in the cloud. Much has been made of, you know, you driving growth from your installed base, but I think more recently there's been an appreciation of winning new customers and maybe even going down in towards, you know, the mid-market, if you like, rather than the very large enterprise market. How's that going? What's different about that go-to-market, the use of the reseller network and ecosystem there? What does that do for your operating model that wasn't there, you know, five or six years ago? Yeah, I mean, probably one issue challenge we still have as SAP is that the brand of SAP is still connected to ERP, large enterprise, long projects, expensive upgrades. In the mid-market, many customers do not even know, hey, we have customers going Greenfield, finance, sourcing, take a BioVD in China. They started like when they were very small in China. Now they conquered the world with our software and they started with a three, four weeks go live of our finance solution, of our sourcing. I mean, that is SAP. The SAP is not like, oh, you need to pay 20 times more on services than for software than to, you know, go live on an ERP. That is not the SAP anymore. I guess we see more and more now that the mid-market is getting that, but we need to intensify our work there. I mean, it's ridiculous, ridiculously small still, the amount of business we are doing given, you know, the size of the market. That's why we are heavily expanding now our reseller channel. We are giving them complete territories where no salesperson of SAP will ever compete with them. That was not the case, you know, two years back. We give them more autonomy, more responsibility, more business. We give them marketing development funds and let's go. I mean, there's no reason why you should not win with the category of one. That is now a major focus for us in the next year. Grow with SAP is of course, you know, the methodology, what we give them to apply the best practices for the industry. If we look either at the sort of internal operating model, a lot has been made of that and becoming more efficient in the way the business operates. It feels like one of the bigger opportunities is around becoming more efficient in your go-to-market, your sales and marketing intensity. I think you talked about getting closer to some of your more efficient peers if we look at selling and marketing intensity. My question is, you know, is there anything structural at SAP that you think, you know, limits how close you can get to those best-in-class peers or, you know, can you get close to where they are? I mean, definitely. I mean, I hope you can see on the sales and marketing ratio how it's now going in the right direction. Have we reached a ceiling? Absolutely not. I mean, as I said, the channel is highly profitable. We want to make it a highly growth and a highly profitable expanding way of go-to-market now in the next year. There's more to come. In the last year, yes, culturally, we had to change some leaders because if they don't believe in it, then it's hard to drive change if you don't have a leadership team who's behind you. Some people had to leave SAP also on the market unit level. We have brought great leaders in, Bessie in Greater China doing a fantastic job now with a SaaS mindset, Simon Davis in [APJ North America]. We did a few changes here and there. Now I would say there is now a team who believes to transform the go-to-market in a highly scalable, but also high growth function. That is good. Now the second piece is about the execution. We are now, when I would say how far we have come, that we are not arriving with a bus of people at every large enterprise customer. It got better. I'm not happy everywhere, but such changes need time. The good piece is for you, there's still potential left to get also more efficient in the large enterprise space. We made good steps. Absolutely. You see it, but we can do better there and for sure get much more scale in the mid-market actually, where we can scale much more with now expanding our channel there. On the marketing side, I mean, of course AI has to help. I mean, why should commercial deal support people do all the compliance checks for a deal, all the refract checks? That's done with AI, with business AI, with SAP. Saves a ton of money for salespeople not going through 400 pages of contracts anymore with the finance people. Second, on the marketing side, content creation, lead routing, lead qualification. I'm happy with the volume of pipeline, but not always with the dollar what we get out of the pipeline. There is also still some efficiencies left, I would say, in the operating model of SAP. I always tell Dominik, as long as we grow that much, the economies of scale, oh my God, that will, you know, solve some sort, some things out just per se because the ratios will look better the more business volume you can put on the system. Prior to your leadership, you know, SAP undertook a, you know, almost a decade of larger M&A to sort of piece together the cloud portfolio that you now have. Since you became CEO, it's been, it feels like it's more of a tuck-in technology-focused prioritization. We've also noticed SAP forming these significant partnerships, Databricks, Perplexity AI, Palantir, they're just the recent ones. What's your philosophy stood here, you know, comparing building versus buying as you look at new pockets of technology and opportunity? What's the risk that you give up some of the economics by partnering when I'm not fully owning? Yeah, this is a good question. I mean, the way how we run a portfolio at SAP now and my QBRs is there's always a slide in build partner buy. And then we categorize what is very close to the core that needs to be owned by SAP because the customers again don't want to replicate data in a third-party product and so on. Then there's the level two where it's okay to partner because, you know, the far you get out there in the vertical in an industry, the much, the less, you know, is probably the need to have, you know, really strong out-of-the-box integration. SAP will never develop the operating system of BMW. That's not what we want to do for a car. We are more like spare parts and everything around the car. This is SAP. That is then partner. The acquisition comes into play where we say, okay, look, first there is a wide gap, a wide spot in our portfolio which we need to close because organically we are probably not fast enough. That is something that can also still happen in the future, but this is then this kind of tuck-ins. What I can promise to you, we will never fall back, never, ever, ever again into we are leaving them on an island. When we acquire them, then in the business case, full integration, automated, out-of-the-box suite category of one is a mandatory thing. If we feel a company which we want to acquire is culturally not up for that and there is huge resistance, then we refrain from this acquisition because it does not make sense to fight against, you know, a whole company you acquire in order to do good for SAP. That can happen, these tuck-ins, but I am now not seeing on the horizon something where I would say we need to buy a larger company just to buy some revenue or fill some, maybe some shortcomings on AI because maybe my data layer is not that strong. Understood. The company's going through a lot of change. There's a product upgrade cycle, there's a cloud migration, adopting AI, operational changes, changing the go-to-market, headcount changes. There's a lot of plates that you're spinning. I'm always curious, you know, as your time as CEO, you know, where do you have concerns? Where do you think you need to do more to move faster or to prioritize? Where are you finding yourself waking up in the morning and saying, right, this is the biggest problem I need to fix? I'm always curious, and maybe that could be our closing question. Yeah, I mean, I sleep well overnight when I look at our strategy. And because I'm a big believer, it's the right strategy. And we get it back from many customers, from many stakeholders that we are on the right track. So that is good. Now execution. Of course, every year we set the bar higher. My question is then also more and more around leadership. When we set the bar higher, is the leadership up for that? Do we have the risk-taking culture? Do they actually have, do we have the general managers who can think through a business end-to-end and not just love their own code and don't care about the adoption at the end or vice versa, just selling something, you know, without having a clue what the customer wants to do with the software? It is all about leadership because you need the best team in order to win, full stop. I would say the team, especially now on the board level with Muhammad first, but then with Thomas, you know, who knows how to implement and adopt software is great. I would say the level underneath is good, but we definitely want to make, you know, huge focus on performance management when it comes to also the lower levels of the organization. The other piece is, of course, what you always have to watch out is with Philipp and Muhammad. What is happening now in three to five years around quantum, what is happening, you know, I mean, AI, we are for sure not at the end. What is happening there? We are still, of course, also looking at being agnostic on with the hyperscalers, what is happening in the hardware space on Kubernetes. Abstraction technology is super important for us. I don't want to create any lock-in into any kind of hyperscalers because that would not be good. These are the topics, yeah, what is in the minds of people and then what is going to happen in three to five years out there because you're asking for accelerated growth. Obviously, you know, you have to make sure now that, you know, there is enough in the pipe innovation-wise what can make this work. Perfect. That brings us nicely out of time, Christian. Thank you very much for joining us. It's been a pleasure. For the investors in this hall, you next have Zalando. If you want to join me in the software space in Hall C, I'll be hosting Dassault Systèmes. Christian, thanks again. Thanks for having me. Thank you.