You might ask and say, wow, why does SAP need a Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer? Why is SAP so much focusing on diversity and inclusion and also investing a lot of resources, a lot of budget, a lot of time and effort? It is very clear. We do have a very clear business case to drive diversity and inclusion at SAP. If I just look, it has a clear impact on employee engagement, and that's what all the studies show, the Gallup studies,the Forbes studies, the McKinsey's that we see. It also has a clear impact on our customer orientation and on our customer satisfaction and diversity and inclusion has a clear impact on our innovation. Now customer orientation, let's just talk about that. SAP has over 310,000 customers. In over 150 different countries. If we don't reflect the diversity of our customers in our workforce, how can we ensure then that we find the right solutions for challenges we might not even know about today? How can we ensure that we understand our customers correctly, and how we can really really help our customers to be successful and to be innovative. Now, those are the underlying causes why we at SAP have been very much focusing on diversity and on inclusion. But here, we have very much an end-to-end look. We don't only look at gender intelligence, that's what everybody's talking about. We also look about the different generations. We look at cultures and identity and we also look at how can we really and truly integrate people with disability into our workforce? Well, we have started about three years ago, and it was a grassroot initiative in India, is our program Autism at Work. We actually started with a workshop with young people who, a lot of them were not communicating. But who were able to use iPads that we had sponsored to communicate with their parents and with their teachers. What we learned was that there is a very correlation between people with autism and some of the skills that we need into the IT. So we started our program Autism at Work, where we made a very bold statement: To have 1% of our workforce by the year 2020 with people who have been diagnosed with autism. SAP is one of the biggest software providers in the world. We are the number one cloud company in the world. But we are not the experts in regards to autism. So therefore we looked for a strong partner, somebody who has been working for a long time with people with autism, and who are a true partner, and we found that with Specialisterne, a company actually coming from Denmark, whose goal it is to create one million jobs for people with autism and we partnered, we partnered three years ago. On a very trusted relationship, we learned together. We also did our lessons learned together, things that we don't need to repeat. But, our goal was always to find a sustainable model to integrate people with autism in the workforce. And, if I talk about sustainability, we also talk about the resources we need here. It's the budget and also the set-up: how can we ensure this is scalable? How can we ensure that this is something that we can run on a global base? And that is where we were able to have with Specialisterne a partner who would grow with us. And it is for sure sometimes challenging. I mean, if you think about it. SAP right now has over 78,000 people worldwide. We are in 115 different countries, we have 120 different nationalities. Just at our headquarters in Walldorf near Frankfurt, we have over 90 different nationalities. And then we have a social entrepreneur like Specialisterne with a lot less resources, but wanting to grow with us on a global base. I know we learn from each other. And that is, I think, also the way we should look at the workforce of the future, the way we collaborate in the future. It will only work if we work very closely together. And if I say we, I mean it's the corporate world, I mean it's the non-profit organizations, it is the academia and it is the public sector. If we work together, if we really collaborate, if we really use our connectional intelligence, that is when we can have an impact in the world. And SAP's motto is: make the world run better and improve people's lives. I strongly believe this is a wonderful way to showcase this.
