During his stint as a Venture Investor at EMC, Kevin Chew tracked cloud computing and Big Data as they began to take root in Silicon Valley. Now the group vice president of Managed Cloud as a Service and Technology Alliances for SAP, Chew is responsible for helping customers and partners leverage these technologies to boost the bottom line.

The veteran executive stopped by theCUBE at the recently concluded Oracle OpenWorld 2013 conference to discuss how SAP is addressing the changing landscape of corporate IT. Where Oracle is aiming to dominate the entire stack, the BI giant is pursuing an ecosystem-oriented strategy that relies on partners for storage, networking and other infrastructure components. Chew explains that these are “areas where SAP will probably never go [because] SAP at its core DNA is an applications company and now a database and middleware company.”

Asked about his firm’s recent investment in enterprise hosting provider Virtustream, Chew says that the move underscores plans to make enterprise applications portable across the private, public and hybrid cloud. Popularizing the HANA in-memory database is another top priority that was recently brought to light by the announcement of the In-Memory Option enhancement for Oracle Enterprise 12c.

Chew highlights that unlike 12c and other rivaling offerings, which are built on “antiquated” technology, HANA is specifically designed to process transactions and analytical workloads in-memory. Furthermore, the platform integrates with SAP applications, a major technological advantage that he says will persist as apps move closer to the database layer. This trend is expected to accelerate as converged infrastructure solutions continue to gain traction among enterprises.

Watch the video below for the full highlights from the interview, including more details about Chew’s work for SAP.