Hasso Plattner

Thirty percent of Americans have German blood in their family. I don't see any major difference in the engineering abilities of Americans and Germans.

I am grateful for the great education at a public university that Germany gave me, and that - added to a little luck - allowed me to achieve. Education is the key to a career, and its basis has to be provided by government.

I made my money with software - encoded knowledge without which few products and services can exist today - and so it seemed imperative that this would be the field where I would give something back.

New applications will have to deal with big data. We have to analyze it on the fly, so we have to have a system that is transactional and analytical at the same time. We cannot have a multi-stage system. This is too slow for modern applications.

There is this permanent hope in America that there is some new technology around the corner that will change the world.

Americans are not afraid of the future.