International Business Machines Corp.’s vaunted software portfolio includes applications to help companies crunch huge amounts of data and manage their online storefronts. It also includes programs like Lotus Notes.

“I go to a party, and I almost immediately get insulted,” says Eugen Tarnow, a director of the consultancy Avalon Business Systems, which sells the aging email software to businesses. “They say, ‘Lotus Notes, that’s still around?’ It’s no fun.”

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The last time we heard from SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott, he talked a great deal about a then-upcoming product strategy called HANA. The idea was to move all of SAP’s existing business applications into a high-performance appliance, where the database runs in memory, and is more responsive to requests.

In the 15 months since that conversation, SAP has been on the move. HANA is not only done, but all of SAP’s primary applications are running on it. SAP has pivoted from running all of its applications in an old-school on-premise fashion to offering them both in the cloud and on premises, or on a mixed hybrid-cloud basis.

It also made a significant acquisition of SuccessFactors, the cloud-based human capital management (HCM) company. SuccessFactors is now a significant business unit within SAP, and includes all of its previous HCM software assets, and it competes with that market’s fast-moving cloud player, Workday.

Last week, SAP hosted a global launch event to announce that the three-year effort to convert its entire suite of business applications to the cloud — and to the HANA architecture — was complete. It also provided me an opportunity to catch up with McDermott in New York. Here’s a sample of our conversation:

AllThingsD: Bill, the last time we talked about HANA, you hadn’t quite moved all your primary applications over to it. It’s not exactly a huge piece of your business yet, but let’s start there. How is HANA coming along?

McDermott: We have 1,000 customers on it now, so it’s growing really fast. The last update we gave, we indicated that we think it could be a half-billion U.S.-dollar business, which would make it the fastest-growing software product in the history of the world. So it’s big.

The last time we talked, you hadn’t quite moved all your applications over to HANA. The big one that was missing was the Enterprise Resource Planning piece. Can I assume that part of the news today is about that process being completed?

That’s exactly it. The big news today is about the whole SAP suite being moved over to HANA. All the things that the business suite does — how you manage your supply chain and manfacture your products and get them to market, how you manage your people, how you manage your customer relationships, everything around you in that whole end-to-end value chain — runs in what we call the business suite. And we go to market with that suite in 24 industries, small, medium and large, all over the world. Now that whole suite runs on HANA.

For the benefit of people who struggle with the idea of what the software actually does, can you give me a good example of who uses it, and how?

We work with this company HSE24, it’s like a QVC in Europe. They are selling product on television, there’s a meter at the lower right-hand corner of the screen telling you how many of that item are left. That’s run on SAP software. When you call in to the call center, they already know from the sensors on the social networks, via HANA, what you’re likely to want. And then they can also do the upsell and the cross-sell. One of the customers that is going to be featured today is John Deere. We’ll talk about how they can, based on usage history and patterns, provide preventative maintenance on the things that will need it the most.

There’s obviously more to it than simply running existing processes faster and cheaper and more efficiently, right?

The wild part about all this is sort of like this: No one could have predicted that Disney would become the Disney we know today when Walt drew a picture of a mouse. What you have is the limitless potential. CEOs have the ability to rethink business models, based on having the speed and the insight and the simplicity to truly change how they run their companies and transform industries. You and I fly too much, and sometimes flights get canceled. It happens. If I have to get out of Moscow and get back to New York, the airline can charge me more. If my original flight is canceled, and I’m on the line with three other people, you can get more money out of me. Dynamic real-time pricing can transform the airline industry.

Is this all the result of intelligence you’ve brought from the applications themselves, that are getting a new benefit from being run in-memory on HANA?

There are two ways to look at it. The in-memory architecture makes it fast, and simplifies it. The application makes it so smart. You’re combining transactions and analytics. And you’re also doing things we like to call “extreme applications.” You may be a big consumer products company, and you have trade promotions that go to different stores in different geographies. If you ask them how it’s going at a particular store in Brazil, they will have a hard time answering unless they’re using HANA, because it captures all the transaction data. They know exactly who’s buying what, and using which promotion or deal.

Talk to me about the competitive landscape. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison loves to lob verbal grenades at you from time to time. Care to lob one back?

In the old days, the answer would have been yes. What’s happened is that we take it a compliment when people try to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt. It’s a sign they’re worried. But they don’t have to be, because we’re open, and our most important mission is to make customers happy and fulfill their ambitions. We’re fully cooperative with Oracle, with IBM and with Microsoft. So, anything that a customer chooses to do with one of them, they can continue to do it, and we are highly supportive of that.

Obviously, SAP’s applications can now run optionally in the cloud or in a mixed environment. But the pure-play cloud companies like Salesforce.com and Workday are certainly showing some strength. What sort of competitive threat are you seeing from them?

I think SAP has responded in the cloud. SAP Cloud will take care of your customers on-premise or on-demand. We announced SAP Customer 360, and it runs on HANA. So it’s real-time, it’s predictive, and it’s in memory. If you want to buy it on a public cloud on a subscription basis like Salesforce, we now have it. Once people realize it’s running on HANA, we’re going to have an advantage. Salesforce has done a good job of building a large cloud company, but they have done it on an old architecture. You can’t do real-time analytics on the Saleforce.com platform. That’s a big Achilles’ heel. On talent, Workday is a good company, they built a good HCM solution. We bought SuccessFactors, and then we took all the assets of SAP’s existing HCM application and put them under SuccessFactors. So now, as it relates to people, wait until you see, in June, the list of companies who are running SuccessFactors. Workday had a great opportunity to go in where there was no competition, and we didn’t have a response. We had HCM, but it was all on-premise. The market wanted talent in the cloud. Now they are going against us, and there’s a lot of competition.

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Late last year, networking giant Cisco Systems had big plans. Having suffered through a gut-wrenching round of layoffs and restructuring moves meant to get the company back in fighting trim after a few years of bloat, 2013 was to be a year of new beginnings.

One big piece of that was a marketing and branding campaign launched at the end of 2012 at Cisco’s annual meeting with financial analysts in New York. Crossing the Web, TV, print and augmented reality, it featured the slogan “Tomorrow Starts Here.” Its intent has been to inject the importance of networking rather than computing as the most important aspect in the narrative of the Internet’s next phase of growth.

It turns out that Cisco is not the first to use that slogan, and the one that got to it first is steaming mad. North Carolina’s second-largest college, East Carolina University, based in Greenville, N.C., announced today that it has sued Cisco in federal court — it didn’t specify which court — for trademark infringement.

“ECU has used the mark ‘Tomorrow Starts Here’ for over a decade, including in national advertisements and publications such as Forbes and Wired,” the university’s chancellor, Steve Ballard, said in a statement. “We feel it is essential to take action to protect that defining trademark of our identity and vision.”

I’m not a lawyer, but from what I understand of trademark law, one of its cornerstone principles is that if you’re going to register a trademark, you have to be willing to defend it when someone uses it without your authorization, or you essentially give them permission to keep using it. So these cases are pretty routine.

But to prove infringement, you also have to prove that the use of the trademark is likely to cause consumer confusion. ECU makes a stab at a case in its press release announcing the suit:

ECU’s trademark “Tomorrow Starts Here” is a university-wide brand that represents an overlapping field of goods and services when compared with that of Cisco. For example, research initiatives through ECU’s College of Technology and Computer Science have created products and intellectual property that are actively being commercialized. ECU is also a leader in the field of distance education technology that is heavily promoted through ECU’s global online education program using the mark “Tomorrow Starts Here.”

A university supporting technology research and a networking giant selling routers, switches and cloud computing gear? Does that confuse you? My guess is that Cisco and ECU will in time come to a settlement. Cisco is flush with cash, something universities always need.

Here are two example videos, first Cisco’s, and then a sample from ECU. You be the judge. Are you confused?

Update: I initially called the college Eastern Carolina University. Sorry about that.

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Here’s something new in the way of security worries: Weaknesses in Ruby on Rails. A significant vulnerability has been found in the popular Web application development framework that can let attackers do unintended things. It’s the second vulnerability — here’s the advisory on the first — detected in Ruby on Rails in as many weeks.

First word of the new vulnerability appeared on a Google group devoted to Ruby on Rails security, and Felix Wilhelm, an IT Security blogger, posted some information about how the vulnerability works, without much in the way of detail.

The vulnerability allows an attacker to take control of a Web site built using Ruby on Rails, and to execute any code they want. Here’s why you care: ROR is one of the most popular Web development frameworks around. Sites built using it include Hulu, Funny or Die and Scribd. Even Twitter was, in its earlier versions, built using Ruby on Rails.

HD Moore is chief security officer at Rapid7, a Cambridge, Mass.-based company that specializes in helping companies stay ahead of new computer-security vulnerabilities. He’s also the chief architect of Metasploit, a cloud-based security service that Rapid7 owns.

In a stroke of some kind of irony, Moore writes that this particular vulnerability is “close to my heart,” because Metasploit itself is written in Ruby on Rails. In a corporate blog post, he writes that the company “marshaled the troops” and released a quick update for Metasploit users.

It’s a nasty vulnerability, says Rapid7 researcher Claudio Guarnieri: “From a technical standpoint it’s a very interesting and challenging vulnerability that can be exploited in several different ways with very dangerous outcomes, from SQL injection to code execution.”

Ruby on Rails developers: You’ve been warned.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

Intel has dominated the high-end, performance-oriented desktop space for years, producing some of the most powerful chips on the market.

Problem is, desktops are so last decade. The age of mobile computing was ushered in on the backs of millions of pallets of laptops, netbooks, smartphones and tablets. And the chips that Intel has classically produced just don’t do low-power, low-consumption like those of some of its competitors. CEO Paul Otellini is widely seen as having been nudged out of his job for missing the boat on this shift away from PCs.

So once again at CES in Las Vegas, Intel is reminding the world that yes, it can translate its technology over to mobile and do it well.

The company plans to roll out a new smartphone platform aimed at the low end of the Android market with its “Lexington” project. Intel has its “Bay Trail” quad-core Atom chip on the way to cover the high-end smartphones. New chips to come, too, for the Ultrabooks the company has so loudly trumpeted over the past year. It’s all supposed to last longer, work better and just plain beat competitors like Nvidia and others using ARM-based architecture.

Intel gave us a peek at the way this will work in December, when it revealed a new manufacturing process for making mobile chips using Tri-Gate transistors.

It’ll just take ’em a little while. Most of this stuff won’t hit the market until the 2013 holiday season. Yes, a full year from now.

At the very least, Intel had a few partners on board to show off. For the low-end smartphones, Acer, Safaricom and Lava will use Intel’s forthcoming platform. And some analysts think that however far off, this is a smart play for Intel.

“The Lexington platform is absolutely targeted at emerging regions, which will let Intel deliver a more functional phone than others like, say, a Qualcomm or a Mediatek,” Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moore Strategy & Insights, told me. “Combined with some of the higher-end features they’re bringing to the low-end phones, they’ll undoubtedly pick up customers with this silicon.”

But we’ll still have to wait until Christmas to see most of this stuff, while competitors like Nvidia continue to introduce subsequent generations of their successful mobile products.

Perhaps by then, the latest and greatest phones you’re seeing launch today might be outdated enough for you to pick up a new one. That’s Intel’s hope, at least.

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