Capping off a profound transformation that has turned SAP into one of the world’s fastest-growing major cloud providers, founder Hasso Plattner, whose vision and passion inspired SAP for more than half a century, will step down as chairman next year, further solidifying CEO Christian Klein’s status as the company’s unquestioned leader.
While SAP is in the process of appointing a new chairman of its supervisory board, it will be impossible for the company to replace Hasso Plattner, who founded the company with four partners in 1972 and spent the next 51 years making enterprise applications absolutely indispensable business tools.
Under Plattner’s leadership, enterprise apps not only codified work that was being done but also radically transformed the nature and scope of that work, connecting suppliers, partners, and customers — indeed, entire industries — in ways that were never before possible.
Driven by the combative and highly competitive Plattner, SAP first created and then clearly dominated the enterprise-apps category for more than 40 years until the explosive growth of the cloud entangled SAP in a classic example of Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma.
Former CEO Bill McDermott then used acquisitions to build a significant cloud business for SAP, but the company faced daunting challenges in attempting to unify those new cloud products with its core ERP products. In an attempt to pull those disparate pieces together, Plattner led — and if not led, surely inspired and aggressively motivated — the development of SAP’s HANA in-memory database, which ultimately become the core of the company’s hugely successful S/4HANA Cloud ERP suite.
And it is within the rise of S/4HANA Cloud that we can see the arc of what has been an elegant and essential transfer of behind-the-scenes influence and power from Plattner to CEO Christian Klein, who took over as sole CEO early in 2020.
In this context, it’s important to recall that while Plattner has served as chairman of SAP’s supervisory board since 2003, he has also carried the title of Chief Software Advisor. If overplayed, that role could have created counterproductive factions within SAP at a time when the company needed to move forward with intense and singular focus and at a speed matching the upheavals taking place among customers and prospects.
But Plattner appears to have managed that transition artfully and successfully, and he deserves enormous credit for acknowledging — quietly, perhaps, but nevertheless acknowledging — that Klein now needs to be viewed by everyone inside and outside SAP as the company’s unquestioned leader.
With S/4HANA Cloud revenue growing close to 100% over the past few quarters, and with SAP’s Business Technology Platform now providing a thoroughly modern end-to-end unifying force for all of SAP’s applications and related solutions, Klein has provided the tangible proof that he deserves that elevated consideration and latitude.
It can’t have been easy for Plattner to decide to step away from the company that he created, nurtured, inspired, and ultimately drove to enormous success. To get a quick sense of this, take a look at a remarkable YouTube video he made about 12 years ago in which — and yes, I’m being serious — he interviews himself. It’s called Hasso on Hasso and I will just say that whatever feelings you happen to currently hold about Plattner, this video will likely intensify those feelings.
Final Thought
In a piece I wrote last month called The New SAP Crushes Q4, I highlighted that, in Q4, S/4HANA Cloud rose 101% and SAP’s overall cloud business now accounts for 40% of the company’s total revenue.
If ever the time was right for Hasso Plattner to move on to the next chapter in a life jammed with achievement and adventure, that time is now. So I tip my hat to Plattner for taking what must have been a difficult step and wish him all the best with his various ventures (Hasso Plattner Institute, sailboat racing, San Jose Sharks, and much more).
As for Christian Klein and his plans for SAP’s future, check out my recent CEO Outlook 2023 video interview with Klein as he describes a dynamic new business world. And in watching that, we should bear in mind that all of SAP’s fast-growing cloud-based innovations were built on the foundation laid 51 years ago by Hasso Plattner.
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