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In a worthy send-off for a true great, at the farewell event for SAP co-founder and long-serving SAP Supervisory Board chairman Hasso Plattner, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz praised him for his life’s work.
“An incredible global success story made in Germany.” This is how Scholz opened his speech at the farewell event in honor of SAP’s last serving co-founder, Hasso Plattner. After more than 20 years as its chairman, Plattner had stepped down from the SAP Supervisory Board at the Annual General Meeting of Shareholders on May 15 and handed the reins to his successor, Finnish-born Pekka Ala-Pietilä.
Plattner, Scholz said, has been a key architect of SAP’s success as one of its co-founders, a boundless source of ideas and energy, its CTO, CEO, and then, for more than 20 years, chairman of the SAP Supervisory Board. He has written history in terms of economic development and globalization. “And, today, the entire global economy runs on SAP software,” he said.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz: “Today, the entire global economy runs on SAP software.”
But he did not do it alone, Scholz continued. Rather, as was characteristic of Plattner, his every move was made in a spirit of productive competition with others. When Plattner founded SAP with four former IBM colleagues in 1972, he dreamed of one day employing 100 people. Now, SAP has 110,000 employees across the world, all inspired and motivated by Plattner’s “constant and unstoppable drive and energy.”
Scholz also quoted a wise observation of Plattner’s that served as a timely reminder for him: “You can’t put off making changes that need to happen for too long. If you do, this will eventually take its toll and then you’ll have less energy to get the job done.” Innovation was an opportunity, not a threat, said Scholz, adding that, today, artificial intelligence has the potential to inject brand-new momentum into SAP.
Some 5,000 guests – including 3,500 SAP employees – gathered at the SAP Arena in Mannheim, Germany, on May 16 to say goodbye to Plattner. German TV presenter Günther Jauch hosted the event and, in honor of avid rock fan Plattner, musical entertainment was provided by American singer-songwriter Anastacia, who was accompanied by the SAP Symphony Orchestra.
“Zigzag Like a Rabbit”
“We managed to keep up with most trends,” said Plattner, explaining what had made SAP so successful. And although things did not always go to plan, he recalled, “when we did set off on the wrong track, we realized in time and corrected our course.”
The most important thing, he said, was to avoid being too impatient or single-minded about pursuing a new strategy. “You need to be able to zigzag like a rabbit.”
After 21 years as chairman of the SAP Supervisory Board, the last SAP co-founder bid farewell.
“He Rocked It!”
How, asked SAP CEO Christian Klein in his farewell speech, could he possibly do justice to all of Plattner’s achievements in just 10 minutes? “My kids would say, ‘He rocked it!’” All five of SAP’s co-founders, driven by the desire to create something entirely new, had shown boundless courage in striking out on their own more than half a century ago.
Plattner was the epitome of what SAP must never be allowed to lose, said Klein, namely “a steadfast focus on customers and the ability to listen to and co-innovate with them.”
Klein spoke about the lasting impact Plattner’s global mindset had on SAP. “He drove SAP’s expansion across the world; today, we do business in more than 130 countries, and that is down to our founders and to Hasso.”
The success Plattner orchestrated for SAP in the United States is particularly symbolic of his tireless efforts to push the boundaries, said SAP Supervisory Board member Aicha Evans. He also stood for a future, she said, in which technology and humanity went hand in hand.
SAP CEO Christian Klein spoke about the founders’ boundless courage.
Dietmar Hopp: Long-Time Friend and Colleague
Among the audience members was Dietmar Hopp, one of SAP’s co-founders and a long-time friend and colleague of Plattner. “Dietmar was a huge influence on me,” said Plattner. “Most importantly of all, he taught me to work with customers. That changed the way I thought. I made it my mission to look in all areas of my life for ways to use software to improve people’s lives.”
Ambition and rivalry are part of the founders’ legacy, too. Many a racket was thrown in frustration when Hopp and Plattner faced off on the tennis court, recalled Klein. But Plattner had also given him this advice: “It’s important to win, but SAP is about more than winning; it’s also about helping others.”
CEO Christian Klein paid tribute to the founders’ legacy.
Philanthropist and Patron of Science
The Prime Minister of the State of Baden-Württemberg, Winfried Kretschmann, addressed the audience in a video message. As well as praising Plattner’s entrepreneurial spirit and creativity, Kretschmann paid tribute to his “immense sense of responsibility beyond the realms of business – particularly in education, art, and sport.”
Alongside his business career, Plattner always had a close affinity with research and development, said Kretschmann. In 1998, he founded the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) at the University of Potsdam, near Berlin.
As well as generously supporting educational and cultural causes, Plattner developed a particular love of art. One of the projects he funded was the reconstruction of a palace in the historic center of Potsdam that is now the Museum Barberini and home to an impressive collection of Impressionist works.
“Your hometown of Potsdam means the world to you,” said Scholz, describing Plattner’s work as a patron and philanthropist as “instrumental in helping Potsdam blossom and flourish over recent decades.”
Scholz added that he had no doubt whatsoever that Plattner would continue to hatch new ideas, make bold plans, and drive ambitious projects. “I believe that is simply the person you are. With or without an official role, it’s what you do.”
Explore further into SAP’s more than 50-year history of success that began with five entrepreneurial programmers
WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced that Alexandra Steiger will join SAP as new global head of Investor Relations on July 1, 2024, reporting to Dominik Asam, member of the Executive Board and CFO of SAP SE.
With over a decade of experience in the finance industry, Steiger has held roles at renowned institutions such as Goldman Sachs and UBS. She currently serves as executive director within Global Investment Research at Goldman Sachs, focusing on the U.S. Internet sector, including companies such as Alphabet, Meta and Amazon.
“I am very happy Alexandra is joining SAP,” said Asam. “We will benefit from her leadership and the wealth of expertise she brings from her previous responsibilities. In her new role, she can build on the strong foundation laid by Anthony Coletta and the entire Investor Relations team.”
Prior to her assignment at Goldman Sachs, Steiger was an executive director within UBS Equity Research, covering select U.S. Internet and Interactive Entertainment companies. She received a bachelor’s degree in International Business Administration from the University of Maastricht and a master’s degree in International Management CEMS from the Erasmus University Rotterdam and University of St. Gallen.
On April 1, 2024, SAP formed Customer Services & Delivery – a new Board area that will focus on maximizing innovation adoption and customer value in the cloud.
This is good news – not just for customers but also for the ecosystem. In recent months, SAP had already identified that when engineering teams deliver innovations, there is a corresponding need to provide customers with guidance on how they can swiftly adopt and consume innovation. Customer Services & Delivery was created to bring together the offerings that help customers tap the value of SAP’s integrated portfolio.
By virtue of its function, the Customer Support organization fits into this strategic setup quite naturally. To learn more about how Customer Support is owning and driving end-to-end customer support experiences powered by AI, I met with Stefan Steinle, executive vice president and head of Customer Support, SAP SE.
Q: How would you describe the role of Customer Support in SAP’s success?
A: Customer support is a differentiating factor among companies that are equally positioned in functional richness, usability, quality, deployability, or configurability. While signing up a new customer is considered a huge win, being able to delight and retain the customer is equally important.
Support at SAP has been singularly impactful in advancing SAP’s customer success stories by proactively responding to customer needs and building long-term relationships. In addition to helping customers solve day-to-day problems, we are business partners who proactively work with customers toward achieving their business goals.
The Customer Support group encompasses much more than bug fixes. In addition to regular ticket resolutions, we use SAP Cloud ALM to help guide customers in application lifecycle management by enabling their transformation to the cloud and the operation of hybrid environments. We help customers help themselves through self-services and we proactively consult with our engineering teams to improve SAP products based on support-related feedback and learnings. Thanks to our support engineers, SAP has delivered over 1,000 improvements in the last 12 months.
Q: How is SAP’s AI story shaping up when it comes to Customer Support? What is the AI strategy for Customer Support?
A: With our focus on value realization, the push to enhance support with AI has never been higher. To start with, we have invested in digitalizing mission-critical business processes with AI.
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There are three parts toward bringing these business processes into the fold of AI-powered offerings. With the help of SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite, we can measure metrics around the customer’s business processes to gauge efficiency, bottlenecks, and opportunities for improvement. Alternatively, customers can use this as a blueprint to review these metrics themselves. The next layer delivers business transformational AI services. And finally, we have a platform that provides tools to support a closed-loop approach for AI innovation in services and support.
Coming to the AI strategy for Customer Support, we believe that any innovations in AI must be in lockstep with application integration, meaning AI developments can only bring business value when they are infused and integrated into the applications used in a business process or scenario.
Q: In the context of Customer Support, could you give some examples of how AI brings business value?
A: While the real-world applications are countless, we could broadly classify them into three groups.
We use AI to correct – this means we use AI for the support experience, for personalization, and for data-driven decisions. We use AI to connect – here you find the platform, tools, and applications along customer touchpoints. We use AI to catalyze – this covers self-service, issue resolutions, and predictive and preventative support.
Q: How does SAP realize this?
A: We do this by taking advantage of our AI development platform that can bring all the data of services and support into one place. This platform helps bring endless possibilities based on the unique needs of customers’ businesses. On our part, we ensure that we explore the power of AI across business contexts.
By building AI models, we have the power to transform business in the way we want. We can plug these models into support systems and portals to extract the full value of AI in support. By collecting data and events from support systems and portals, we can even train AI models that can deliver value later. By processing the context and history of the customer, we can provide highly personalized support experiences – at runtime.
At SAP SuccessFactors, our partners play a pivotal role in extending our reach and enhancing our solutions, ensuring that customers can best leverage innovative technologies that help them tackle the business challenges of today and tomorrow while making every employee a success story.
This year, the SAP Global Line of Business Partner Excellence Awards have once again spotlighted our partners’ outstanding contributions to customer success. The following partners have showcased their expertise and unwavering commitment to excellence, leading the way with groundbreaking initiatives and exceptional customer service.
Accenture has been recognized as the winner for Sales Success in Large Enterprises. This award illustrates Accenture’s success bringing exceptional results to the largest and most complex HR transformations. With a long-standing SAP partnership, Accenture has built expertise across multiple industries, and, with this deep knowledge, it delivers innovative solutions and services to help our customers drive operational efficiency and enhance the employee experience.
NTT DATA Business Solutions stands out for winning awards in two categories: Customer Success Management and Intelligent Enterprise Value Realization. It was also a finalist in the Sales Success in Large Enterprises category. The combination of these awards highlights NTT DATA’s relentless determination to deliver throughout the customer value journey, as well as its breadth of offerings across human capital management (HCM) and SAP’s broader cloud ERP suite. NTT DATA’s consistent recognition demonstrates its leading innovation, adaptability to changing market needs, and commitment to customer satisfaction.
Empleox GmbH has been named the winner in the Sales Success in Midmarket category. Empleox GmbH helps us meet the needs of our midsize customers by continuously innovating and designing solutions to help them grow, scale, and stay agile. Specializing in implementing and optimizing SAP SuccessFactors solutions, Empleox GmbH empowers organizations to transform HR operations, enhance employee engagement, and achieve their business objectives.
OpenText has been recognized for its exceptional performance throughout 2023, alongside SAP, to bring cutting-edge solutions to the market. As the winner in the Partner Solution Success category, this recognition reflects the OpenText team’s ongoing commitment to growth and innovation. Its integration with SAP SuccessFactors solutions provides customers with enhanced document management capabilities, helping to streamline HR processes and reduce administrative costs.
EPI-USE has won the Delivery Quality category, which is awarded to partners for consistent excellence in project delivery across a number of metrics. This award speaks to the EPI-USE team’s commitment to customer delivery. With over 30 years of experience, EPI-USE has developed deep expertise in the SAP SuccessFactors portfolio and has become a trusted advisor for organizations looking to optimize their HCM solutions.
“We are proud to be recognized for our commitment to Customer Success and Intelligent Enterprise Value Realization. These awards underscore our dedication to delivering innovative HR solutions to our customers worldwide. We help them to optimize their HR processes and improve their employee experience. Being a finalist in the Sales Success in Large Enterprise category further validates our strategic approach to supporting a broad spectrum in the market.”
Norbert Rotter, CEO, NTT DATA Business Solutions, and EVP, NTT DATA, Inc.
These partners have surpassed the high standard expected in our industry. We extend our heartfelt congratulations to all winners and finalists in the SAP Global LoB Partner Excellence Awards.
We are incredibly grateful for our entire SAP SuccessFactors partner ecosystem, whose efforts are critical to our success. Your relentless pursuit of excellence ensures that, together, we can help our customers make every employee a success story.
Get a detailed look at all the winners and more information about the awards.
Aaron Green is chief marketing & solutions officer for SAP SuccessFactors. Nick Holmes is vice president of Ecosystem for SAP SuccessFactors.
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Artificial intelligence (AI) – generative AI particularly – is changing the way business processes can be designed and optimized. By embedding AI in business applications, users can experience immediate value in their day-to-day work. For implementing AI across processes and applications and for SAP Business AI overall, SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) plays a critical role.
Across processes and applications, SAP BTP helps improve operational efficiency, enhance the customer experience, and drive innovation. The latest SAP BTP strategy paper offers a preview of what the future holds for our customers and partners.
SAP BTP already offers features such as code generation, application logic, data models, and test scripts, enabling businesses to modernize their IT landscapes, streamline their processes, and make more informed decisions through a consistent data foundation. As we continue to embed generative AI across the platform toolbox, SAP BTP is the trusted business AI platform for SAP-centric landscapes.
Here are some highlights:
Joule, our AI copilot, will see increasing adoption across SAP BTP to help provide information and data, give intelligent recommendations, and execute tasks based on natural language interactions. Looking forward, we will extend Joule to empower customers to build their own generative AI agents and skills.
SAP HANA Cloud vector engine and the knowledge graph in SAP Datasphere will help enable customers to better contextualize their input to large language models (LLMs) to achieve high-precision results.
The set of AI partner offerings accessible in the generative AI hub in SAP AI Core, which is part of SAP BTP, will continue to grow. Customers will soon be able to use them in the context of their business process directly.
SAP BTP Cockpit will also include more generative AI capabilities that can simplify the experience around day-to-day administration tasks.
SAP BTP is our secure and reliable engine that helps drive business innovation in organizations. And we will make it available to even more customers in the future: SAP recently announced a substantial expansion of regional SAP BTP availability by the end of 2025.
By ensuring access to SAP BTP in more locations via new data centers, we are empowering more customers and partners around the globe to modernize IT landscapes, streamline business processes, and utilize data for better decision-making. While increasing the footprint of SAP BTP globally, we are also infusing our platform with AI capabilities.
With global expansion on the horizon and the addition of AI, it’s all set to help businesses run smoother and make smarter decisions. If you’re curious about our strategic direction and what’s next, I highly recommend taking a look at our latest SAP BTP strategy paper.
Michael Ameling is executive vice president and chief product officer of SAP Business Technology Platform.
Unleash digital innovation across business functions
WALLDORF and TOKYO — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced NEC Corporation (TSE: 6701 “NEC”) has selected SAP S/4HANA Cloud through the RISE with SAP solution, running on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
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Together with implementation partner ABeam Consulting, the migration will leverage NEC’s generative AI technology and SAP’s natural language, generative AI Joule copilot.
NEC, a Japan-based multinational leader in the integration of IT and network technologies, was seeking to optimize costs and streamline data systems to increase integration across its lines of business. As part of advancing its digital transformation, NEC will migrate from on-premise SAP S/4HANA software to SAP S/4HANA Cloud and adopt a clean-core approach, which emphasizes standard offerings and extends them while also reducing future upgrade and operational costs.
NEC is currently operating a large-scale system that includes 1,200 add-ons and more than 200 external interfaces. To migrate to the cloud, NEC will use generative AI to facilitate a clean-core transformation, streamline migration costs and improve operational efficiency. NEC’s generative AI and SAP’s Joule copilot for natural language processing will automate critical processes such as add-on analysis, report interpretation, code generation from specifications and test automation. Joule is SAP’s generative AI assistant that understands the user’s unique role and acts as a work copilot across SAP applications to streamline tasks. NEC will be among the first companies to leverage AI tools from SAP to streamline its migrations.
“NEC sees itself as the first customer of its own innovations, applying cutting-edge technologies internally and sharing the gained insights and know-how with customers and society,” NEC President and CEO Takayuki Morita said. “This milestone implementation with SAP creates a new industry blueprint for other businesses looking to migrate to the cloud, underscoring NEC’s commitment to leading by example in technological adoption and societal contributions.”
By migrating to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, NEC anticipates more-efficient system operations by tapping into AI to support version upgrades and reduce future operation-related costs while being able to quickly respond to market changes. By leveraging innovative technologies including AI, NEC aims to digitally drive societal and industry transformations. This migration to the cloud is a key part of NEC’s 2025 mid-term management plan focusing on internal, customer and societal digital transformations.
“Our shared vision with NEC of creating a sustainable society through digital transformation is the foundation for our long-term partnership,” said Christian Klein, CEO and member of the Executive Board of SAP SE. “This project marks a milestone in our relationship, and we’re excited to support NEC on their continued transformation journey.”
As a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, SAP (NYSE: SAP) stands at the nexus of business and technology. For over 50 years, organizations have trusted SAP to bring out their best by uniting business-critical operations spanning finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, and customer experience. For more information, visit www.sap.com.
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Dr. Benjamin Blau was recently appointed chief process and information officer and head of Corporate Processes and Information Technology at SAP. Here, he shares how he defines his new role as well as the future of his organization and the impact of artificial intelligence (AI).
SAP Business AI: Revolutionary technology, real-world results
Blau joined SAP in 2010 and has held various executive leadership positions with a strong track record in process management and business transformation. As chief process and information officer (CPIO), he represents the Corporate Processes & Information Technology (CPIT) organization with the main objective to enable SAP to scale and increase productivity through process transformation and optimization powered by AI. At the same time, the unit functions as the company’s own best reference customer showcasing how SAP runs SAP.
In this interview, Blau discusses his role and the transformation of the IT industry in general.
Q: For those not familiar with the Corporate Processes & Information Technology organization, what is its role within SAP?
A: It is widely recognized and acknowledged that the traditional concept of IT Services has undergone a significant shift in recent years, thanks to advancements in cloud computing, AI, and Big Data. Companies need to double down on their core strength and USP while demonstrating their ability to scale. To do so, IT has become a strategic instrument to enable every business to be more adaptable, scalable, and intelligent.
At SAP, we have invested a considerable amount of time and resources in this transformation, turning IT into a strategic enabler for business growth and a trusted technology partner. However, companies need to rethink their strategies to outperform their competitors by demonstrating operational efficiency and accelerated scalability. We see a substantial requirement to focus on process excellence and automation powered by AI. This means unleashing productivity through simplification and standardization of processes, powered by business AI and SAP’s own technology.
With that in mind, our strategic focus has evolved beyond information technology to support end-to-end process excellence with clear accountabilities that drive autonomy and quick decision-making. And that is the leading aspect of the CPIT organization.
Q: How would you describe the difference between the CIO and CPIO?
A: For me, the key difference lies within the approach to problem-solving. Rather than focusing solely on products or tools, the CPIO tends to tackle issues at the process level, where the root causes are often found. Especially as a SaaS company, we tend to solve every issue with another tool or a customization and/or a worst-case modification of a system, while in many cases the problem can be solved by standardizing and simplifying the way we work.
Hence, in addition to our information technology strategy, it is crucial for our organization to fulfill our mandate as SAP’s business process design authority, emphasizing our responsibility to oversee and optimize business processes. This means the business defines the strategy and clear objectives — aka the “why” and “what” — while we define “how” to get there in the most end-user friendly and productive way.
Q: What are you most looking forward to in your new role?
A: Coming from my former role leading Industry Engineering for SAP, I love working close to products and customers. To this extent, I have the perfect job as we are SAP’s customer and first adopter of new technology, all while I am in the luxury position of being able to authentically talk to SAP’s customers about our challenges and solutions, being their trusted “peer” in the industry. This also means demonstrating how we boost productivity for SAP mainly through our fast-growing AI portfolio.
Q: The past five years have seen a tremendous amount of innovation, especially with the rise of generative AI. How will this influence the role of CIOs or that of an IT organization in the next two to five years?
A: In the coming two to five years, the influx of generative AI promises to revolutionize the landscape of IT organizations and the role of CIOs. Let me give you three examples.
First, it will significantly boost IT productivity by automating repetitive tasks and streamlining processes, which will free up valuable resources to either “do more with the same” or elevate those roles to even higher value-adding ones. Second, as CIOs in SaaS companies are customer zero, it is our task to showcase how AI can unlock value in highly differentiating parts of our value chain as innovation leaders of the industry. Third, with data even further emerging as a crucial competitive advantage, CIOs will increasingly focus on harnessing and maximizing the value of data assets. This entails not only owning and controlling data, but also developing new data products and mastering provisioning, management, and analysis, thereby cementing data management as a core responsibility of the IT organization.
For SAP, this clearly is the competitive edge in the AI game, as we have access to the probably largest amount of business data to feed high-value AI scenarios.
Q: Considering the fast-tracked development of AI and its potential impact, what is your approach for CPIT and SAP at large?
A: The strategic role of my organization in that context is twofold. First, we are the early adopter of every AI case ideated and developed at SAP, with an obligation to challenge the level of quality, maturity, and value on behalf of our customers. Second, I expect my team to also come up with new ideas and potential AI use cases, try them out, and be equally strict in their assessment regarding desirably, feasibility, and especially viability.
At the end of the day, business AI is about quality not quantity. To accelerate AI innovation, we have started an internal initiative to identify use cases with the highest value. This includes a process that also ensures we focus on the most effective solutions. By implementing quality gates in each step of the process, we also prioritize quality over quantity. This enables us to implement use cases that clearly demonstrate business value.
Marcus Kabat is head of CPIT Business Operations at SAP.
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In a significant move aimed at empowering clients to become next-generation enterprises, SAP and IBM have announced their plans to expand their long-standing collaboration. The SAP-IBM partnership envisions leveraging generative AI capabilities and industry-specific cloud solutions to help enterprises unlock business value and drive innovation. With a shared approach to generative AI, built on an […]
