SAP to Have a Co-CEO Structure with Christian Klein and a Strategic Advisor

100 Years of SAP Experience

It’s a match made in heaven: SAP CEO Christian Klein is restructuring the Executive Board and has a veteran of SAP’s success by his side to lend a helping hand. The focus is on finalizing an AI strategy for the global ERP market leader. Naturally, Christian Klein cannot tackle this technological disruption alone. A return to a dual leadership structure at SAP is the logical consequence, even if the new leader is to operate behind the scenes for the time being. The person responsible for the group’s strategic direction is very well known to E3 Magazine; however, since he is to remain behind the scenes (for now), the editorial team respects his request for anonymity: Ultimately, this is not about names and individuals, but about another success for SAP that benefits the company itself, as well as SAP’s existing customers and partners.

This has led to an interesting development at SAP, one that is familiar in principle from the business world: Whenever there are serious problems in the company’s operational division, a member of the supervisory board steps in to assist the executive board. This process is largely based on the compliance rules for German corporations. Professor Hasso Plattner has repeatedly complained that, as chairman of the supervisory board, he is not allowed to assist with or participate in operational matters, as a U.S. chairman, for example, is permitted to do. But German laws are what they are: Consequently, a very experienced member of the supervisory board has stepped in as a “firefighter” at SAP in recent weeks and has since left the supervisory board.

SAP clearly lacks technical AI expertise in general, and Christian Klein can’t find an AI roadmap in particular: Hasso Plattner is not only a co-founder, but for decades he has been the technical conscience, the visionary compass, and often the necessary thorn in the side of the Walldorf-based software company. His fundamental philosophy on leading an IT company stands in sharp contrast to the current management style of many corporations. Plattner believes it is a mistake to run an IT company from a purely managerial perspective. In numerous conversations, he explicitly warned the industry against falling for so-called „guys in suits“ who, while appearing to be powerful executives, understand nothing about their own product. As for where SAP CEO Christian Klein fits into this picture, Hasso Plattner will no longer answer that question from his “restless retirement.” For Professor Plattner, however, a deep, detailed understanding of technology is an absolute prerequisite for sustainable business success. Christian Klein has learned a great deal, but he never received a technical education in the traditional sense, unlike Shai Agassi, Vishal Sikka, and Jürgen Müller. Former SAP Chief Technology Officer Müller was, among other things, part of the founding team for the SAP HANA database at the HPI in Potsdam under the leadership of Professor Hasso Plattner and Professor Alexander Zeier.

The Innovator's Dilemma

Hasso Plattner has repeatedly criticized the culture of conservatism that prevails in Europe, and especially in Germany. While U.S. companies do not demonize new IT technologies such as the cloud and AI but instead embrace them with enthusiasm, IT users in Europe often cling to a negative and dismissive attitude, which means that crucial leaps in innovation are simply missed.

At the heart of Plattner’s technical vision for the ERP system was his last major in-house development: the in-memory computing database SAP HANA. Based on the simple yet far-reaching insight that a data record in an ERP environment is created only once but queried hundreds of times, he designed an architecture at the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) that was primarily optimized for query speed.

Plattner hailed Hana as an elite milestone in computer science and as a disruptive innovation that was set to revolutionize the market. An analytical examination, however, reveals cracks in this narrative: In a legendary and publicly staged debate on the Sapphire stage in 2014, Harvard economist Clayton M. Christensen (1952–2020) vehemently contradicted him and argued that HANA was merely a sustaining innovation and that SAP was heading straight into the „Innovator’s Dilemma.“.

Critics of computer science also accuse Plattner of being stuck in the „von Neumann bottleneck“ from an architectural standpoint, since he merely masked the performance deficit by moving data to main memory without truly rethinking the fundamental computer architecture. In a later interview, Plattner himself admitted, with uncharacteristic self-criticism, that SAP had not quite succeeded in propelling HANA to the undisputed top of the database segment, as he had hoped.

From a business perspective, however, Hana was a massive success for SAP, as it enabled the Walldorf-based company to force its existing ERP customers into a permanent, highly profitable vendor lock-in and to push competitors such as Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft out of its own ecosystem.

SAP Cloud Computing: A Long and Winding Road—Business ByDesign

When it comes to cloud computing, history also demonstrates Plattner’s visionary foresight, but also the company’s often sluggish ability to implement changes. Long before the current cloud hype driven by the hyperscalers, Plattner, together with then-Chief Technology Officer Peter Zencke, launched the Business ByDesign project, a revolutionary cloud-based ERP concept.

In hindsight, however, it must be acknowledged that this early in-house SaaS development failed—a fact that Plattner openly admits. He recognized the structural problem with the SAP “tanker”: In an environment that demands extreme perfectionism from the existing core system, agile, smaller innovation projects have an incredibly hard time. The bitter realization for Plattner was that new initiatives require new freedoms, and that SAP ultimately only made the real leap into the cloud through the massive and expensive acquisitions carried out by former CEO Bill McDermott.

After the Cloud Comes AI

It is precisely from this experience with SAP’s rigid corporate culture that Hasso Plattner derives his stance on artificial intelligence. He explicitly pins his hopes for AI on the fact that this technology is now being developed, at least, outside of SAP’s sluggish structures. For Plattner, AI is not just another IT tool, but a disruptive force that places new demands on human education. In a world shaped by AI, Plattner says, it is no longer crucial to accumulate mere factual knowledge; rather, the absolute core competency lies in learning how to learn and familiarizing oneself with entirely new subjects at breakneck speed.

To ensure that Europe is not left behind as a defenseless victim in this global race, he is massively expanding the Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam and strengthening its partnership with SAP to accelerate knowledge transfer in AI research and secure digital sovereignty. Furthermore, Plattner’s early research on data anonymization is proving today to be a visionary foundation for providing AI with legally compliant and clean training data. SAP CEO Christian Klein regularly visits the HPI in Potsdam, where he is regarded as an attentive listener and an inquisitive questioner.

A Future for SAP with a New Co-CEO Structure on the Executive Board

For existing SAP customers, an analysis of Hasso Plattner’s statements and his life’s work reveals a troubling gap in SAP’s current leadership. Plattner was the courageous visionary who often disregarded rigid compliance rules to drive technical breakthroughs and who propelled the company forward with emotional intensity.

With his departure from the supervisory board two years ago, SAP now lacks this indispensable „thorn in its side.“ While current CEO Christian Klein manages the company’s finances alongside CFO Dominik Asam and drives the cloud transformation from a business perspective, there is a glaring lack of the profound architectural vision and technical passion that Hasso Plattner embodied.

The SAP community must recognize that, without a technical visionary at the helm, standard business software runs the risk of degenerating into a mere, interchangeable cloud subscription in the era of Agentic AI and Composable ERP, because Agentic AI will fundamentally transform the revenue models for enterprise software: According to estimates by the research and consulting firm Gartner, spending on enterprise application software totaling up to $234 billion will be subject to so-called “Agentic Arbitrage” by 2030. This represents approximately 20 percent of spending on Software as a Service (SaaS) in the enterprise applications sector by 2030.

SAP Code Red: Agentic Arbitrage

Gartner refers to „Agentic Arbitrage“ when AI agents perform tasks across systems, thereby reducing the need for users to interact with the user interfaces of various traditional software applications. „Agentic AI is changing the economic fundamentals of the software industry,“ explained George Brocklehurst, Managing Vice President at Gartner. “Agentic systems deliver results directly, bypassing traditional applications that are heavily focused on the user experience and allowing the actual software to fade into the background. For many enterprise software providers, this breaks the previous link between user growth and revenue growth.” This transformation is already in full swing and will fundamentally change the way software is developed, priced, and used. It will also lead to a redefinition of the “Saaspocalypse”—the fragmentation of the traditional SaaS market—and thus to a potential decline in SAP’s significance. However, Gartner analysts believe this is less of an “apocalypse” and more of a “metamorphosis.” SaaS will not disappear but will evolve into a new form. This transformation presents both risks and opportunities for established providers and new market entrants alike.