History repeats itself: Agassi, Sikka, Leukert and Müller

But the "father-son relationship" did not last long and Plattner became aware of the mathematician Vishal Sikka in Palo Alto (California, USA). He was quickly adopted and established as the company's chief technology officer.

Sikka was allowed to present the SAP database Hana and wanted to see it, in continuation of SAP MaxDB, at least "open source". In the SAP house, there was again a rift: Vishal Sikka had to leave overnight: On Friday there were rumors, on Sunday evening the supervisory board met and on Monday Bernd Leukert presented himself as the new chief technology officer.

At the end of this week, he flew to Palo Alto to SAP Lab to clean up Vishal Sikka's Hana legacy. That was in 2014. And as of 0 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 21, 2019, Leukert is not a member of SAP's Executive Board, either.

Before that, he had to give up his engineering job to the new "Plattner stepson," Jürgen Müller, who earned his doctorate at the Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam.

Bernd Leukert would have succeeded Executive Board member Michael Kleinemeier in the Digital Business Services division. Leukert was once prepared for this role by ex-SAP Executive Board member Gerd Oswald (current SAP Supervisory Board member) because Kleinemeier was planning to retire at the end of 2019.

Now Michael Kleinemeier has extended his contract by one year and will have to look for a new successor. It is not yet known what Bernd Leukert will do, and whether Gerd Oswald thinks this development is right from the point of view of an SAP Supervisory Board member is also unknown.

The fact is, however, that years of personnel planning at SAP are currently imploding: Leukert will not succeed Oswald Kleinemeier, and the new SAP Chief Technology Officer is not Björn Goerke but Jürgen Müller - you have to study in Potsdam.

SAP CTO and President SAP Cloud Platform Björn Goerke has not been working at SAP since the end of February and there is a community rumor that he will move to Google.

SAP CEO Bill McDermott does not have an easy year ahead of him: He has thus lost his most important man for the "Cloud First" strategy and if the SAP share price does not soon exceed the 100 euro mark, he too will have to fear for his job.