In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I unpack the recent developments at SAP, which include strategic shifts in leadership in what I’m calling Plattner’s Last Stand.
Highlights
00:17 — We’ve seen a fascinating change of the guard in some way at SAP. It’s taken some twists and turns along the way. I’m looking at this through the context of what I call Hasso Plattner’s Last Stand.
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01:04 — A year ago around this time, SAP said that the former CEO of Deloitte, Punit Renjen, was going to become the new chairman of SAP, succeeding Plattner. Last week, SAP reversed on that, and the new chairman, starting in the middle of May, will be Pekka Ala-Pietilä, who had been the president of Nokia. He’s done a lot of work in AI.
02:29 — I suspect that Renjen had assumed he saw some of the role that Plattner played and maybe thought, “Hey, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to be pretty active, involved in a lot of things.” This is pure speculation on my part.
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03:45 — The big thing is SAP had to find somebody who’s willing to be firm enough to be a very successful and effective chairman of the supervisory board, but not somebody who necessarily felt like, “I get involved in running the business.” CEO Christian Klein, with that successful trajectory that SAP is on, has shown he doesn’t need a lot of close-up handholding.
04:07 — Beyond that, you’ve had this extraordinary relationship that Klein and Plattner have developed over the last quarter-century. It’s been almost that long that Klein has been at SAP; you know, he started in his teens as an intern. Somewhere in there, the mix with Renjen just didn’t feel right.
05:20 — I take my hat off to Hasso Plattner for stepping in and saying, “Hey, as my final move here as chairman, I’m going to make sure that the next chairman is the one that we believe here at SAP is going to give us the best chance to succeed as we go from being not just a cloud-first company but an AI-first cloud company.”
