Just three months before concluding his legendary career as SAP cofounder, CEO, and ultimately chairman, Hasso Plattner has engineered one last blockbuster maneuver to ensure the software powerhouse he helped launch 52 years ago does not stray from the vision that’s served SAP and its customers remarkably well for half a century.
The company’s carefully worded press release conveys the details behind the big change driven by Plattner but at the same time avoids offering so much as even a hint at the strategic import and impact of the event:
“SAP and Dr. Punit Renjen have mutually agreed to part ways because of a difference in perspective on the role of SAP Supervisory Board chair, which Punit Renjen was designated to assume. Punit Renjen has chosen to resign his mandate on the SAP Supervisory Board with effect from the end of SAP’s Annual General Meeting on May 15, 2024.”
So if that seems a little glossy, here are the details:
- In February 2023, SAP announced that Plattner would step down as chairman of the SAP supervisory board on May 15, 2024. (For my analysis on that from a year ago, please see “SAP Ultimate Transformation: Iconic Chairman Hasso Plattner to Step Down.”)
- At about the same time, SAP said it had chosen Renjen, the former global CEO of Deloitte, to join the SAP supervisory board and to take Plattner’s place as board chairman in May 2024.
- Last week, per the italicized excerpt above, SAP reversed that decision, meaning Renjen will remain a member of the SAP board until May 15 but will not become chairman and will resign from the SAP board.
- In the same press release disclosing the about-face on Renjen, SAP also disclosed that former Nokia president Pekka Ala-Pietilä, who had served on SAP’s supervisory board for 20 years (2002 to 2021), will be nominated to once again join the supervisory board in May and is expected to be named as Plattner’s successor as chairman.
While it can be tempting to dismiss this 11th-hour melodrama as little more than back-room maneuvering that will have little or no impact on SAP’s everyday business and its customers — and I suspect that SAP would prefer if everyone viewed it that way — I think the SAP chairmen shuffle raises three big questions.
1. After Hasso Plattner steps down, how much power should SAP’s chairman have?
The SAP announcement says Renjen and SAP agreed to cancel his elevation to chairman of the supervisory board because of these 12 words: “a difference in perspective on the role of SAP Supervisory Board chair”. My guess is that Renjen wanted more authority and more power over the company’s strategy and execution than Plattner and the board were willing to give him.
I suspect Renjen wanted to be able to exert the type of influence and impact that Plattner has wielded in his 52 years at the helm of SAP. Renjen might have been thinking that under any other scenario, the role of supervisory board chairman would be seen as diminished, lessened, and reduced.
But that approach would have been doomed from the start because, regardless of whatever title Plattner held across those 52 years — CEO, chairman, chief software advisor — he was always The Man, the ultimate visionary and decision-maker. And no incoming chairman could or would ever be able to wield such power and influence because, in addition to the hands-on impact he had over that half-century with customers, developers, and investors, Plattner remains SAP’s largest sharehold, with his 76 million shares accounting for about 6.2% of SAP’s total shares.
2. What type of working relationship will new chairman-designate Ala-Pietilä have with CEO Christian Klein?
Given the success Klein has had in his four years as SAP’s CEO, I would think that Plattner and the rest of the board have given this question an enormous amount of consideration. In that context, I was surprised to see the following sentence — particularly the words I’ve highlighted — in the SAP press release: “Pekka Ala-Pietilä, 67 years old, has an illustrious track record in European innovation and technology and is well-positioned to lead SAP’s ongoing successful transformation.”
Hey, wait a minute — I thought Klein was already the one leading “SAP’s ongoing successful transformation”? After all, Klein was recently named the Cloud Wars CEO of the Year for 2023 and has presided over a booming cloud business within SAP whose continued growth prospects have pushed SAP’s market cap to an all-time high of $207 billion.
Last April, as Klein was concluding his third year as SAP CEO, I offered this analysis of how Klein was appropriately putting his own mark on the iconic software vendor: “The New SAP: CEO Christian Klein Builds His Own Leadership Team.”
Given the highly successful trajectory that Klein and SAP are on, I think it would be disastrous for SAP to dump a truckload of sand into the well-lubricated growth machine SAP has become under Klein’s leadership by giving the incoming chairman the latitude to be operating at cross-purposes to what Klein’s already doing. Ergo, I think the line from the press release about Ala-Pietilä being “well-positioned to lead SAP’s ongoing successful transformation” is little more than some nice-sounding commentary intended to reflect well on SAP’s new, new incoming chairman.
3. After Plattner steps down as chairman, how much influence will he have on SAP?
First off, I think we can all be completely certain that Plattner and Klein will observe all legal and regulatory guidelines governing the level of influence someone in Plattner’s position can or cannot have. But at the same time, I think we can be equally certain that Klein will continue to lean heavily on Plattner’s wisdom and vision as SAP transforms into not just a cloud-first company but also an AI-first cloud company.
The relationship that Klein and Plattner have developed across the past quarter-century — Klein started at SAP as an intern in his teens — transcends titles, and their personalities do as well. For all of Plattner’s interests outside of SAP — his institute, the San Jose Sharks, sailboat racing and more — he is as spiritually and psychologically fused with SAP as any person and any corporation could possibly be.
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Final Thought
Hasso Plattner will always be one of the legendary titans of the enterprise-tech business. And regardless of the precise nature of the disagreement with Renjen that led to the mutual agreement that he would not become SAP’s chairman, I have no doubt that Plattner had very good reasons for orchestrating that change as well as for bringing in Ala-Pietila.
And I think that as a result of Hasso Plattner’s Last Stand, SAP is very well equipped to move into the next phase of the Cloud Wars with an incoming chairman who’s been immersed in AI for the past several years and who will be able to complement rather than challenge Klein’s outstanding leadership.
