Managing Automation - January 2009 - (Page 40) [EXECUTIVE Q&A] Q: Will SAP still be the largest application A: Oh, it’s a question of how long you look software company in 10 years? A: I’m 100% convinced. Q: I thought you’d say 125%. A: I’m a mathematician. It takes credibility away. A question on Business ByDesign. You have been going through a learning curve on it. Have you rethought the basic business model based on what you’ve learned so far? Yes, I think we have applied some learnings. One was taking speed out and doing it more sequentially. Sequentially means that you give yourself certain milestones and targets, what you want to achieve in KPIs. That is a normal sequence. I think you start with, I would say, a stable and functionally complete product. I think we are close. Then you add all these things about total cost of ownership. You have to manage the response time over whatever lines you have. The Internet is great, but the Internet is not great everywhere. You go after these, and we will not scale before we have, let’s say, achieved certain of these challenges. Then we will scale faster, which is then finally a challenge to the sales model. We will not do it too much in parallel. Originally, I think the ambition was to do many things in parallel, but that means you have many assumptions. If one of these assumptions fails, your business model is collapsing. That’s the issue. We want to make money and not just have revenue. That’s the point. Therefore, we monitor this very carefully. Q: back, I think. If I would look back 10 years, I would say it’s really, from my point of view, a successful transition from a one-product company to a multi-suite company, from an ERP vendor to an enterprise application software vendor. I think that was a challenge, and we did it. If I look to the last [several] years, since 2003, after the Internet bubble, I would say it might be that the intention was always to build or bring back a growth engine to SAP. Q: If you could change one thing looking back over the tenure, what would it be? It’s extremely difficult. I think everybody has a list of things he would do differently, but he would never speak about it. That’s for me because it’s not a good signal. Sorry. It tells the market where you feel we still are not good enough. A: A: Q: It’s a dangerous question? A: That’s the reason. I admit I made a lot of mistakes. You can write this, but I wouldn’t give you a very precise one. You can write that I made a lot of mistakes. I can stand behind that. I think I have seen very interesting times in this industry and this company. I had a chance to enter after academic years and later on became CEO and brought the company to €10 billion. That’s a unique chance. I had my good times and my bad times, but it was definitely better than staying at the university. Let’s flash forward to May. What advice would you give to Leo? I think he is experienced enough and doesn’t need advice. Otherwise, we would have made a mistake. I think he can run this business alone. He will bring it to the next level. I have no doubts about this. When he asks me about my advice, he gets all my advice, but he does not follow it. Q: Q: Are you confident it’s on track now? A: Yes, but with a slower pace. What I tried to say when we spoke to analysts, I said, “Look, everything we are doing is completely new.” When they ask about risk, etc., I say I’m pretty convinced that we can make it. I’m not concerned about the individual steps and challenges. It’s more the overall thing. So, here the human brain needs a little bit more time to digest this because assumption is assumption, and proof is something different. I don’t want to have too many moving parts in this model. Looking back over your tenure, what would you consider to be your most important accomplishment as CEO? A: Q: What are your plans? A: Just sleeping. Q: Just sleeping? Doing math? A: Could be. I don’t know exactly. I think I have a few plans, as you can imagine. I think it’s too early to discuss it. A little bit, I think, I’m in favor of the academic. So, I’ll come back a little bit to the true roots I have. s Q: ma January 40 2009
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