Manufacturing Executive - January/February 2009 - (Page 36) A CONVERSATION WITH SAP'S CHIEF Henning Kagermann clients because you could argue that, with scale, you can invest more R&D euros, which, in the end, extends the software and helps everybody who participates. You have a broader portfolio. You have more choice. Q: But too much choice can be confusing. A : Yes. You have more choices, and you have a higher risk of whether they are still there in five to 10 years. There might be a little less choice [as a result of consolidation], but you could more or less guarantee that what I buy and invest in is there for a longer time because it has more power and more scale behind it. Q: The Society of Information Management in the U.S. recently issued its latest member survey. Again, this year, it shows that the number one concern among CIOs is the alignment between business and IT. What has been the root of the problem? A : The root cause, from my point of view, is the feeling of many businesspeople that they depend on the advice of the IT people because they don’t understand IT. Therefore, you find frustration. People say, “OK, I’m not business will be satisfied, no doubt. There’s a second point that’s very important. The question is can I rely on what I consume? It’s like nutrition. That means is my infrastructure in IT good enough that I can blindly rely on the quality of what I consume? That’s a key piece. Q: But if we’re moving more in the direction of making fact-based decisions generated by increasingly intelligent systems, we’re going to change the relationship that business has with IT because right now in business a lot of it is still intuitive, right? A : Yes. I think that’s something that we discussed earlier about automation. I think we will come over time to, let’s say, a degree of automation where systems can make decisions. But I have my doubts if we go too much into decisions where human intuition is important. You see it now with the financial system. I think automation should go as far as people understand the decisions. Therefore, I come back to the beginning. You’re right. As long as we are quick, we understand, then it’s fine. If it’s beyond our capacity, we should be very careful. It’s like driving. You should only drive as fast as you can master the car. Q: Let’s turn to SAP. Are you still confident that SAP will make your 2010 goal of 100,000 customers, 45% of which will come from companies under €1 billion in revenue, as you move into 2009 now? A : Yes. I’m very confident that we will have more than 100,000 clients. Q: More than 100,000? A : Yes. I think we have already 75,000. If 45% are from the mid-market, I’m not sure; it might be 40%. Forty-five is high. Q: How do you maintain a culture of innovation as you get larger? A : I wouldn’t say that we have to change something at €20 billion. I don’t think there’s a fundamental change necessarily. If you would say €30 billion or €40 billion, I think then you need some changes. That is very large. I guess, first of all, SAP would be much more divisionalised than today. That would be obvious. Then you are a little bit in smaller pieces, depending on customer segmentation. From an engineering point of view, I think we have started a lot of initiatives to manage this innovation. First was clearly this network of business partners. Another one is communities of innovation. Where we can do more, and will do more, is the supply chain. Q: Let me challenge that €30 billion to €40 billion scenario. Is that realistic or will the law of large numbers come into play, and inevitably growth rates will come down simply because of size? A : Now, you have to always look at the market. I was sitting here many years ago and asked myself, “What happens if SAP continues to grow fast? We cannot have 70% market share. That’s impossible.” What you do is “On Business ByDesign: Assumption is assumption, and proof is something different. I don’t want to have too many moving parts in this model.“ really happy, but I cannot really influence this. I’m not on top of it.” You know, in business that is the worst that can happen. So, the more we can come to a constructive dialogue with the business and they feel they understand roughly that they are the ones that are in the driver’s seat, the better. Q: Do you think that if we could make more progress in making systems easier to use and more fully consumed, it would help to solve that problem? A : I think easy to consume is a key topic for the future. The easier you can consume the assets, let’s say, the more 36 Manufacturing Executive JAN/FEB-09
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.