Plattner reflects on years with SAP

SAP AG Thursday announced that Hasso Plattner, its co-CEO and chairman, will give up those two jobs and step away from a full-time management role at the company he helped found in 1972. Plattner, who will become the head of SAP's supervisory board, spoke with Computerworld shortly after the announcement was made public.

Do you view the mySAP.com initiative as having played a part in the company's turnaround?

Absolutely. Overall it was the right strategy. Probably we should have spent one more year in development before we came out with this, but we had to accelerate it. We combined all our new products -- we had done that before and called them New Dimension. I invented it, and it was not that good a name. MySAP.com was a clear strategy, with a clear product delivery in a short period of time after the announcement. Now, we have a combined scenario with the new technology represented by NetWeaver that gives us the opportunity to develop applications based on a database or on services. Before, we only did applications based on databases.

When you founded SAP, did you expect it to become the titan it is?

No. When we founded it, my plan was for the foreseeable future to become [$54 million in size], and that seemed for me pretty big. In the early '80s, we were still below that level, and all of a sudden in the mid-'80s there was a real boom with R/2. And then there was a breakthrough with R/3 that went to a completely different level.

What are your customers' greatest pain points?

All are thinking that they have to save costs, [and] growth is limited. In the big investment rush of the '90s, some are still suffering from over-potential in areas that didn't come to fruition as much as expected, and they are conservative now.

Looking back, would you have done anything differently?

You know, I would have liked to have founded Microsoft and with the same relentless energy built the applications Microsoft built, because in some areas that would have been much easier than building the heavy-duty enterprise stuff, in terms of the complexity [of the applications]. But you can't do it all.

If Microsoft had started up early on the stuff we did, then we would have had the opportunity to do what they did. There are things we probably had an advantage in. Doing business in Europe, with 15 languages, there are things you get good at because of the complexity of European society and industry.