Hasso Plattner
SAP
Co-chairman and CEO
57, German
www.sap.com
During a 1996 race off the coast of Hawaii, Plattner's yacht, the Morning Glory, had a breakdown. A boat owned by archrival Larry Ellison, the head of Oracle, cruised by and the crew allegedly mocked Plattner's plight by videotaping rather than helping. He famously mooned the camera.
Five years later, the company he helped co-found is demonstrating the same kind of feisty retort Plattner exhibited when he flashed his behind. SAP was slow to grasp the importance of the Internet and it looked as if newcomers would take the lead. But the 29-year-old company is playing catch-up fast while upstarts are sinking.
The secret of Plattner's success can be found in SAP's new marketing campaign. "In the old New Economy, it seemed that all a company needed to succeed was a URL and a marketing budget. But in the new New Economy companies are measured by the value they create. Can you increase productivity? Reduce costs? Discover new business?" These are questions software companies — in fact all companies — ought to be asking themselves. Products that make businesses more efficient will be in big demand in an economic downturn, and SAP has been honing its skills in this area for nearly three decades.
The world's second-largest application-software supplier after Microsoft, SAP soared to global prominence with software that helps speed decision-making, slash costs and give managers control over global empires by bringing together a company's operations, from order-taking to manufacturing to accounting.
With 15,000 companies as customers, it had the heft to branch out into specialized software for 19 industries — well ahead of Ellison's Oracle, its closest competitor in this business. In recent years SAP has expanded into building links from the inside of these companies to emerging e-marketplaces, tying together suppliers and customers so they can easily transact online.
A deal Plattner orchestrated in June 2000 to combine forces with Commerce One, a U.S. Internet software company, helped shore up SAP's strengths in building business-to-business marketplaces on the Web. And now Plattner is gearing up to gain on Siebel Systems, the leading firm in the market for sales force, marketing and customer-service software products. As he has repeatedly demonstrated — on his yacht and in the software sector — Plattner doesn't like to lose any race.
The Vision Thing: "We want to deliver collaborative processes which move companies forward."
Forward Spin: While it would be a mistake to underestimate the strengths of players like Siebel and i2, information technology market research firm IDC says SAP's main competition going forward will be from the software industry's heaviest hitters. Microsoft bought Great Plains, an enterprise-application software company, in December 2000 and is expected to target part of SAP's traditional customer base. While IBM isn't talking about its plans, it is expected to make a defensive play, and Oracle is putting more of its efforts into corporate software applications, SAP's core strength.