Farewell, Hasso Plattner: Making Christian Klein SAP CEO Tops Legendary Legacy
Bob Evans
Hasso Plattner steps down from SAP's supervisory board, leaving behind a legacy of customer-centric innovation.
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Acceleration Economy
Concluding a remarkable career as SAP cofounder, co-CEO, chairman, and indomitable animating spirit, Hasso Plattner stepped down from the supervisory board yesterday and for the first time in more than half a century has no formal role at the iconic company that dominated the enterprise-applications market across that era.

Plattner and the company he propelled to iconic status have triggered many adventures and more than a few ups and downs across those 52 years, and SAP touches on many of those in a historical retrospective of key milestones during the Plattner era. Of those, here’s my favorite, which is from 2022:

In an interview to mark SAP’s 50th anniversary, Plattner shared some advice: “I recommend a return to the approach we used in the early days of SAP — of sending SAP teams out to the customer. Instead of implementing our standard systems, they should find out how people actually use the tools they get from SAP and other vendors. That will give us our starting point. There are so many interesting companies out there. We can learn from them and with them. We have to step outside SAP and do something with the customers.”

And in a comment directed to SAP employees, he said: “Treat the customers well — once we have them, we have to keep them. That’s one of SAP’s strengths. And never think it’s done. You have to carry on. The job is never done!”

That comment embodies a unique attribute of the highly technical Plattner: the ability for the creator of software products to stay deeply focused on customers and their desires and the outcomes they want to achieve, rather than remaining obsessed with the code that’s taken so much time and effort to create.

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The SAP retrospective on Plattner also touches on some of the difficult decisions Plattner has faced over the years, including:

shifting focus from mainframes, which propelled SAP to its early success, over to minicomputers;

expanding beyond Europe and into the United States;

jumping into web technologies; and

electing to compete with Oracle by stepping outside of applications and entering the database market with HANA.

But the SAP article does not mention what I believe is the crowning decision of Plattner’s extraordinary 52-year career: In early 2020, with the pandemic raging and the entire business world thrown into turmoil, Plattner chose to abandon the co-CEO model that had been a staple at SAP and made 40-year-old Christian Klein the CEO.

In hindsight, with all the great success Klein has had, Plattner’s decision doesn’t seem risky at all —in fact, I’m sure some folks would regard it as “obvious.” But at the time, it was anything but that, particularly with the pandemic disrupting the operations and outlooks of many and perhaps most of SAP’s global customers.

In fact, when Klein presided over his first earnings call in April of 2020, SAP’s business was in such turmoil due to the pandemic-induced ravages of global markets, Klein and longtime CFO Luka Mucic were not even able to offer guidance for what Q2 — let alone the full year — would look like.

Plus, with Plattner having dismissed co-CEO Jennifer Morgan as part of the move to make Klein sole CEO, many self-proclaimed experts were howling that the sales-oriented Morgan should have been made CEO rather than Klein, whose primary experience over his 20-plus years with the company — he started as a teenage intern — was in operations rather than with customers.

But Klein has proven to be a brilliant all-around leader, engaging successfully with customers across the globe and propelling SAP to become one of the world’s fastest-growing major cloud vendors and to hit an all-time high for its market cap. In its most-recent quarter, SAP cloud revenue was up 24% to $4.32 billion.

Klein himself recently shared with me a couple of anecdotes involving Plattner and stemming from the extremely close interactions Klein had with Plattner over the years. From my exclusive video interview with Klein late last year headlined “The Cloud Wars CEO of the Year is SAP’s Christian Klein,” here are those two examples of Plattner’s impact on not only Klein but also by extension the entire company and its hundreds of thousands of customers.

In the first anecdote, Plattner appears to be testing Klein — who at the time was involved in finance and operations — to see if he had the toughness and the resilience to be a top-level leader.

“I will always remember when I walked into the supervisory board meeting, and I had to present the financials of the company, and I did that with a good PowerPoint presentation well prepared. But Hasso said, ‘Don’t we have technology for that question? Do I really need to get to the slides? I want to see the numbers real time!’ And so, challenge accepted! And this was actually the point when we then invented the Digital Boardroom and the Analytics Cloud, and what came out of that is a big, big business for SAP, and we have also revolutionized the way how you see a company by how you combine reporting with planning and predictive. And, you know, this also taught me a lesson: How can we always also challenge ourselves with how can we use our own technology, to be better in our job and in everything we’re doing?”

In the second anecdote from my interview with Klein, he relates how Plattner made a very public bet of about $300 million on Plattner’s belief that Klein could and would lead an extraordinary financial turnaround at SAP in late 2020.

“And the second one is something for which I’m extremely grateful. After I became the CEO, I said, ‘Hasso, this transformation needs to happen now. And I need to not only change the strategy, I also need to change the financial guidance of the company.’

“And you know, as a founder, he first of all understood why we needed to do that. But also he accepted the consequences. He obviously didn’t like it.” [Editor’s note: Indeed, Plattner had many reasons — about 2.4 billion — not to like that tough decision that Klein made because, in the wake of Klein’s announcement about the change in financial guidance, the stock market hammered SAP’s share price and caused the value of Plattner’s shares to fall by about $2.4 billion.]

“But he accepted it. And he backed me up, and I’m not sure if every chairman would have backed me up in that situation. And now, of course, 3-4 years later, I mean, we see the outcome of that. And I guess it was actually for SAP make-or-break to do that. But I’m very thankful that Hasso backed me up on this journey.”

For that article, I reached out to Plattner to get a comment about Klein’s performance as CEO. And Plattner’s reply reflects exactly why I believe his decision to make Klein SAP’s sole CEO was the best and most-important decision Plattner made across his legendary 52-year career at the top of SAP.

“Christian is exactly the CEO SAP needs at this critical watershed moment, as AI fundamentally reshapes the technology and business landscapes,” Plattner wrote in his email reply.

“His vision, courage, and decisiveness are evident in the many successes we’ve celebrated during his tenure as CEO, most notably in SAP’s cloud leadership. This will ensure the company capitalizes on the strong foundation of the past 50 years.”

Well done, Hasso Plattner, and may your next adventures be filled with joy!