A company's executive succession plan often reveals a great deal about its view of itself, its market, and its future. For SAP, such a plan is beginning to take shape in the person of executive board member Leo Apotheker, who was named deputy CEO in April following the abrupt departure of Shai Agassi, the executive who ran SAP's key Product & Technology group.
The original plan had called for Apotheker and Agassi to share responsibilities for running SAP at the conclusion of CEO Henning Kagermann's contract in 2009. Now, however, Apotheker has a clear shot at the top job.
But who is Leo Apotheker and why is he in line to run the world's largest enterprise software company? Apotheker, who joined SAP in 1988 and heads the company's critical Customer Solutions & Operations organization, has never been a highly visible public face for SAP. That role had been filled by Agassi and, before him, founder Hasso Plattner.
Apotheker may be low-key, but he's also very focused on the job at hand — namely, sales. He's the guy who brought in Bill McDermott, the former Siebel executive, who runs SAP's now successful Americas operation. SAP insiders, with whom Managing Automation met at the company's recent Sapphire Conference in Atlanta, describe Apotheker as one tough, take-no-prisoners sales executive who can be a micromanager when it comes to the sales pipeline but who can also be collaborative and warm. "He's the most cultured sales executive I've ever met," one SAP insider says.
Insiders also say that Apotheker, in some ways, couldn't be more different from the scientist Kagermann, a professorial personality who is just as much at home talking about philosophy as technology. But they also say that Apotheker, with his reputation for relentless execution, may just be the right guy to lead SAP in the years ahead.
That's because the 53-year-old Apotheker, a child of Holocaust survivors who was born in Germany, grew up in Antwerp, and now lives in Paris, is viewed as right for the times. SAP has solidified its basic strategy around NetWeaver, its Business Process Platform, and service-oriented architecture. Now, the insiders say, SAP's future success rests on executing on this strategy in a world that is very different from that of the 1990s when R/3 catapulted the company to the top of the enterprise software market. Today's world is characterized by the need to manage innovation with customers and partners, and deliver what Apotheker calls the "next quantum leap in business improvement."
SAP's man from Paris, fluent in six languages and capable of unexpected flashes of humor, will have his work cut out for him should the top job eventually become his. For one thing, he will have to be that important public face at a time when SAP, at $10 billion and 40,000 employees, has become a large and complex company. He will also have to decide just how aggressive SAP needs to be in the market — he prefers the term "assertive" — against such competitors as Oracle.
But perhaps most important, he will have to say where the ship heads next. After all, in any business, there is a vast gulf between the top job and all the rest. The leader must worry about the future perhaps even more than the present. For SAP and Leo Apotheker, that future is just a vision away.
Is Leo right for SAP? Where do you think the company should be heading? Write to me at Dbrousell@thomaspublishing.com.