May 9, 2007
SAP’s Plattner: View from the Valley
Hasso Plattner seems right at home in Silicon Valley. SAP, which he helped found 35 years ago and where he is still head of the supervisory board, is best known for its stolid R/3 suite of enterprise applications. But Plattner displays the same sort of restless impatience and frustration with the limitations of the software status quo that are apparent in today’s generation of software entrepreneurs. Is that enough to push SAP faster along the road of one of the most important product transitions it has ever faced - particularly now that protege and one-time heir apparent Shai Agassi has quit?
When I met him earlier this week at SAP’s labs in the Valley, Plattner was fizzing over with what he calls his "new idea" - the on-demand software (codenamed A1S, due to appear next year) that is aimed at small and medium-sized companies, but which also looks like a blueprint for the way much of the business software market will one day work.
The German company was simply late to the on-demand party. As Plattner says:
We didn’t believe five years ago you could run an enterprise system over the internet. Google and others have shown you can run big systems over the internet with reasonable response time.
He still insists that it will be a long time before the big companies which are SAP’s core customers are ready to switch fully to the internet (shareholders had better hope he’s right.) The key to SAP’s future, though, rests on a new architecture: composite applications delivered over the internet, assembled from piecemeal software services, and onto which you could bolt a number of different "front-end" user interfaces, depending on the needs and skill level of the user. (This blog post by Dan Farber, from SAP’s user conference in Atlanta last month, is a good summation.)
Think of it as Web 2.0-meets-SOA: The back end is based on the robust but more flexible service-oriented architecture that Agassi pioneered, while the front end is an adaptable interface that draws on all the community and communications features of the Web 2.0 world.
This challenges the SAP culture to its roots. Consider this: SAP, a company not exactly known for the useability of its products, is trying to set itself up as designer of user interfaces that will act as the front-end to both its own software "services" and those created by others. That puts it in competition with Microsoft, which is trying to cement its place as the universal UI by offering to license the interface of its new Office, free of charge, to any application maker that wants to take it.
Plattner has a home in the Valley and plans to work here for the next few months. His presence is no doubt partly intended to help make up for the recent loss of Agassi, who was the animating spirit of the Palo Alto labs. But longer term, he badly needs to find another protege with the vision to launch SAP on its next 35 years.
